Attempt a critical appreciation of Robert Browning's 'The Last Ride Together'.

The dramatic situation of Robert Browning's The Last Ride
Together appears to be one in which the lover, upon being rejected by his mistress, asks
for, and is granted, one last horseback ride with her across a mysterious landscape. The
ride, however, seems to stretch out to eternity; there is no sense of time demarcation,
but a continuous unfurling of landscape.

At the end of the
poem. the narrator's focus shifts from the external circumstances of the ride to what
various types of artist (visual, musician) have achieved as they grow old. The final
artistic type mentioned is the poet, the narrator himself, who suggests that the ride
will stretch into eternity, for as long aspeople read the poem. This theme, originally
found in Horace, is captured famously in Shakespeare's Sonnet
LV:

Not marble, nor the gilded
monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful
rhyme;

As in the case of the Shakespeare's
sonnet, the poet has the upper hand, because the relationship as he portrays it is the
version that shall continue through its posterity.