23 “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came”
(See Edgar’s Song in “LEAR”)
Text and publication
First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863, 18652 (without stanza numbers), 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1855.
Composition and date
If B.’s account of the poem’s composition is to be trusted, Childe Roland was written immediately after Women and Roses in early Jan. 1853: ‘The next day “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. But it was simply that I had to do it. I did not know then what I meant beyond that, and I’m sure I don’t know now. But I am very fond of it’ (Lilian Whiting, The Brownings: their Life and Art [1911] 261; see headnote to Women and Roses, III 235). He told a very similar story to Daniel Sargent Curtis late in his life: ‘Asked Mr. Browning if there were any sous-entendu [subtext] in his poem of Childe Roland?—“Not the least. I wrote it on the 2d January, having begun the year with the intention of writing a lyric poem every day that year … The first I wrote was ‘Women and Roses,’ about a rose-tree which some American lady had sent to my wife as a New Year’s gift. I wrote half of Childe Roland, and finished it the next day. Then somebody or something put it out of my head, and I relapsed into my old desultory way” ’ (Daniel Sargent Curtis, ‘Robert Browning, 1879 to 1885’, in More than Friend 170). The Brownings were living in Florence at this time, so the suggestion that the poem was written in Paris (Orr Life 362; Cyclopedia 103; DeVane Handbook 229) is incompatible with this version of events, notwithstanding B.’s assertion in a letter of 29 Apr. 1866 (commenting on a picture based on the poem by Alfred William Hunt) that Childe Roland was written ‘at Paris’ (New Letters 173; see also Non-literary sources).
Sources and influences
As early as 1925 DeVane observed that critics have ‘ransacked ballad, fairy tale and legend to find the origin’ of the poem (‘The Landscape of Browning’s Childe Roland,’ PMLA xl [1925] 426). Like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, with which it has often been compared, the poem claims to be the imperfectly remembered record of a dream, and as such it has been analysed by critics for traces of the raw material from which the poet drew his conscious ideas. It is, however, important to make a clear distinction between those texts to which the poem explicitly refers, and those which B. may have drawn on unconsciously in constructing the story of his imaginary knight’s quest.
As the poem’s subtitle makes clear, its title comes from ‘Edgar’s song in “Lear” ’: ‘Childe Rowland to the dark tower came, / His word was still, “fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man” ’ (III iv 182–4). Edgar is still at this stage disguised as Poor Tom, and is attempting, along with Gloucester, to persuade Lear to take shelter for the night rather than stay out on the heath. Some general similarities between Edgar’s situation and that of the speaker in B.’s poem have been highlighted; Mario D’Avanzo, for instance, notes that both poem and play use landscape as an emblem of the speaker’s psychological state, and suggests that ‘the triumph of love, fidelity and virtue’ in B.’s poem is ‘mirrored in Edgar’s “pilgrimage” (V iii 197) to truth and in his victory for justice and good’ (SEL xvii [1977], 705).
Edgar’s song may in turn derive from ‘the romance of Child Roland’, one of the stories recorded in Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (ed. Henry Weber, R. Jamieson and W[alter] S[cott], 1814), pp. 397–403. In this collection Jamieson gives a prose paraphrase, with some verse excerpts, of ‘Rosmer Haf-Mand, or the Mer-man Rosmer’, as narrated to him ‘by a country tailor then at work in my father’s house’, which turns out to be ‘the Romance of Child Rowland’ (p. 403). Rowland, the youngest sibling in King Arthur’s family, goes on a quest to Elfland to find his sister, Burd Ellen, who has been stolen by the elves, and his two elder brothers, who have been captured trying to rescue her. Jamieson notes the presence in this ballad of the ‘fee, faw, fum’ motif, and adds: ‘When on a former occasion, in “Popular Ballads and Songs,” vol. ii. p. 282, the present writer laid before the public a translation of the first ballad of “Rosmer,” he expressed an opinion that this was the identical romance quoted by Edgar in “King Lear,” which in Shakespeare’s time was well-known in England, and is still preserved, in however mutilated a state, in Scotland’ (p. 397). There are several parallels between the story and B.’s poem. The ‘Warluck Merlin’ tells Rowland that he ‘should kill every person he met after entering the land of Fairy, and should neither eat nor drink of what was offered him in that country, whatever his hunger or thirst might be; for if he tasted or touched in Elfland, he must remain in the power of the Elves, and never see middle eard again’ (p. 399). When Rowland arrives at the place where his sister is held captive, the King of Elfland emerges from its ‘folding doors’ and sings: ‘With “fi, fi, fo, and fum! / I smell the blood of a Christian man! / Be he dead, be he living, wi’ my brand / I’ll clash his harns frae his harn-pan!” ’ At this, the ‘undaunted’ Child Rowland exclaims, ‘Strike, then, Bogle of Hell, if thou darest!’, and ‘[draws] the good claymore [Excalibar,] that never struck in vain’ (pp. 402–3).
(ii) The Bible
Although a large number of potential sources have been identified for the poem, the only other text to which it alludes directly is the Bible. ‘Tophet’, mentioned at l. 143 in the phrase ‘Tophet’s tool’, was a ‘place of burning’ lying to the south of Jerusalem in which ‘the carcases and other filthiness from the city’ were destroyed; it is frequently used in the Bible as an emblem of hell (e.g. 2 Kings xxiii 10; Isaiah xxx 33). The allusion to ‘Apollyon’ (l. 160) invokes one of B.’s habitual points of reference, Revelation, and more specifically the terrifying locusts unleashed by the star which falls from heaven to earth in ch. ix: ‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle … And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit … in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon’ (ix 6–11). There is also a reference to the Last Judgement, graphically described in Revelation, at ll. 65–6. In ‘Biblical Influence in Childe Roland’, Leslie M. Thompson suggests some thematic similarities between the poem and passages of the New Testament comparing the Christian to a soldier; see Papers on Language and Literature iii (1967), 339–53.
(iii) Pilgrim’s Progress
The ‘foul fiend’ mentioned by Edgar in Lear (III iv 51–62) is linked to Apollyon in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, whose hero is, of course, also engaged on a journey or quest through a hostile landscape largely composed of valleys. Christian meets a fearsome monster called Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation and eventually overcomes him through faith in Christ. There are, as Melchiori notes, some verbal parallels between this passage in Pilgrim’s Progress and the poem (see below ll. 160–1n.). Bunyan’s text also illustrates the use of ‘Tophet’ as a synonym for Hell: ‘Then said Evangelist, Why not willing to die? since this life is attended with so many evils? The Man answered, Because I fear that this burden that is upon my back, will sink me lower than the Grave; and I shall fall into Tophet’ (Oxford 1966, p. 9).
(iv) Fairy Tales
Taking his cue from B.’s account of the poem’s composition, Harold Golder suggests that there is a dreamlike association between Edgar’s song and Childe Roland, with the words of the song triggering a whole series of associations with material that B. had known since childhood (‘Browning’s Childe Roland’, PMLA xxxix [1924] 963–78). He points out that the ‘doggerel’ words in Edgar’s song occur in Hop-o’-my-thumb, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Jack the Giant Killer, texts to which B. alludes elsewhere; see e.g. Ring i 136–7. There are, moreover, similarities between these stories and the narrative of Childe Roland. At the end of Jack the Giant-Killer, the hero is guided to a castle by a white-headed man, ‘where a host of lost adventurers, who had previously essayed the conquest of the tower, lie imprisoned. On arriving before the gates, Jack finds a golden trumpet hanging suspended by a silver chain, under which is written: “Whoever can this trumpet blow, / Soon shall the giant overthrow, / And break the black enchantment straight, / So all shall be in happy state” ’ (Golder, 966). B.’s tendency towards creative reintepretation of this fairy-tale material is indicated in Lovers’ Quarrel 131–3 (p. 383), where ‘the valiant Thumb’ is transformed into a hero; as Golder puts it, ‘B. … has obviously confused these tales with others in which the main character is a fighting hero’ (p. 965). Cp. also the closing lines of Pauline, whose protagonist declares: ‘I seem dying, as one going in the dark / To fight a giant’ (ll. 1026–7, p. 69).
(v) Romance and Chivalry
B. undoubtedly knew the Chanson de Roland, and he may have known of ‘the publication in 1837 of the earliest, most complete and most literate manuscript that gained the attention of modern readers’ (Howard S. Robertson, ed., The Song of Roland [1972], p. vii). Roland is a vassal of the Emperor Charlemagne, who is left behind in Spain with a small force, which is attacked by a much larger Saracen army and utterly destroyed; towards the end of the battle he repeatedly blows his horn to summon Charlemagne’s main force to his assistance, but they arrive only in time to avenge his death. Roland became one of the main heroes of the chivalric tradition, featuring in a number of Middle English romances, and his exploits were alluded to in many nineteenth-century texts. These mainly relate to his relationship with his friend Oliver and his blowing of his horn at Roncevaux. Contemporary references to Roland tend to treat him as an exemplar of medieval romance chivalry; see for instance bk. v of Aurora Leigh, where EBB. considers the duty of contemporary poets: ‘Their sole work is to represent the age, / Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age, / That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, / And spends more passion, more heroic heat, / Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, / Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles’ (ll. 202–7). Roland is the name of the speaker’s horse in How They Brought the Good News (p. 220).
Golder points out resemblances to other stories of chivalry and romance. Perhaps the most significant of these is Spenser’s Faerie Queene; the ‘hoary cripple’ who guides Roland towards the dark tower in B.’s poem is compared with Archimago, the sorcerer who attempts to beguile the Red Cross Knight from his quest: ‘At length they chaunst to meet upon the way / An aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad, / His feete all bare, his beard all hoarie gray’ (I i st. 29). He also notes similarities to Richard Johnson’s Renowned History of the Seven Champions of Christendom, especially the story of St George, and to Palmerin of England, a Spanish romance translated into English by Robert Southey at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Similarities have also been noted to sections of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, inc. the story of Balin (Linda Hughes, SBHC ix [1981] 42–50) and the Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney (Lionel Stevenson, ‘Pertinacious Victorian Poets’, University of Toronto Quarterly xxi [1952], 239–40).
(vi) Dante
Ruth Elizabeth Sullivan (‘B.’s Childe Roland and Dante’s Inferno’, VP v [1967] 296–302), notes some general similarities between the setting and landscape of the poem and that of Dante’s Inferno, and suggests a specific comparison between the ‘engine’ mentioned in ll. 140–4 and the punishment meted out by Satan to Judas, Brutus and Cassius in hell: ‘Da ogni bocca dirompea co’ denti / un peccatore, a guisa di maciulla, / sì che tre ne facea così dolenti’ [At every mouth his teeth a sinner champ’d, / Bruised as with ponderous engine; so that three / Were in this guise tormented.] (299; Inferno xxxiv, 55–7). The horn of Orlando [Roland] is mentioned in Canto xxxi of the poem, as Dante and Virgil enter the deepest circles of hell: ‘Quiv’era men che notte e men che giorno / sì che ‘l viso m’andava innanzi poco; / ma io senti’ sonare un alto corno, / tanto ch’avrebbe ogne tuon fatto fioco, / che, contra sé la sua via seguitando, / dirizzò li occhi miei tutti ad un loco. / Dopo la dolorosa rotta, quando / Carlo Magno perdé la santa gesta, / non sonò sì terribilmente Orlando. / Poco portäi in là volta la testa, / che me parve veder molte alte torri[.] (ll. 10–20) [There / Was less than day and less than night, that far / Mine eye advanced not: but I heard a horn / Sounded so loud, the peal it rang had made / The thunder feeble. Following its course / The adverse way, my strained eyes were bent / On that one spot. So terrible a blast / Orlando blew not, when that dismal rout / O’er threw the host of Charlemain, and quench’d / His saintly warfare. Thitherward not long / My head was raised, when many a lofty tower / Methought I spied.] Cp. D. S. S. Parsons, ‘Childe Roland and the Fool’, University of Windsor Review iv.1 (1968) 24–30.
(vii) Gerard de Lairesse
In his PMLA article and again (more briefly) in Handbook, DeVane suggests that the poem’s unusual focus on landscape ultimately derives from ch. 17 of de Lairesse’s The Art of Painting in All its Branches (1778), entitled ‘Of Things Deformed and Broken, Falsely Called Painter-like’. This was clearly a favourite book of B.’s as a child; he noted on the fly-leaf that he ‘read this book more often and with greater delight … than any other’ when he was a child (‘Landscape of Childe Roland’, 428); and he returned to de Lairesse in the late Parleyings (1887). The chapter traces an imaginary ‘walk’ designed to show the difference between the ‘painter-like’ and the ‘unpainter-like’ in landscape. Verbal resemblances are noted at ll. 51–2 and 154 below.
(viii) Contemporary Sources
Tennyson’s ‘The Vision of Sin’ (1842) takes the form of a dream vision in which a ‘gray and gap-toothed man as lean as death’ rides across ‘a withered heath’ and joins a ghoulish company at a ‘ruined inn’ determined to pursue a life of degraded hedonism. The final section of the poem is especially reminiscent of Childe Roland:
The voice grew faint: there came a further change:
Once more uprose the mystic mountain-range:
Below were men and horses pierced with worms,
And slowly quickening into lower forms;
By shards and scurf of salt, and scum of dross,
Old plash of rains, and refuse patched with moss
(ll. 207–12)
The idea of writing a poem around a line of Shakespeare may also have been prompted by Tennyson’s example in poems such as Mariana.
Melchiori draws attention to the possible influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story Metzengerstein on the portrait of the horse at ll.76–84, and on the atmosphere of the poem as a whole (pp. 208–13); C. Alphonso Smith (Poet Lore xi [1899] 626–8) compares the poem to the opening sentences of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Other suggested influences include Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo (Richard Dellamora, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies ii [1981] 36–52) and Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, which contains a night journey across a psychologically inflected landscape, a ‘gaunt’ ass with ‘staring bones’, and a drowned man in a river (see ll. 121–6n., and also Thomas Harrison, ‘B.’s Childe Roland and Wordsworth’, Tennessee Studies in Literature vi [1961] 1–23). EBB.’s The Cry of the Children (1844) is presented as a possible influence by David Erdman, ‘Browning’s Industrial Nightmare’, Philological Quarterly xxxvi [1957] 417–35, but verbal parallels between the two poems are slight, and Erdman’s attempts to place Childe Roland in its contemporary historical context are undermined by his acceptance of DeVane’s (almost certainly erroneous) assertion that the poem was written in Paris (see Composition). B. himself rejected Irene Hardy’s suggestion that the poem might have been inspired by Scott’s ‘The Bridal of Triermain’; see Poet Lore xxiv (1913) 53–8.
(ix) Non-literary sources
In a footnote, Orr comments that the ‘picturesque materials’ which went into the poem included ‘a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room’ (Orr Handbook 274). Her authority for this may derive from B. himself, who mentioned the tower in Massa-Carrara in a letter to A. W. Hunt (DeVane Handbook 229). Thomas investigates the various tapestries known to have been in the drawing-room at Casa Guidi, and concludes that none of them was likely to have served as the model for the horse in the poem, although he does not rule out the possibility that other tapestries owned by B. might eventually come to light (p. 61). He also investigates the whereabouts of the tower, and suggests the Malaspina Castle in Massa as its possible prototype (p. 424).
Miller (p. 12) places Childe Roland with Paracelsus in B.’s ‘great gallery of brilliant tainted characters’; she draws attention to a passage from Paracelsus (iii 718–24, I 223) in which the hero laments the failure of his quest for knowledge, using a chivalric metaphor: ‘I have address’d a frock of heavy mail, / Yet may not join the troop of sacred knights … Best follow, dreaming that ere night arrive / I shall o’ertake the company, and ride / Glittering as they!’ Melchiori (pp. 124–5) notes another strong parallel with Paracelsus ii 289–313, a passage in which Paracelsus overhears Aprile singing of the ‘wan troop’ of poets who have betrayed their gifts; they urge the ‘Lost one’ to join them, for although they had hoped that he would ‘speak / The message which our lips, too weak, / Refused to utter’, he has failed like them. Melchiori refers not to the first edition text (1835) but to the text which B. had recently and extensively revised for his collected Poems of 1849 (where ‘The message’ read ‘God’s message’): see the notes in our edition, I 169–70. The apocalyptic tone recalls the vision of the Last Judgement in Easter Day, which also anticipates its narrative in its description of a knight who fails his task at the last moment (ll. 483–8, III 121). Melchiori also points out a similar moment in A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (1843) III i 8–11: ‘And the dim turret I have fled from, fronts / Again my step; the very river put / Its arm about me and conducted me / To this detested spot’ (p. 138). Both Melchiori and Daniel Karlin (Browning’s Hatreds, Oxford 1993) note the resemblance of the ‘Dark Tower’ to the ‘strange square black turret’ on the largest of the ‘isles of the syren’ which the speaker of England in Italy proposes to explore (see ll. 217–21, p. 266); for the recurrence of such structures in B., see Sordello vi 779–85n. (I 763). Melchiori also notes a similarity to Ring vii 867–70, in which Pompilia’s mother is compared to a ‘plashy pool’. The speaker’s anticipation of imminent death (whether fulfilled or not) recalls Pauline 1026 ff. (p. 69); cp. also Prospice (DP, 1864).
Criticism
Some of the difficulties of interpretation offered by this poem are summarized by Orr. After her account of the poem’s apparent action, she adds: ‘So far, the picture is consistent; but if we look below its surface discrepancies appear. The Tower is much nearer and more accessible than Childe Roland has thought; a sinister-looking man of whom he asked the way, and who, he believed, was deceiving him, has really put him on the right track; and as he describes the country through which he passes, it becomes clear that half its horrors are created by his own heated imagination, or by some undefined influence in the place itself. We are left in doubt whether those who have found failure in this quest, have not done so through the very act of attainment in it, and when, dauntless, Childe Roland sounds his slughorn and announces that he has come, we should not know, but that he lives to tell the tale, whether in doing this he incurs, or is escaping, the general doom’ (Handbook 273–4). Orr’s summary raises the central problem of the object of the quest. Line 176 would seem to suggest that the Dark Tower is itself the object, but the fact that Roland takes the cripple’s direction despite knowing that ‘all agree’ he is pointing the way to the Dark Tower (ll. 10–15) implies that he has asked the way to somewhere else; drawing on the poem’s possible allusion to Bunyan (see Sources and ll. 160–1n.), Melchiori nominates the ‘Celestial City’. Golder attempts to resolve this difficulty by claiming that the words ‘all agree’ ‘are not Roland’s words … but the cripple’s, which Roland quotes indirectly and ironically’ (Golder, op. cit., 968n.).
In the remarks about the poem’s composition recorded by Lilian Whiting, B. stated that he ‘was conscious of no allegorical intention in writing’ the poem; to another enquirer he replied that the poem was ‘only a fantasy’. Berdoe records a similarly emphatic statement to this effect by Furnivall at a meeting of the Browning Society: ‘ “he had asked Browning if it was an allegory, and in answer had, on three separate occasions, received an emphatic ‘no’; that it was simply a dramatic creation called forth by a line of Shakespeare’s” ’ (Cyclopaedia 103). B. was, however, willing to give qualified assent to J. W. Chadwick’s suggestion that the meaning of the poem could be summed up in the words of Matthew x 22: ‘he that endureth to the end shall be saved’ (Cyclopaedia 104; DeVane Handbook 229, 231). The poem’s Biblical allusions and its similarities to Christianized versions of the quest romance such as The Faerie Queene and Pilgrim’s Progress have led some critics to see it as a representation of the journey of the soul towards salvation deeply rooted in the language and conventions of evangelical Protestantism (see e.g. Donald Hair, Robert Browning’s Language, Toronto 1999). Others read the poem in biographical or even psychoanalytical terms as an out-pouring of some of B.’s deepest fears about himself and his creativity (e.g. Karlin, Browning’s Hatreds). Melchiori’s suggestion that Childe Roland’s predecessors and the ‘wan troop’ of Paracelsus might be B.’s poetic precursors (see Parallels) is developed by Harold Bloom in his various essays on the poem; see e.g. A Map of Misreading (Oxford 1975), ch. 6.
1
My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
5 Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge at one more victim gained thereby.
2
What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers that might find him posted there,
10 And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch ’gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,
3
If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
15 Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed; neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end should be.
4
For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,
20 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.
5
25 As when a sick man very near to death
Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end
The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,
And hears one bid the other go, draw breath
Freelier outside, (“since all is o’er,” he saith,
30 “And the blow fall’n no grieving can amend”)
While some discuss if near the other graves
Be room enough for this, and when a day
Suits best for carrying the corpse away,
With care about the banners, scarves and staves,—
35 And still the man hears all, and only craves
He may not shame such tender love and stay.
7
Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among “The Band”—to wit,
40 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—should I be fit.
8
So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
45 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.
For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
50 Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than pausing to throw backward a last view
To the safe road, ’twas gone! grey plain all round!
Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound.
I might go on; nought else remained to do.
10
55 So on I went. I think I never saw
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For flowers—as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,
60 You’d think: a burr had been a treasure-trove.
11
No! penury, inertness, and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land’s portion. “See
Or shut your eyes”—said Nature peevishly—
“It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
65 The Judgment’s fire alone can cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.”
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
70 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.
13
As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy—thin dry blades pricked the mud
75 Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupified, however he came there—
Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!
Alive? he might be dead for all I know,
80 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.
15
85 I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.
As a man calls for wine before he fights,
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards—the soldier’s art:
90 One taste of the old times sets all to rights!
16
Not it! 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,
95 That way he used. Alas! one night’s disgrace!
Out went my heart’s new fire and left it cold.
17
Giles, then, the soul of honour—there he stands
Frank as ten years ago when knighted first.
What honest men should dare (he said) he durst.
100 Good—but the scene shifts—faugh! what hangman’s hands
Pin to his breast a parchment? his own bands
Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!
18
Better this present than a past like that—
Back therefore to my darkening path again.
105 No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.
Will the night send a howlet or a bat?
I asked: when something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.
19
A sudden little river crossed my path
110 As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms—\
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend’s glowing hoof—to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.
20
115 So petty yet so spiteful! all along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
120 Whate’er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.
21
Which, while I forded,—good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man’s cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
125 —It may have been a water-rat I speared,
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.
22
Glad was I when I reached the other bank.
Now for a better country. Vain presage!
Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage
130 Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash? toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage—
23
The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.
What kept them there, with all the plain to choose?
135 No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it: mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.
24
And more than that—a furlong on—why, there!
140 What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel—that harrow fit to reel
Men’s bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet’s tool, on earth left unaware,
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.
25
145 Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood
150 Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.
26
Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil’s
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
155 Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.
27
And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
160 A great black bird, Apollyon’s bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap—perchance the guide I sought.
For looking up, aware I somehow grew,
’Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
165 All round to mountains—with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stol’n in view.
How thus they had surprised me,—solve it, you!
How to get from them was no plainer case.
29
Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
170 Of mischief happened to me, God knows when—
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts—you’re inside the den!
30
175 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,
Fool, to be dozing at the very nonce,
180 After a life spent training for the sight!
31
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. The tempest’s mocking elf
185 Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.
32
Not see? because of night perhaps?—Why, day
Came back again for that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
190 The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay—
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,—
“Now stab and end the creature—to the heft!”
Not hear? when noise was everywhere? it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears,
195 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.
34
There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides—met
200 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.”
Title. A ‘Childe’ is ‘a youth of gentle birth’; the word is ‘applied to a young noble awaiting knighthood’ in a number of medieval ballads and romances (OED). Byron adopted the term for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
Subtitle. Edgar’s] the Fool’s (H proof). See headnote, Sources (i) King Lear.
2. hoary: ‘White or grey with age’ (J.).
3. the working] the lurking (H proof, but not H proof 2); clearly a compositor’s misprint, although its provenance is puzzling; it is unlikely to be the result of a misreading of B.’s MS, and may be an example of the compositor making a ‘poetic’ error, since ‘lurking’ fits the context if not the grammar.
4. mine: ‘my eye’, with the sense that the cripple, with his ‘malicious eye’, is observing Roland’s (psychological) reaction; but the syntax, supported by the proximity of ‘his lie’, allows for a darker reading, in which ‘mine’ means ‘my lie’, i.e. the cripple is lying in response to a question which he knows or believes to be itself a lie, and is watching to see what Roland will (physically) do. Even if this is not the ‘right’ reading it fits the poem’s atmosphere of ambivalence and its theme of self-division.
7. be set] bet set (H proof). This mispr. is underlined and noted in ink, probably by the printer’s reader, in the margin of H proof, and is one of the few misprs. in H proof which are also recorded in H proof 2. with his staff?] on his staff ? (H proof).
9. that might] who might (1865–88).
11. what crutch] whose crutch (H proof).
14. all agree: on this possible inconsistency in the action of the poem, see Criticism.
17. descried: ‘to descry’ is defined by J. as ‘[to] discover; to perceive by the eye; to see any thing distant or obscure’.
18. should be] might be (1863–88).
22. obstreperous: ‘Loud; clamorous; noisy; turbulent; vociferous’ (J.).
25–36. The resemblance between these lines and the opening of Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ was pointed out by Livingston Lowes, NQ [1953] 491–2; Christopher Ricks (NQ [1967] 374) compares Tennyson, The Princess vii 136–9.
30. the blow fall’n] the blow fallen (1863–88). The metrical contraction of ‘—en’ words is unusual for B., especially at this period; for another example, see below, l. 166.
34. banners, scarves and staves: staves is a plural of ‘staff ’ (J.), a pole from which a flag is flown. Cp. Byron, Siege of Corinth 256–7: ‘The winds were pillow’d on the waves; / The banners droop’d along their staves’.
44. out of his highway: in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (see headnote, Sources) Christian is warned not to leave ‘the King’s [i.e. God’s] highway’, but does so on the advice of Mr Worldly-Wiseman; as a result he falls into the hands of Giant Despair and is imprisoned in Doubting Castle. But the image here is characteristically complicated by its being ‘his [the cripple’s] highway’; by l. 52 it has become ‘the safe road’. Highway is accented on the second syllable, as often in Renaissance verse; cp. e.g. Chapman’s 1616 translation of Homer’s Iliad (vi 33–4): ‘he would a traueller pray / To be his guest; his friendly house, stood in the brode high way’ (ll. 33–4).
45–8. With this description of the sunset, cp. Keats, ‘There is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain’, l. 17: ‘Blood-red the Sun may set behind black mountain peaks’; and Shelley, Julian and Maddalo 53–4: ‘Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight, / Over the horizon of the mountains’. Cp. also Lairesse, Art of Painting (see headnote, Sources): ‘The sun, now on the point of setting, darted his refulgent rays between some heavy clouds’ (p. 261). This moment is repeated at ll. 182–4.
48. estray: ‘A creature wandered beyond its limits; a stray’ (J.). Melchiori (p. 212) points out that this unusual word is also used in Poe’s story Metzengerstein, a possible source for the horse described in ll. 76–84.
51–2. DeVane compares Lairesse’s description of an ‘unpainter-like’ landscape as ‘without roads or ways’ (‘Landscape of Childe Roland’, p. 429; see headnote, Sources).
52. To] O’er (1865–88).
57. a cedar grove: the cedar has biblical associations of nobility and religious devotion; cedar wood was used in the building of Solomon’s temple. But the phrase ‘cedar grove’ does not appear in the Bible; the word ‘grove’ itself is consistently associated with pagan idolatry.
58. cockle: ‘A weed that grows in corn’ (J.). spurge: ‘A plant violently purgative’ (J.).
60. burr: ‘A rough head of a plant, which sticks to the hair or cloaths’ (J.); cp. Twins 4, and headnote to that poem (III 657).
62–6.] no quotation marks in H proof.
64. “It nothing skills”: ‘it doesn’t help; it makes no difference’.
65.] ’Tis the Last Judgment’s fire must cure this place, (1863–88). There is no exact parallel in Revelation, or elsewhere in the Bible, for this concept of fire as a purifying agent with regard to the earth itself; the closest parallel is Revelation xx 9–15, in which fire from heaven destroys God’s enemies, an event that immediately precedes the Last Judgement and the vision of the New Jerusalem in ch. xxi.
66. Calcine: to burn (something) to powder, from ‘calx’, the Latin word for quicklime, but used in English as an alchemical term denoting a powder produced by thoroughly burning a mineral or metal and reducing it to its purest state. OED cites works by authors B. certainly knew, e.g. Ben Jonson and Sit Thomas Browne. Cp. Easter Day 631n. (III 126). set my prisoners free: seeds, locked in the earth, require heat to trigger their fertilization; but here no natural heat will suffice.
67–9. If there pushed … jealous else: the grass is like a democracy in which each blade is ‘jealous’ of the advancement of any other; in this, as in other respects, the poem revises some of the political imagery of Sordello, e.g. the contrast between the ‘real pines’ in Taurello Salinguerra’s garden and the ‘throng / Of shrubs … a nameless common sort’ (iv 211–13, I 606). For another echo of Taurello’s garden, see By the Fire-Side 23n. (p. 460).
68. the head was chopped: this action implies human agency, yet none is visible, as in the case of the horse at l. 77; another mark of the hallucinatory strangeness of the landscape. the bents: a ‘bent’ is ‘A stalk of grass, called bent-grass’ (J.).
70–1. swarth leaves—… hope of greenness?] swarth leaves? … hope of greenness—(H proof). On the spelling of ‘baulk’ see An Epistle 190n. (p. 521).
70. dock’s harsh swarth leaves: a dock is a plant or weed (J.); cp. Sordello iv 23 (I 594): ‘Docks, quitchgrass, loathly mallows no man plants’, part of the landscape of the devastated city of Ferrara.
72. pashing: from ‘to pash’, ‘[to] strike; to crush; to push against; to dash with violence’ (J.).
73–4. as scant as hair / In leprosy: loss of hair from eyebrows, eyelashes and other parts of the body is one of the symptoms of leprosy; cp. An Epistle 58–9n. (p. 514).
76–84. The suffering horse is unusual in B. for being associated with wickedness; such images (especially of cab-horses) were common in the period, but were more often used to evoke pity and indignation. Roland’s final judgement is especially striking in its Calvinist ‘logic’, which distances him from B.’s own theology, and from his personal opposition to cruelty towards animals. Cp. How It Strikes 31–2n. (p. 440).
78. A ‘stud’ is ‘A collection of breeding horses and mares’ (J.). ‘Past service’ means that the horse, a stallion, is impotent and can no longer ‘serve’ the devil’s mares.
79. for all] for aught (1863–88).
80. colloped: derived from ‘collop’, ‘a piece of any animal’ (J.); the sense may be that the horse’s vertebrae protrude and give its neck the effect of being articulated in pieces, like meat prepared for cooking; cp. Aristophanes’ Apology (1875) 5314: ‘Collops of hare with roast spinks rare!’
90. old times] old time (1863–88).
91–7. Cuthbert … Giles: names of fictitious knights.
97–102. cp. The Patriot (p. 340), and see headnote, Criticism.
98. Frank: there may be a pun on ‘Frank’ as a proper noun, used in the Levant to designate a native of northern Europe, especially a crusading knight; B. uses this term extensively and often ironically in The Return of the Druses (1843), his play about the duplicitous actions of the ‘Knights-Hospitallers of Rhodes’ on an imaginary ‘islet of the Southern Sporades’.
99. Oxford suggests an allusion here to Macbeth I vii 46–7: ‘I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none’. honest men] honest man (1868–88).
100. faugh! an exclamation of disgust. hangman’s hands] hangman hands (1868–88). Cp. Macbeth II ii 25.
104–21. This passage may owe something to one in Lairesse’s Art of Painting (see headnote, Sources): ‘I found myself again at the lake before-mentioned; which lay near a shattered tomb, with the corpse half tumbled out. The head and arm rested on a large root of a tree lying near it; the lid was almost off, and just on the totter, and a snake, from underneath, was creeping into the tomb. A sight frightful enough’ (p. 261).
106. ‘Howlet’ is ‘the vulgar name for an owl’ (J.). Cp. Pippa Passes iv 287–90 (p. 170): ‘But at night, brother Howlet, over the woods / Toll the world to thy chantry— / Sing to the bats’ sleek sisterhoods / Full complines with gallantry’. Pippa introduces this scene by remarking: ‘Oh, what a drear, dark close to my poor day! / How could that red sun drop in that black cloud!’ (ll. 279–80).
114. bespate: not in J.; OED cites this as the only post-medieval use of this variant of ‘bespit’ (‘spat upon’), but it is more plausible to see it as a variant of ‘bespattered’, which B. has put in this form because it calls up the image of a river ‘in spate’. spumes: J. defines ‘spume’ as ‘Foam; froth’.
117–20. Roland’s image is typically dense (or confused): the willows (probably the variety known as ‘weeping willow’) are compared to women throwing themselves into the river because they have been ‘wronged’ (their leaning attitude reinforces the idea that they are ‘fallen women’); at the same time, the river is the lover who has ‘done them all the wrong’. B. may have been remembering the scene of Ophelia’s death (‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook’, Hamlet IV vii 166), and he would have known many Victorian evocations of women drowning or thinking of drowning themselves, e.g. in Thomas Hood’s famous poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ (1844), and in novels by Dickens (Oliver Twist, 1839; David Copperfield, 1850). Cp. also Cowper, The Task i 268–9: ‘We pass a gulph in which the willows dip / Their pendent boughs, stooping as if to drink’. 121–6: cp. Wordsworth, Peter Bell, 573–5: ‘He touches here—he touches there— / And now among the dead man’s hair / His sapling Peter has entwined’. Oxford also compares Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, 2466–8.
128. a better country: a biblical phrase, associated with salvation: ‘But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly’ (Hebrews xi 16). presage: ‘Prognostick; presension of futurity’ (J.); note that B. follows J. in placing the emphasis on the last syllable.
131. plash: ‘A small lake of water or puddle’ (J.).
133. cirque: a cirque is a ‘space or area for sports, with seats round for the spectators’ (J.). The association here is with the Roman ‘circus’ where gladiatorial combats were held.
134. kept them] penned them (1863–88).
135. mews: derived (somewhat obscurely) from the sense in J.: ‘A cage; an inclosure; a place where any thing is confined’ (J.).
136. brewage: ‘Mixture of various things’ (J.).
137–8. Turkish cruelty was proverbial; note their appearance as victims of Christian cruelty in Heretic’s Tragedy 50 (III 224). Cp. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873) 3651–3: ‘One galley-slave, whom curse and blow compel / To labour on, ply oar—beside his chain, / Encumbered with a corpse-companion now’. The idea of ‘partners enforced and loth’ also features in Bad Dreams II (Asolando, 1889) 21–5.
140. engine: ‘A military machine’ (J.); here an instrument of torture. David Erdman (see headnote, Sources) suggests an allusion to the silk factories mentioned in Pippa Passes (e.g. Intro 47, p. 93), a suggestion supported by the simile in l. 142. But there is also an (inverted) allusion to the ‘engine’ whose gradual, collective construction is an emblem of human progress in Sordello iii 811–35 (I 582), and whose component parts are also, as here, a mystery (‘Remark this tooth’s spring, wonder what that valve’s / Fall bodes’ [ll. 820–1]).
141. harrow: B. seems to have in mind here something like the ‘back harrow’, defined in OED as ‘a harrow of which the teeth are fixed on radiating arms, so as to revolve horizontally’.
143. Tophet’s tool: for Tophet, see headnote, Sources.
145. stubbed: ‘Of trees: Cut down to a stub; cut off near the ground; also, deprived of branches or pollarded’ (OED).
148. Makes a thing and then mars it: cp. Caliban upon Setebos 97 (p. 630), and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871) 371.
149. rood] rood—(1863–88); ‘a measure of sixteen feet and a half in long measure’ (J.).
150. Possibly influenced by a sentence in Lairesse’s Art of Painting (see headnote, Sources): ‘His whole port-folio was full of such-like painter-like trumpery; such as muddy water, decayed and broken stones, pieces of wood, barren shrubs and bushes, rough grounds, toads, snakes, &c.’ (p. 259). Cp. also PL ii 621: ‘Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death’. rubble, sand] rubble stones (H proof).
151. rankling: from rankle, ‘[to] fester; to breed corruption; to be inflamed in body or mind’ (J.).
152. where some leanness] raw where leanness (18652), a rare example of a substantive variant unique to this edition; see also below, l. 159.
154. DeVane (‘Landscape of Browning’s Childe Roland’, p. 430; see headnote, Sources) compares a description by Lairesse of oaks ‘which had been thunder-struck; the stem cleft from top to bottom’.
157. the end!] the end. (1872); the end, (H proof, 1884). It is rare to find variants unique to 1872 and even rarer to find them revised in reissues of this edition. The full stop in 1872 may be a mispr.; the comma in 1884 is more likely to be authorial, with B. noticing the error and correcting it without having another text to hand (and just possibly with a memory of the original proof reading almost thirty years previously!). See also ll. 166n., 174n.
160–1. Apollyon is the ‘angel of the bottomless pit’ in Revelation ix 11; his ‘wide wing dragon-penned’ (lit. ‘feathered like a dragon’s’, although the sense is probably ‘shaped’, since dragons are usually depicted with wings like those of a bat) probably derives, as Melchiori suggests, from his appearance in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘now the Monster was hideous to behold, he was cloathed with scales like a Fish; (and they are his pride) he had Wings like a Dragon, feet like a Bear, and out of his belly came Fire and Smoak’ (p. 128).
165. with such name to grace: ‘if I might grace with such a name …’
166. stol’n] stolen (H proof, but not H proof 2, 1863–88). The ‘—en’ contraction is rare in B. (see above, l. 30n.), as is the return to a proof reading in eds. after 1855; see l. 157.
167. me,—solve it, you!] me, tell who knew, (H proof).
168. get from them] get through them (H proof, but not H proof 2). no plainer case] no clearer case (1863–88).
174. the den!] the den (1872); the den. (1884). 1872 is clearly misprinted (contrast the less obvious case in l. 157); it seems likely that B. made the correction without recourse to another text, and he did not retain it because the next printing, 1888, would not have been set from 1884, a volume of selections, but from the Poetical Works of 1868 or one of its reissues. See also l. 177.
177. Crouched] Couched (1884). Variants unique to 1884 are even rarer than ones unique to 1872; this may be a mispr., although it makes sense and the proximity of the line to l. 174, in which B. corrected an obvious mispr. in 1872, makes it more likely that his eye fell on this line and that he introduced a variant which he did not recall, or about which he changed his mind, when he read proof for the next appearance of the poem, in 1888 (the text of which would not, of course, have been set from a volume of selections: see l. 174n.). See also next note.
177–8. in fight— / While] in fight; / While (1863–88, except 1884, which has ‘in fight, / While,’. The occurrence of these variants in punctuation unique to 1884 strengthens the argument that ‘Couched’ in l. 177 is authorial.
179. Fool, to be dozing] Fool, to be caught blind (H proof, but not H proof 2); Dotard, a-dozing (1865–88). B. may have noticed the phrase ‘fool’s heart’ only 3 lines later. nonce: not in J. in this sense; only in the phrase ‘for the nonce’, meaning ‘for the purpose’.
180.] With my life spent in training for the sight! (H proof).
181–4. What in the midst … the whole world: for possible sources for the description of the tower, and other such structures in B., see headnote.
182. blind as the fool’s heart: cp. Psalms xiv 1: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ ‘Blind’ in the architectural sense means ‘windowless’, but also carries biblical connotations of spiritual darkness in both OT and NT; note esp. Matthew xxiii 16–17: ‘Woe unto you, ye blind guides … Ye fools and blind’. 184. The tempest’s mocking elf: an elf is ‘A wandering spirit, supposed to be seen in wild unfrequented places; a fairy’ or ‘a devil’ (J.). There may be an echo of Ariel in The Tempest: he creates (at Prospero’s bidding) the false ‘effects’ of the storm which opens the play, and can be seen as a ‘mocking elf’ in his relation to other characters such as Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo. B. may also recall the phrase ‘deceiving elf’ from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (l. 74).
186. when the timbers start: i.e. when the ship has already collided with the ‘unseen shelf ’. Cp. James Lee 48–53 (p. 670): ‘Did a woman ever—would I knew!— / Watch the man / With whom began / Love’s voyage full-sail,—(now, gnash your teeth!) / When planks start, open hell beneath / Unawares?’ Oxford suggests a possible indebtedness to George Anson’s A Voyage round the World (1748), a copy of which was in B.’s library (Collections, A0067): ‘a but-end or plank might start, and we might go down immediately’ (III ii 317).
192. heft: ‘Handle’ (J.).
195. Cp. the dying Aprile’s vision, at the end of bk. ii of Paracelsus, of the ‘phantoms [and] powers’ whom he recognizes as the spirits of his fellow-poets (ll. 594–9, I 188); see also How It Strikes 99–103 (p. 444). Cp. also (noting ‘I knew them all’ in l. 202) EBB.’s A Vision of Poets (1844), which B. greatly admired: ‘The poet knew them … these were poets true, / Who died for Beauty as martyrs do / For truth’ (ll. 286, 289–91). These are all positive images of precursors; again, Childe Roland suggests a nightmarish inversion.
196. a one] an one (1856). Verbal variants unique to the first American ed. are extremely rare; this one is probably, though not certainly, a misprint.
202–4. Turner compares Malory, Morte D’Arthur: ‘And also there was fast by a sycamore tree, and there hung an horn, the greatest that ever they saw … and this Knight of the Red Laundes had hanged it up there, that if there came any errant-knight, he must blow that horn, and then he will make him ready and come to him to do battle.’
203. Dauntless: in the ‘Romance of Child Rowland’ (see headnote, Sources), Rowland is said to be ‘undaunted’ by the Elf-king’s challenge. slug-horn: B. follows Chatterton in using this word incorrectly to mean a trumpet of some kind: ‘Some caught a slug-horn, and an onset wound, / King Harold heard the charge, and wondered at the sound’ (The Battle of Hastings ii 99–100). For the etymology of this word see W. Maddan, Poetry Review ii (1913) 308: ‘The word is a poor attempt to represent two Gaelic words: sluagh, a host or army, and gairm, a call or outcry … Slogan is also a softened equivalent and better known.’