Robert Browning's Poetry “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1852) Summary & Analysis

Summary

Published in the volume Men and Women, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” takes its title and its inspiration from the song sung by Edgar in William Shakespeare’s King Lear, when he pretends to be a madman. “Childe” is an archaic aristocratic title indicating a young man who has not yet been knighted. This particular young man is on a quest for the “Dark Tower”: what the tower’s significance is we do not know (perhaps it holds the Holy Grail). He wanders through a dark, marshy waste-land, filled with horrors and terrible noises. He thinks of home and old friends as he presses forward. Fighting discouragement and fear, he reaches the tower, where he sounds his horn, knowing as he does that his quest and his life have come to an end.

Form

“Childe Roland” divides into six-line stanzas, mostly in irregularly stressed pentameter lines. The stanzas rhyme ABBAAB. Much of the language in this poem makes a rough, even unpoetic impression: it reflects the ugly scenery and hellish journey it discusses. Lines such as “In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves...” wind so contortedly that they nearly confound all attempts at reading them aloud. Both the rhyme scheme and the poem’s vocabulary suggest a deliberate archaicness, similar to some of Tennyson’s poems. However, unlike Tennyson’s poems, this poem recreates a medieval world that does not evoke pleasant fairy tales, but rather dark horrors.

Analysis

Browning’s vision of the wasteland prefigures T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and other works of high modernism. The barren plains symbolize the sterile, corrupted conditions of modern life. Although they are depopulated and remote, they serve as a stand-in for the city. Childe Roland hallucinates about dead comrades and imagines horrors that aren’t actually there: like the modern city, this place strains his psyche and provokes abnormal responses. Indeed, he has only arrived here by way of a malevolent guide: Roland’s first instinct is to think that the man is lying to him, but his lack of spiritual guidance and his general confusion lead him to accept the man’s directions.

Childe Roland’s quest has no pertinence to the modern world, a fact evidenced by the fact that the young man has no one with whom to celebrate his success—in fact, no one will even know of it. In this way his journey speaks to the anonymity and isolation of the modern individual. The meaninglessness of Roland’s quest is reinforced by its origins: Childe Roland is not the creation of a genuine madman, but of a man (Edgar in King Lear) who pretends to be mad to escape his half-brother’s murderous intentions. The inspiration for Browning’s poem thus springs from no sincere emotion, not even from genuine madness: it is a convenience and a folly, a sane man’s approximation of what madness might look like. The inspiration is an empty performance, just as the quest described here is an empty adventure.

Much of the poem’s imagery references the storm scene in King Lear from whence its inspiration comes. Shakespeare is, of course, the patriarch of all English literature, particularly poetry. But here Browning tries to work out his own relationship to the English literary tradition. He also tries to analyze the continued importance of canonical works in a much-changed modern world. (Through his reference to Shakespeare and to medieval themes, Browning places especial emphasis on these two eras of literature.) He suggests that while the Shakespearean and medieval modes still have aesthetic value, their cultural maintains a less certain relevance. That no one hears Roland’s horn or appreciates his deeds suggests cultural discontinuity: Roland has more in common with the heroes of the past than with his peers; he has nothing in common with Browning’s contemporaries except an overwhelming sense of futility. Indeed, the poem laments a meaninglessness so all-pervasive that even the idea of the wasteland cannot truly describe modern life or make a statement about that life; it is this sense of meaninglessness that dominates the poem.