You can read it here. It won't take long; I timed it. If you've read it before and know all about the slughorn controversy and Browning's unconventional use of "estray" in line 48, it'll take about six minutes. If you've never read it before, it'll take maybe ten. Go on, go read it. You know you resolved on New Year's to broaden your literary horizons and watch less football. I'll wait here.
There. That was a lot better than watching some guy demonstrate his lack of choreographic ability in the end zone, right?
Robert Browning was a British Victorian poet. He's rightly known for writing monologues that explore the character of the speaker, using nothing but the speaker's own words. His subjects range from a psychotic murderer to a highly rational bastard murderer (brilliantly described by Brecht here ) to a couple of tormented Renaissance painters to a fussy grammarian. As conventional as he was in some respects, Browning's monologues are very --- unusual for his era.
But among his dramatic monologues, "Child Roland to The Dark Tower Came," published in 1855, is by far the most unexpected.
I was conscious of no allegorical intention of writing it ... Childe Roland came upon me as a kind of dream. I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day, I believe. I do not know what I meant beyond that, and I do not know now. But I am very fond of it."
(Wrote it in a day, yeah. We've heard that story
before. He'd made a New Year's resolution in 1852 to write a poem a day, and don't we all like to pretend our resolutions last more than an afternoon?)
It's fullblown poeme noir way before noirness was ever born or thought of. Except for Shakespeare, I suppose. I hear he thought of everything. In fact the title of this poem comes from King Lear, where it's babbled by someone pretending to be insane.
The speaker is a knight, or aspiring knight (a "childe" is a well born man who will become a knight). But his salad days are long gone. He's spent his life on a hopeless quest against an enemy which is never clearly described, and which he is about to encounter for the first time at the end of this poem.
As the poem begins, he turns onto a path at the direction of a malevolent "liar" who nevertheless directs him the right way:
So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray
and he finds himself trudging through a monstrous, deformed, landscape:
If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents.
As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
The word choice reflects the wrongness, deformity, of the landscape: Askance, crutch, starved, ignoble, inertness, grimace, grotesqueness, petty, spiteful, mute despair, suicidal throng, savage trample, rusty teeth, palsied oak, distorted mouth. And it's described in precise detail. There's a good painting by Thomas Moran illustrating it. I'm not sure about its copyright status, but you can see it here.
To cheer himself up, Roland thinks about his old comrades in this quest: "Think first, fight afterwards--the soldier's art:/One taste of the old time sets all to rights." But he can only remember their death and dishonor.
...I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face
Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
An arm in mine to fix me to the place
That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace!
Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold.
Then, just as the reader is about to slit his wrists, Roland finds himself where he needs to be:
Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!
The poem is pure catnip to
literary critic after
literary critic and apparently to Stephen King. I haven't read King's Dark Tower series, but the hero is named Roland, so, yeah).
But as much as I love analyzing poetry, I don't do that with this one. The speaker's feelings about his quest are what leads me to get it out at dinner parties and read from it (Practice tip: Make a really good dessert and read while they're eying it. Make it clear the poem comes first, then the apple pie).
He whines a bit at first:
...I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.
For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,
What with my search drawn out thro' years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring,
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope.
But he keeps going. And at the end he finds his object:
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world.
And then he does what he's come to do:
...Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,--
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
So does the Dark Tower represent death, depression, evil, ignorance? I take Browning at his word that he doesn't know himself. And though you can read the poem as the delusional ramblings of an insane speaker, I don't. It's too real somehow.
Roland is embittered and on his way to an ultimate defeat, but he's not some naive fathead who's dashing into the Valley of Death just because everyone else is. He's thoughtful, observant, and compassionate. Philip Marlowesque. He endures and persists despite all the disappointment he's experienced, despite every disillusionment and every sorrow, and despite the fact that his quest is doomed. It's worth it to him. I love that.