Robert Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
commentary by Jim Rockhill
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came,
His word was so still - Fie, foh, and fom,
I smell the blood of a British man."
-William Shakespeare King LearAct III, Scene 4, ll. 187-189.
It is a shame that even fewer anthologists include verse now than in the past, because several excellent weird tales are thereby excluded simply because they happen to be written in verse.
According to contemporary sources, Robert Browning was inspired to write his narrative poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (1852, revised and published in Men & Women, 1855) based on a tower he had seen in Italy, a painting he had seen in France, the figure of an emaciated horse depicted on a tapestry in his own drawing room and Edgar's song in King Lear. Shakespeare's famous mad-song seems to be a conflation of the familiar tale of Jack the Giant Killer and an old Scottish ballad entitled "Childe Roland." The latter is a light-hearted piece which shares the title character's name and a tower, but nothing else, with Browning's poem.
Interpretations have varied wildly even in the poet's own time. Browning has been quoted as saying the poem came to him in a dream, that it had no message, and once even assented to an interviewer's interpretation that the poem was about survival and triumph through the power of idealistic perseverance in the face of adversity. This last is what all good Victorians would have liked to have believed, but like Browning's portrayals of passionate and dispassionate psychopaths in "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess" respectively, the poem is ultimately a horror story.
We already know from his title, "Childe" Roland, that the protagonist is an unproven knight, but his idealism has been crushed before the poem even begins. Suspecting treachery as soon as he turns toward the Tower, our hero enters this phase of his quest with no other desire than to end it:
"I did turn as he pointed - neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.
. . .
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope." (ll. 16-18. 23-24)
In the extended simile that follows, he compares the death of his own hopes and his inability to rekindle his enthusiasm with the final thoughts of a dying man (ll. 25-42), then having reflected on those he had seen depart before him only to die, wonders if he is even worthy of failing as they had:
"Thus I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among "The Band" - to wit,
The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed
Their steps - that just to fail as they, seemed best,
And all the doubt was now - would I be fit?" (ll. 37-42)
"Quiet as despair" (l. 43), he turns toward the plain leading to the Tower only to be engulfed by the plain as soon as he enters it. He has neither choice nor will but to proceed:
"For mark! No sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O'er the safe road, ëtwas gone; gray plain all round -
Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
I might go on; naught else remained to do." (ll. 49-54)
Trapped in this preternaturally vast plain where nothing thrives, he broods upon the barrenness of the landscape (ll. 55-75), until grass becomes leprous hair and mud resembles clotted blood. Before long he hates even the wasteland's victims:
"One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there -
Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!
. . .
Alive? He might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe:
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain." (ll. 76-84)
The sight of this dying horse causes him to recoil within himself for "one draught of earlier, happy sights" (l. 87). "One taste of the old time sets all to rights" (l. 90). He closes his eyes to the present, and flees to the past, but the landscape and the apparent increasing sympathy he has with it, in spite of himself, poisons even his memories. All he can remember is dishonor and death (ll. 86-102). Almost as quickly as he had fled into the past, he recoils from it, returning to the hellish present and reassuring himself, "better this present than a past like that" (l. 103).
Of course, there is worse to come. The protagonist's use of the pathetic fallacy becomes even more intense, making it increasingly unclear how much of what he describes is external and how much his perception has been warped by his past experiences and the present environment. A river becomes:
"So petty yet so spiteful! All along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng;
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit." (ll. 115-120)
Crossing this river, he dwells upon every object he encounters as if it might be "a dead man's cheek" or "his hair or beard" (ll. 121-124). What he assumes to be a speared rat shrieks like a baby (ll. 125-126). This is a horrible succession of images, but it is hard to tell which is worse: the objects themselves or his increasingly obsessive description of them.
Now, he has reached the site of a great battle or siege, full of the dead, engines of torture and engines of war (ll. 127-150). The descriptions here seem to anticipate the work of the World War I poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Appalled by what he sees - even the ravaged trees take on the aspect of the gaping dead (ll. 151-156) - he walks from the plain into a mountainous enclosure.
The flight of a bird overhead, simultaneously guide, carrion and harbinger of doom, signals to the hero that he is at risk from more than the landscape and creates a tension between the almost pathological description of physical horrors up till now and a new sense of spiritual dread (ll. 157-162). Too late, he realizes that he has missed the trap he had spent his life training himself to avoid (ll. 163-180).
"The dying sunset kindled through the cleft;
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin, upon hand, to see the game at bay -" (ll. 189-191)
The hills ring with the tolling roll-call of all those who have preceded him, failed and died. "One moment knelled the woe of years" (1. 198). Finally, with the flaming dead ranged before him along the hillsides, Roland places the horn to his lips and blows a defiant challenge to the Dark Tower.
It might be an anachronism, but every time I read this poem I am reminded of Friedrich Nietsche's dictum,
"He who fights monsters should be careful lest he therefore become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you." Beyond Good & Evil, Book IV.
I find it impossible to believe that Roland is either triumphant or survives. His doom is evident almost from the start. What intrigues me is the question of whether or not he has already been so thoroughly assimilated by the evil he seeks to combat that it is already too late for him before he issues his challenge. Although I used to think this was the case, I now believe that Roland, though doomed to fail and die like all those before him, has averted his eyes from the abyss at the last moment. That one final act of defiance in the face of certain death provides the answer to the question which plagued him near the beginning of the poem:
". . . just to fail as they, seemed best,
And all the doubt was now - should I be fit?"
Whichever way you interpret it, you will have difficulty finding another work that equals this poem for combining intensity of imagery, gruesome horror and spiritual dread. That all this occurs within an ostensibly heroic context only adds to its power.