The title is half of a Latin proverb about taste, that there is no disputing it, and the poem proves the point by declining to argue at all. A speaker talks to a friend, a "lover of trees," and imagines them both dead and returned as ghosts. The friend, he predicts, will haunt an English lane, while he himself will turn up somewhere hotter and wilder in the Italian south. Neither place is defended against the other. By the end, what looked like a difference of opinion has become something closer to a love declaration.
The first stanza is short and quick, and its rhymes come thick and bright: "trees" and "please," "remain" and "lane," "poppies" and "coppice." The scene is made of small, gentle things, such as a cornfield "a-flutter with poppies," beanflower, and a blackbird's tune. The stanza ends in a rush of rhymes, "moon," "soon," "boon," "tune," "June," and the clipped "And May, and June!" The sound is as light and brief as the season it describes. The speaker is also generous. He asks the friend's ghost to "draw yourself up from the light of the moon" and let a boy and girl pass unhindered: "The happier they!" Even so, "as they will too soon" admits that this sweetness is on loan.
Then the second stanza opens bluntly: "What I love best in all the world." The lines lengthen and the tidy rhymes start to pile up, "mouth," "South," "drouth," and later "bands," "lands," "stands," "sands," "expands." The sentences sprawl across line breaks like someone describing home to a friend and not wanting to stop. Even the speaker's afterlife is earthier than his friend's. He has to "get my head from out the mouth / O' the grave," a comic, heaving image beside the ghost drifting in moonlight.
The Italian landscape is harsh and ancient where the English one was soft. The Apennine is "wind-grieved," as if the weather had feelings, and the cicada is "baked" and dies of drought. The cypress is "red-rusted" and "iron-spiked," more like a metal sentinel than a tree. The sea is a "great opaque / Blue breadth of sea without a break." Everything is crumbling, with frescoes flaking off the walls and a scorpion sprawled in the blisters, yet the speaker finds all of it beautiful. England's charm is that it passes, and Italy's is that it lasts, even in ruin: "forever crumbles."
Human life arrives in the shape of a barefoot girl who "tumbles / Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons." She brings news that the king has been shot at, "touched in the liver-wing" and walking with his "Bourbon arm in a sling." Politics reaches the house as gossip. "Liver-wing" is a cook's word for a bird's wing, so the monarch shrinks to a wounded fowl. The girl hopes "they have not caught the felons," which suggests, by inference, that her sympathies lie with the attackers. The speaker lets that stand without comment.
The ending hands the poem its emotional logic. The speaker borrows "Queen Mary's saying," the claim that the name of Calais, which she lost, would be found on her heart, and puts "Italy" in its place: "Open my heart and you will see / Graved inside of it, 'Italy.'" Italy, in rhyme with "see," "she," and "be," becomes a woman, and the lines close with "Such lovers old are I and she." Here the first stanza's young lovers return in a new light. English love is a boy, a girl, a hazel coppice and a few weeks of early summer. The speaker's love is old, stubborn and permanent: "So it always was, so shall ever be!" The poem sets the two kinds of love side by side and never ranks them.
The poem matters because it shows how preference works. Taste here is not a list of approved pleasures but an attachment built from particular, even ugly details, such as a rusted tree, a crumbling wall and a girl with melons. Browning's loose, talky rhythm keeps the voice casual, while the pull of the rhymes lifts it toward song. You cannot argue anyone out of what they love, because it has stopped being an opinion and become part of who they are.