Browning's poem Sordello, written between 1836 and 1840, was partly aimed as a "correction" of Wordsworth's politics and poetics, but neither the audience nor Wordsworth saw this; instead the poem acquired a reputation for incomprehensibility, and Browning was called "the madman who had foisted the unreadable Sordello upon the world".
The "handful of silver" is a reference to thirty pieces of silver, a phrase associated with betrayal or selling out [REF].