Reading 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' by Robert Browning

Part One

In my first term reading English Literature at university, we studied the Victorians. Busy as I was making friends, falling in love and learning how to do my own laundry, I struggled to keep up with the reading list of weighty novels, but I did manage to write an essay on Robert Browning’s poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ (1852), and it is one of those pieces of writing that – looking back now – I realise has haunted my work ever since. For example, it was through Robert Browning I discovered the power of the dramatic monologue, or persona poem – he is considered an expert at the form (if you haven’t read ‘My Last Duchess’ do yourself a favour and read it now).

I have always been a frustrated actress, and there is something about the intimacy and urgency of the first-person poetry that I’m very attracted to. I love the slipperiness of persona poems, the potential of that ‘I’, and have since translated Ovid’s Heroines, the first book of dramatic monologues.

And then it’s set in a courtly, Arthurian world, and love I myth. And there are faeries and fairytales buried in there somewhere too, and ballads. The poem’s dark depiction of a supernatural waste-land is evident both in my own ballad ‘The Lure’ and in the scenes set in in the kingdom of Carbonek in my novel The Untameables…

Anyway, reading ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning with you last summer, addressed by Elizabeth to Robert - her lover and then husband - sent me back to the poem. And I recently read the novel Elidor by Alan Garner, which draws on the same folklore and features a boy called Roland, so it has felt like the universe is nudging me. It’s only 34 verses long, so will make for a shortish readalong, whilst I unpick some of those threads and images that have been living in my head for thirty years. If you want to read the poem in its entirety before we start, it’s also here.

Okay, so let’s begin with the title. ‘Childe’ sets us in the courtly world – a ‘Childe’ is the eldest son of a nobleman who has not yet attained knighthood. So he is almost a knight, but not quite – hoping perhaps to prove himself on this quest. The ‘dark tower’ is an interesting symbol too – knights often rescue princesses from towers. But they are also tall in order to survey the landscape. The title puts me, the reader, in the position of the mysterious inhabitant of the tower, watching Childe Roland approach. Hopefully? Or with the intent to destroy him, like a spider luring a fly into its web?

It’s a generous title in many ways: letting us know the name of our protagonist and that they will be traversing a kind of mythical Britain. But why is he going to the dark tower? What is the aim? The fact this is withheld from us both intrigues and disturbs – the purpose of this Arthurian quest narrative is unclear from the start.

I am and was a huge Shakespeare fan-girl, so would have also been drawn to the fact the title ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ is a quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Gloucester’s son Edgar is pretending to be mad by talking nonsense, posing as Tom o’ Bedlam, when he utters these lines in act 3, scene 4:

Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
His word was still ‘Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British Man’.

These is something very uneasy about the way Browning is taking faked gibberish literally. And those who know this full allusion might also think both of fairytales and of nationalist violence.

(Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Thomas Moran, 1859)

Next, let’s look where in the story we begin:

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
(See Edgar's song in "Lear.")

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
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 who might find him posted there,
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,
    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 might be.

So we begin in medias res. Childe Roland is on the road, and he’s asking an elderly man the way. His first thought on meeting this person – and his first remark to us – is ‘he lied in every word’. Our young wannabe-knight is already becoming bitter and cynical. His belief in his quest is already curdling. How long has the speaker been on the ‘dusty thoroughfare’ for? We do not know for sure, but he seems not naïve, but battle-weary. The elderly man’s bad eye and wrinkled mouth (‘scored’ at the edge) are interpreted as signs of malevolence. His very existence – his presence in the landscape with his staff – is read as being a trap ‘set’ by some cruel power who has ‘posted’ him there. The speaker feverishly imagines a ‘skull-like laugh’ once he has followed the elderly man’s instructions. Personally, as a reader, my alarm bells are already going off – is the speaker himself a kind of ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’, already half-mad from his travels, projecting paranoid fantasies onto the landscape?

But in many ways, he is simply blaming the messenger. It becomes increasingly apparent that the old man’s directions are sending him into an ‘ominous tract’ of land that makes him very afraid. And it is not the old man’s fault at all – ‘all agree’ this is where the Dark Tower is located. Childe Roland’s loathing is self-loathing. He cannot believe he is going through with this quest. This journey towards the dark tower seems in some ways to be a masculine right of passage. In order to earn his spurs – to prove himself a worthy knight – he is going through these motions despite all his better instincts. ‘Acquiescingly’, as the next line has it. There is a tension here – in order to become a man and a hero, the speaker has to be subservient to the patriarchy and its demands (embodied in this ‘hoary’, twisted figure). The dark tower is surely, in this reading, a massive phallic symbol.

Still, at least the instructions imply a possible ‘end’ point to this quest. Lack of aim or purpose will be the greatest horror in this poem. Let’s continue:

4.
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.

Here we are given the context then. This knight is still a ‘childe’ after wandering the whole world over many years. The promised land of adulthood and maturity – that glittering prize – has never materialised. If this is a coming-of-age poem, it is about a coming-of-age endlessly forestalled. Roland’s hope itself is already a ‘ghost’. We have joined the quest – and the story – not at the beginning, but painfully late.

And isn’t hope painful? Browning seems to understand this. The speaker’s hope can no longer ‘cope’ with the thought of success and the ‘obstreperous’ joy it would bring. Obstreperous as in noisy, stubborn, defiant, hard to handle… We all surely understand this feeling: that it feels much easier and less painful not to hope, but to be prepared for disappointment.

His heart gives a ‘spring’ at the thought of ‘failure’, which would at least be an end to it.

And is there something of the Freudian death drive here too? To fail on such a quest surely means to die. There is something suicidal in his attraction to the idea of failure – to reach the ‘dark tower’ on some level means to reach death. Which is, as it happens, a word in his next line:

5.
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,
    "And the blow fall'n no grieving can amend")
 
6.
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,—
And still the man hears all, and only craves
    He may not shame such tender love and stay.

These verses are very upsetting – at first the speaker almost seems to be spinning himself a fantasy, imagining dying at home amongst his friends and being able to say his final words and put his house in order. But then the friends begin to discuss whether there is room for him in the graveyard, and what day they’d like his funeral to be on in order to suit their calendar, and what banners should be displayed at the funeral to give it suitable pomp, etc. And the dying man ‘only craves / He may not shame such tender love and stay’. That is: he begins to want to die, so as not to embarrass them and himself. I find that ‘tender’ particularly hard to read, as they are not being tender so much as thoughtless. The dying man is taking all the shame upon himself. Like this man, our speaker - Roland - has begun to desire death, preferring it to the humiliation of failure beneath the male gaze.

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,
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.

This is another important verse for our narrative. Roland is not the first man to attempt to reach the dark tower. In fact, there have been many. And they have all failed (died). It explains his reluctance – and also suggests that if he did succeed he would be haunted by survivors’ guilt. In the Victorian times, they would surely have thought of young soldiers sent to heroic, pointless deaths by their (older) superiors – the famous, doomed Charge of the Light Brigade happened just two years later in 1854 – with the ‘Band’ here sounding something like a regiment (remember that smell of the ‘blood of a British Man’ in the Shakespeare quote?') Our speaker’s question to himself is whether he is ‘fit’ to ‘fail as they’ – that is to die a hero’s death, rather than run away in cowardice at this final test.

In the end he makes his decision to bow to masculine peer pressure, and follows the elderly man’s directions:

8.
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.

The setting here is like something in a horror film, not a courtly fantasy – the ominous silence, the dreary day, the bleak plain stretching ahead. Is it the old man or the sun who give ‘one grim / red leer’? They seem to have blurred. Again there is that sense of a malevolent, personified landscape, that has ‘caught’ him – of some larger plan or game being enacted.

If it feels like a nightmare, perhaps in part it’s because it is – Browning claimed that ‘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 now. But I am very fond of it’.

We will leave Childe Roland there for now, on the path he has chosen, about to wander deep into Robert Browning’s subconscious… Do let me know if you remember this poem too, and what it means to you.