"Take the Kaiser's cause, you and I together; build a new Italy under the Emperor." And Sordello is fired by the thought, not as yet for the sake of doing good to man, but to satisfy his curiosity in a new life, and to edify his individual soul into a perfection unattained as yet.

"I will go," he thinks, "and be the spirit in this body of mankind, wield, animate, and shape the people of Italy, make them the form in which I shall express myself.

It is not enough to act, in imagination, all that man is, as I have done.

I will now make men act by the force of my spirit: North Italy shall be my body, and thus I shall realise myself"-- as if one could, with that self-contemplating motive, ever realise personality.
This, then, is the position of Sordello in the period of history I have pictured, and it carries him to the end of the third book of the poem.
It has embodied the history of his youth--of his first contact with the world; of his retreat from it into thought over what he has gone through; and of his reawakening into a fresh questioning--how he shall realise life, how manifest himself in action.

"What shall I do as a poet, and a man ?" 3.