Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855).

I've been following a breadcrumb trail for a while now.  I guess you could say that's what I've been trying to do, anyway.  For the past month of two I've been not so much obsessed, as curious about something to do with Stephen King's Dark Tower series of books.  I'm not sure if it's correct to say I'm interested in figuring them all out.  This seems less of a question about "What does it all mean"?  Nor is it a matter of making the usual judgment call on the overall quality of the books as a whole.  Besides which, I've already done the latter in a myriad number of ways, and all of it amounts to the same thing.  There might have been some kind of Inspiration going on in the basement level of the writer's mind when he got the idea of taking Sergio Leone's Man with No Name and placing him in a Gonzo Western version of J.R.R. Tolkien's landscape.  However, even if that's the case, then the final results speak less of Inspired revery, and more of the quiet desperation of an otherwise talented mind grasping at whatever secondhand glimpses of the original Creative Idea he can rescue from the murk of his inner workshop.  Because of this, the final result remains one long slog of invention as opposed to anything approaching Inspiration.  When a writer like King is Inspired, you'll know it when you read it.  It's what allows imaginary small towns like Salem's Lot or Derry, Maine to feel like real, lived in places.  He's able to bring these pictures in his head to such vibrant life that it's now reached a point where Derry has become a character in it's own right.  Why else do you suppose Hollywood of all places would be trying to make a TV series out of it, otherwise?

That's a good example of King at his Inspired best.  With the Tower books, you're seeing the author caught in a desperate struggle to work the story fossil out the ground, and it's difficult to tell if the darn thing is too deep in the ground excavate, or there's even anything there at all, and the author has spent all this time doing no more than mining for the mental equivalent of Fool's Gold.  In other words, the story of the Last Gunslinger in a World that has Moved On never manages to be one of Kings best.  The funny thing is how they're also kind of fascinating to think about.  I don't mean they're interesting in terms of overall plot, but rather of the scattered hints of themes, ideas, and other Inspirations that went into the composition of the Gunslinger's patchwork secondary world.  If I had to point to where this interest came from, then a lot of the credit their probably has to go to a scholar named Robin Furth, and the contents of essay she wrote once upon a by for The Complete Dark Tower Concordance.  That essay, Roland, the Quest, and the Tower, seems to have contained just enough thematic richness to it to act as a lure for any online nobody with an interest in hunting down bits and pieces of forgotten and obscure literary esoterica.  A lot of Furth's thoughts on the Tower seemed interesting to me.  I thought I recognized some of her words as being reflections of statements King himself had made elsewhere.

Specifically, it was phrases like "As Above, So Below" that recalled to memory several smatterings of commentary that King had made in Danse Macabre about how "Modem horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when we get right down to it (422)".  It's the kind of statement that has no choice except to come off as obtuse to most folks in the audience, unless you happen to be a self-made fan of Renaissance era literature.  In which case statements such as those will tend to activate some kind of internal literary allusion detecting antenna.  It's the same reaction that knowledgeable fans used to get from any halfway decent episode of The Simpsons, back in the day.  The only difference is a mind attuned to references and words drawn from the Age of Shakespeare.  I can't say that I ever made a deliberate choice to end up like this.  It's just the way that King and other writers like him were able to mold me.  Who knew?  In any case, it was statements like the one above from non-fiction books like Macabre, coupled with the author's use of antiquarian terms like Microcosm and Macrocosm, and the ability to realize that these two words helped the ending of the novel version of It to make a greater deal of sense that got me interested in learning more about the internal storehouse that King draws upon for his own artistry.

So I decided to see if it was possible to discern any pattern to the bric-a-brac in the King's workshop, and down the rabbit hole I more or less went.  If of all of that backstory proves anything, then I guess the lesson is...it pays to grow up as a fan of the Horror genre?  I don't know, you're guess is as good as mine.  Anyway, I went source hunting for, not the key or heart of King's Imagination, let's be clear about that.  I think his general essence as a writer is basically that of the Romantics at its core.  He's one of the lucky few who was just born with a natural talent for tapping into Jung's Collective Unconscious and (nine times out of ten) bringing one of them up to the surface, and getting a pretty good read out of it, more often than not.  Everything else is just so much bells and whistles, really.  His maxim has always been "The Book is the Boss", and it's something he appears to have spent his entire life living up to.  It's just that the writer's notion of Horror as a form of Renaissance literature for the modern age is yet another idea that he keeps returning to, though he never makes any big deal out it.  It's just another part of the general ingredients that are always "on the table", in a manner of speaking.  If the narrative he's working on has a use for such notions, into the Cauldron of Story they go.  If not, neither harm nor foul.  It really does all seem to be just part of another day at the office so far as Steve King is concerned.

What makes the Tower books fascinating to think about (as opposed to reading) is that the entire series has a way of acting as an accidental manifestation of the contents of King's inner storehouse, both in terms of his Inspirations, and his thoughts about the nature of writing.  So, I guess that might explain why I'm sometimes drawn back to examining these particular sets of books.  The Dark Tower books (along with their sister novel The Stand) are able to do double duty as the closest thing to a palimpsest or mappa mundi of King's creativity and thinking.  It's like stumbling upon a treasure chest full of hidden of sources that, when taken together, create an outline of King's artistry.  What I'm interested in for the purposes of this article is to go back to the major literary source that author has cited as his main Inspiration for starting the whole peculiar mess.  He says he got it from a poem.  "The idea of writing this dark fantasy series came from...Robert Browning’s “Child [sic] Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” King quickly warms to his story: “Browning never says what that tower is, but it’s based on an even older tradition about Childe Roland that’s lost in antiquity. Nobody knows who wrote it, and nobody knows what the Dark Tower is.  “So I started off wondering: What is this tower? What does it mean? And I decided that everybody keeps a Dark Tower in their heart that they want to find.  “They know it’s destructive and it will probably mean the end of them, but there’s that urge to make it your own or to destroy it, one or the other. So I thought: Maybe it’s different things to different people, and as I write along I’ll find out what it is to Roland. And I found that out, but I’m not going to tell you (web)".

It's King's mentioning of what he terms "The Tradition of Roland" lost to antiquity that jumps out a me the most.  I suppose the reason why is because it telegraphs that it wasn't just the experience of reading Robert Browning's poetical obscurus, but also the knowledge that the poem in itself was a pointer to some long forgotten volumes of quaint and curious lore that seems to have acted as the extra bit of creative enticement to see what he could do with the whole thing.  When it comes to the Tradition that King mentions in passing, I think of all the critics I've read, it is Michele Baum who has done the most to provide us the closest summary of what that Tradition is, and how it has been use in an artistic sense down through the years.  "...Stephen King describes how Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” was  his inspiration for Roland the Gunslinger. But Browning’s knight also had his predecessors, such as Orlando in the sixteenth century Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, or Charlemagne’s knight in the eleventh century Song of Roland. The genre and heroic conventions change across these four texts but despite the different contexts, we can see similarities in the construction of the hero (66-67)".

I've devoted an article a piece on this site to at least one of the texts that Braun talks about in the pages of Patrick McAleer's Stephen King's Modern Macabre, and one other that seems to have escaped everyone else's radar.  In doing so, I've done no more than to satisfy my own curiosity about where this lifelong oddity in King's career might have come from.  At last, I think, I've reached the clearing at the end of this particular path.  I'm going to devote this review to studying where it all started for some then unknown student at the University of Maine in Orono.  It's time to take a look at Robert Browning's Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and see what it can tells us as King's main Inspiration.

The Story.

A Poet and a Poem, Both Alike in Obscurity.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the only reason anyone knows anything about this guy is thanks to the efforts of Stephen King.  If the author of Salem's Lot hadn't been assigned this one obscure poem to read back in his college student days, then I'd doubt I'd be writing these words now.  It's an open question in my mind as to whether any of us would know so much as a single thing about a poet named Robert Browning.  The same could pretty much be said about the one poem that has made him famous all the way up to the 21st century.  Out of all the efforts composed in his own lifetime, the poem that anyone is capable of remembering anymore is the one about this guy named Roland as he makes his way to towards a Dark Tower.  The punchline there is that such a barebones description would still make most people think you're talking about the King books.  Thanks to the publication of The Gunslinger all the way back in 1981, Browning's popular reputation (what little there even is of it) is now irrevocably tied with that of the fiction of Stephen King.  It's one of those now and forever deals by this point, and it would be interesting to hear the poet's take on all of this.  At the very least you can say he was remembered for something.  Though I can also understand any reading this who would claim that all it amounts to is just so much cold comfort for change.

Well, whatever the case, this is where things stand now.  Once upon a time there was a poet.  This man was well regarded in his own day for the wide variety of themes and subject matter, both obscure and famous, that he wrote about for the masses, and all of it treated in what many agreed was one of the best poetical techniques of the time.  For a while, he was lauded with a reputation as high as that of Alfred Lord Tennyson.  So, as a result, no one knows about Tennyson all that much now, except for those who dwell in the Ivory Tower.  While Browning is lucky to be allowed to trail along in the shadow of America's Boogeyman.  That's when anyone can even remember he's there at all, of course.  It's the situation this review has had to start with, for better or worse.  Though maybe that's no real challenge, or even different from the usual run of things here.  The Scriblerus Club is (at least in part) all about rummaging through the forgotten attics and out of the way corners for various quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore and their authors.  The goal is to dust off a few of the names of these unremembered artists, and see if they can hold up to being given their day in the spotlight.  Robert Browning, and what has now become his most famous poem, are no different in that regard.

What has turned out to be interesting is the results I'm left with while studying up for this article, and the approach it's forced me to take when it comes to talking about Browning and his ironic poetic legacy.  The best way I can describe it is to say that we're dealing with a guy who's sort of managed to turn himself into an obscurity even within the confines of that other, Ivory Tower.  There's been just a handful of anything like a complete and thorough critical excavation of Browning and his work, and a lot of what I found is either unconvincing or incomplete for the most part.  The punchline is how a lot of that could be chalked to the poet's own fault.  Browning seems to have been one of those writers who felt at home in a certain level of poetic obscurity.  What I mean is that even in his most legible works, the poet relied on at least two known methods that might be said to work against him.  The first was this constant use of framing each of his major poems as a form of poetic monologue.  This is something that can be seen with clarity in Childe Roland, and its a feature that carries over into his other efforts.  If Browning is to be catalogued the great, forgotten master of Verse Narratives, then his approach to storytelling through rhyme is what makes him so unique.  It's all told in the first-person singular.

Almost every poem that Browning wrote was told through a subject, personal lens.  And what could frustrating about this approach was that all of the character's whose eyes the poet looked out of were, not so much insular to a fault, but rather so much a product of an environment that they already knew so much about that they tend to take it as a given that the reader should already understand the full import of what they are saying.  This goes double for all those moments when its implied the speaker is hinting at some hidden meaning in the monologue which he, she, or any of the other characters around them are perfectly aware of, but which remain unspoken secrets to the vast majority of the audience.  I'll have to admit that's maybe not the best way to compose your narrative setup, even if there's genuine talent at work there .  I think I remember King saying somewhere that all writing is an act of consensual voyeurism.  That books are like the keyholes in a door the author is inviting the reader to peep through, and observe the comings and goings of the characters at the heart of any given narrative, and the events that happen to them, whether mundane or fantastic.  The trick is that the only reason any of that works is because the author has to give as full a picture of the story as possible, otherwise the narrative won't be able to work its proper effects, and the audience feels cheated as a natural enough result.

All good storytelling, in other words, involves telling as much of the whole situation as necessary in order for the reader to get a good grasp on what they're reading or watching.  It doesn't have to be encyclopedic, by any means.  Not every story has to have the depth, heft, and nomenclature of Middle Earth.  The writer, whether a poet or novelist, just has to make sure that all the basic gist of the narrative is explained in as much detail as will allows his or her audience to follow along, and not be left wondering what the hell they just read or saw?  It's perhaps the most fundamental rule of Basic Creative Writing 101.  In order to tell any story well, the writer has to explain as much of all of it as they can.  Browning's poetry makes for an interesting locale off the beaten path, in that sense.  If it's true to label him as a narrative storyteller, then his way of going about it is more or less always out of left field.  He often begins in the middle of things, rather than at any proper "This is What Happened" start.  His lead narrators are so caught up in their situations that it's almost as if the author forgot that its the purpose of fictional characters to be expositional about their natures and circumstances in a way that never happens in real life.  Since his poems don't spend all that much time on narrative exposition, his efforts can come off sounding more like the fragments of unfinished novels rather than proper narratives told in verse.

At least this is the effect that Browning's writings can suggest for himself if he isn't too careful.  For all we know, maybe there's truth in that statement.  Maybe the poet had the mind of a novelist, minus the ability to work with prose in its proper narrative formatting.  In which case, part of the explanation for the poet's obscurity might lie somewhere in the way his mental faculties operated.  It might be interesting to speculate, for instance, whether this might be a sign that Browning was one of those guys who live their entire lives somewhere on the Spectrum, albeit forever undiagnosed.  However, this line of thought is no different from all of the other theories I've seen tossed out around about him.  At least it's some effort to explain the poet's notorious insularity.  It would make a certain amount of sense if his supposed neurodivergence was influencing his methods of composition.  As many autistics tend to be insular and gnomic (however unintentional) in their conversation and thinking.  Still, all this remains a theory, at best.  What's not is the second aspect that makes Browning's poetry such a minefield to navigate.  The obscurity extends not just to poetic technique, but also into the realm of subject matter.

It's very much as British literary critic G.K. Chesterton sums it up when discussing the success of one of Browning's first critical triumphs, that being a poem entitled Paracelsus.  "The poem shows an enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years afterwards he wrote Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day, the last poem published in  his lifetime; and any reader of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in their day as that they are of no importance in ours.

"The same eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote Paracelsus and Sordello. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about Socrates or Cæsar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or Muhammed. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some extraordinary persons called Abbot Vogler and Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme pf morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire and pity, the a priori scientist of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His supreme typo of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist. but the alchemist (23-4)".

As Chesterton further points out, "It is difficult to imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view (24)".  Still, this was Browning's lifelong creative choice, both in terms of method and content.  From the modern point of view, it's like being introduced to an artist who doesn't want to be famous.  Perhaps a better way to phrase it is to consider this.  Browning's writings could very well have been a version of what might have happened to J.R.R. Tolkien if no one ever gave him the encouragement to take his initial Elvish scribblings, and see if he could make a career out of them.  Imagine all of Middle Earth reduced to a handful of verse fragments whose insularity is so compact as to be perhaps illegible to all except the author, and if there's still a chance that some of them were written so long ago, then he might dismiss them as juvenile jottings.  There's a bit of cheat involved in a thought experiment like that, of course.  The fact that people can now make whole encyclopedias of Tolkien's writings is one of the main reasons such a "What If" scenario is even possible in the first place.  It's also what makes the idea horrifying to contemplate.  At the same time, Tolkien serves as a pretty good foil to the approach Browning takes in his fiction.  All of which presents what is perhaps one of the most surprising sort of challenges I've ever run across.

If one of the main goals of this website is to give obscure names another chance at fame, then what's to be done about an author who somehow seems to go out of his way to escape notice?  To be fair, it's not the same as saying that Browning is a total obscurity, or that he ever shunned the public stage.  We're not talking about folks like J.D. Salinger, here.  It's just every creative choice the poet ever made turned out to be the kind that would inevitably condemn his legacy to a form of cultural neglect.  In Robert Browning, we see the portrait of the artist as a self-made obscurity.  Despite what critic Barbara Melchiori refers to as Browning's Poetry of Reticence, it is still possible to say a few things about the poet and his most famous poem.  The somewhat fitting second punchline catch there is that I've had to utilize the insights of at least two other critical sources to do it.  Now this is nothing out of the ordinary.  In fact, it's kind of the standard operating procedure for any good criticism.  The irony is that when I try to apply this technique to Browning, no one or two sources I've consulted can ever entirely reach a consensus with this author.  By making himself in to accidental obscurity, Browning has allowed both his life and work to become different things to different people.  This is an outcome that applies just as much to the work of Stephen King, as it does the handful of scholars who have devoted their time to the poet and his work.  As a result, I've kind of had to pick and choose the best possible sources to go on.

It means that everything I'm about to say next will be drawing from the two critical studies that I've found to be the closest to anything like a reliable set of guidelines.  One of them has already been been utilized with Chesterton's Critical Study of Browning.  The second resource for this article has turned out to be the more interesting of the two.  It's title is called The Darkling Plain, by John Heath-Stubbs, and its was published way back in 1950.  A basic summary of this now overlooked text is provided by its subtitle: A Study of the Later Fortunes of Romanticism in English Poetry from George Darley to W.B. Yeats.  Browning is not the sole interest of Stubbs' book, yet a case can be made that he ends up as one of the study's central figures.  It's in between the dichotomies established by these two critical essays that I'll have to make my own judgment call on Browning and Childe Roland.  Each critic presents a positive and negative view of the poet and his achievements, and what I say here will have to chart its own course between these two vantage points.  With that in mind, the best place to start is with the life of the author.  The first point goes to Chesterton for being able to provide good background info:

"Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and grandfather had been clerks in the "Bank of England, and his whole family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educates middle class-the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity...It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate forebears, who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert Browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent him in a bill for the cost of his education.

"About the same time he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by joining a dissenting He was, in short, a very typical example of the serious middle-class man of the 'Wilberforce period, a man to whom duty was all in all, and who would revolutionize an empire or a continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the seventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century, he had upon the surface all tastes and graces of a man of culture. Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole was absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century. He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceased adjuring him to model himself upon Pope.  He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order to protest against black slavery...

"The ideals of the men of that period appear to us very un attractive; to them duty was a kind of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive fancies.  We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility. Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of  William Wiedemann, a German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training - a very strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a very real significance to those who realize the peculiar condition of Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear to look at places where she had walked.

"Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education ; it took place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediaeval chronicles. If we test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; that he was in fact, if anything, over educated. In a spirited poem he has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of knowledge —knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the Provencal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, taught to regard himself as clever.

"In the atmosphere in which he lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world...As a young man he attended classes at University beyond this there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary area (10-14)".  We'll have reason to return to Chesterton's words in a minute.  For now, it's enough to say that even as a bare description, his brief bio of the early life of the poet seems to get the job done.  It also leaves us with the kind of artist portrait that I'm not sure many folks even know what to do with nowadays.  The idea that learning and reading should be one of those processes whose goal is to build up the mind of a what is perhaps best referred as a Liberal Humanist is one that I'm not sure anyone is aware of anymore.

It's not that people don't believe, or no longer subscribe to the idea.  It's more that I can't even count on the fingers of one hand so much as a single school student or teacher who even knows that what happened with Browning Jr. is something that's even possible with the idea of education.  It's what some folks believed back in the poet's day, at any rate.  For whatever it's worth, this seems to have been how the writer experienced the world.  The question is does any of that help to explain the insular nature of his poetry?  It might be able to on at least one level.  The fact that Browning received what we'd now call a mostly Home School education as a child might account for his interest in esoteric subjects that are so far off the beaten path.  If his pedagogic upbringing came from the content of, say, a voluminous family library, then it may explain why the portrait Chesterton paints of the artist sounds like someone whose knowledge all runs through the same medieval and folkloric history as that possessed by someone like Tolkien.  The fact that the poet shows such a fascination with the overlooked corners of history also seems to be a pointer to the way he was taught by his parents, and maybe even private tutors.  It helps explain why the subjects of his poetry make up one long catalogue of overlooked and forgotten names, such as Paracelsus, or Ben Ezra.  These are the subjects he learned as a young boy.

At the same time, Chesterton's commentary also perhaps gives us a clue as to why Browning's poems are the way they are.  He says that Browning grew up with the sense that his "schooling" (for a very given amount of what that term means in either its Victorian or Modern senses) was the same that other children of his age bracket and demographic received.  However, if most of his elementary years (in American terms) was spent at home, and most of his lessons came from the family library, then there's no real useful comparison to be made between the normal lesson plan of a Victorian Middle Class child, and the kind of pedagogy that the young Rob Browning was taught growing up.  Such an a "Lesson Plan" can result in just the sort of results that Chesterton writes about.  The fact of the matter is that despite the best positive spin that the creator of Father Brown might put on it, Browning really was one of the least educated authors growing up in the Age of Dickens.  It's something that shows in both his poetry, and his composition.  In that respect, maybe some of Browning's critics are correct when they speak of a certain level of artistic primitivism in his writings.  Once you factor in the poems as the clear and demonstratable results of an early form of Home Schooling, then everything kind of falls into place.  Chesterton said Browning never distinguished between his education and that of others.

Well, if that's the case, then it looks like we've got proof of it with his poetry.  This is not the result I came in expecting to find.  It's just one of those on-the-fly results that can sometimes be unearthed with a bit of due diligence.  It means that with a writer like Browning, what we've got on our hands is something like the literary equivalent of Grandma Moses.  We're dealing with an artist who is capable of doling out what can be called a legitimate artistic product.  However, the final product must always seen as the results of an unschooled talent.  Something that was born and bred without much in the way of formal aid, and so the results will always have this raw, almost uncultured sounding quality to them.  It explains, for instance, the skilled simplicity of the paintings done by Moses, or the way that Browning's poems bear this unique, fragmented quality; like they're stories made up of passing conversations that are more overheard, than told outright.  All of it is the result of never fitting in to a proper academic environment, the way that later authors like Tolkien or King did, and having to rely on the contents of his father's book collection to find out about whatever we mean when we speak of real life.  It's the strangest setup for an artistic career I've ever seen, and the amazing thing is that Browning was able to succeed at it, for a time, at least, anyway.  That just leaves the quality of Childe Roland to be discerned.

The Sources of Browning's Poem.  

There's a moment in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass when his child protagonist, Alice, has just finished reading from a book of poems.  When she's done, she puts the book down, and has the following train of thought about it.  “It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate (24)".  I think Carroll might come the closest to summing up most audience's reaction to Browning's Dark Tower poem.  It all sounds strange as hell, yet somewhat beguiling.  There's a plot going on of some kind, yet it's details aren't all that legible.  It's clear enough that somebody is journeying somewhere, towards what appears to be at least some purpose, however obscure.  Yet it's difficult to tell who this person is, where they are, or where they're going.  It's also difficult to tell just what's so important about this Tower that the protagonist is trying to reach.  At the same time, there is this Gothic form of enchantment about the whole thing.

At least I wouldn't be surprised if that's how most readers would react to a work like this.  (Always assuming, of course, that curiosity gets the better them, and they decide to look and see about the Inspiration for the Tower saga on their own).  If I'm being honest, I don't see how we have much choice in the way of options to how we react to older stories that don't quite fit into out current narrative expectations.  The problem with being a fan of the Popular Genres (i.e. Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy) in this age is that all the tropes that we tend to associate with the stories we like have somehow been allowed to become commodified to a point where there's no longer any room for the Imagination to stretch its legs like it used to.  If a narrative comes along that doesn't fit the current limited set of molds, then it's like, does it even have a right to exist?  I'm not talking about what the studios have been up to lately, I mean the kind of novels and films that were pushing boundaries back during the New Wave Movement in Sci-Fi and Fantasy back during the 1960s, when writers like Peter S. Beagle and Harlan Ellison were busy making names for themselves.  We don't see much of that kind of groundbreaking anymore.  So without that impetus to keep our audience expectations on the alert for new creative innovations, it's like the horizons of our story intake has dwindled to this very peculiar sort of point.

We appear to have grown so used to such a limited supply of creativity from our current crop of new entertainers that at this point even seeing an old trope used well in a familiar narrative setup would probably come off sounding and looking like this strange species of exotic bird.  There's just something about all that which strikes me as a sorry frame of mind to be in.  It's a sign that we've grown a bit too comfortable with a lack of creativity.  In a mental zeitgeist such as this, such an experimental and avant-garde work like Childe Roland probably wouldn't be able to find a place for itself.  To sound like a broken record, this makes for a less than ideal situation from which to judge the merits of a poem like this.  If anyone is curious enough to want a clearer picture of what's going on in Browning's weirding verse narrative, then we're going to have to do an extra bit of excavation in order to get a clear grasp of the story fossil.  Will start with the basic outline.  For those who couldn't quite piece together the narrative, the poem concerns a knightly figure on a quest of some kind.  The exact nature of our protagonists journey is never entirely clear, yet it has something to do with looking for, and finding the location of the ominous Dark Tower of the title.  Much like with the nature of the knight's quest, we never quite seem to learn the nature or importance of this gothic sounding edifice.  These are all plot points that the narrative leaves vague, and perhaps even entirely up to good old reader interpretations. 

It's a point I'll get back to in a minute.  For now it's enough to restate the facts.  Browning's poem presents the reader with the clear setup of a Quest narrative.  However it's details remain vague except for a few, small handouts of information.  We know, for instance, that we are on this journey with a strange sounding, solitary wanderer.  One almost has to call him a Ulysses figure.  He speaks of "my whole world-wide wandering" and "my search drawn out through the years".  It's one of the few pieces of concrete detail that we ever learns about the main character.  In doing so, however, the result makes him sound like a Type.  Like he's this classic, searching drifter straight out of the realms of the poetry of the Romantic Movement.  Perhaps that's who he's meant to be.  He could almost be the same figure who has his back forever turned to us in the famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich.  That portrait became something of the unofficial mascot for the Romantics, and the mysterious hero of Browning's poem could fit the bill of belonging to just such a character type.  Beyond these few vague clues, however, there's almost nothing else to go on.  We don't even technically find out the main character's name until the very last line of the poem.  Though we should be able to guess he's the story's narrator based on just a simple reading of the title.  The rest, however, is left as little more than a series of hints.  A breadcrumb trail of clues, allusions, and vague suggestions beckoning the curious to explore further.

True to its Romantic roots, Browning's poem almost seems to be a poetical invocation of the same one Tolkien made once in an old essay of his.  What the poet has presented us with is in some sense more than just a mere narrative.  It functions almost as a living portrait.  One of those picture frames that Lewis Carroll liked to write about, where what seems like an ordinary household object is really a portal or magic casement opening onto some long forgotten, yet familiar landscape.  The setting that Browning presents us with is, as the Scribe of Middle Earth tells it, a realm or land that is "wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveler who would report them (27)".  Tolkien is also quick to remind of the drawbacks to such other places, stating how " in it are pit falls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold".  "And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost (ibid)".  It's Browning's ability to weave this spell of the Uncanny Sublime through his gnomic use of words that is the hallmark of Roland's journey

It's the key element that counts for its overall success, and what has probably kept the poet's name alive.  Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came seems to be one of those half-told tales that people are always stumbling upon by accident, whether through the work of later writers like King, or else through the force of sheer luck (or Ka, if you prefer).  Sometimes its a passing mention in a novel or book of criticism.  At other times it's just good, old fashioned word of mouth.  Whichever way the work keeps finding its way back into the public consciousness, through whatever various means, the sheer fact that this seemingly deliberate bit of obscure versification has managed to hold on to its reputation of being this gritty and surreal underground classic somehow manages to work in its favor as perhaps the best proof anyone can muster for the idea that all the best writing carries this genuine sense of staying power with it.  Something that is able to transcend both its genre, and whatever medium anyone decides to tell it in.  In that sense, I am willing to place Browning's poem up there with the likes of, say, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.  Nor is placing the British Victorian on the same shelf space as that occupied by one of the key pioneers of the American Gothic all that coincidental.  This is especially so should you ever stop to notice just how much Browning's words and the scenes they describe somehow manage to jib very well with the kind of grotesque and morbid subject matter that was Poe's literal lifelong means of bread and butter.  This is a work that begs to have itself interpreted on the same symbolic Gothic level.

The catch there is that while the task itself is not impossible, the challenge is a bit extra hard for first time readers who have no clue of not just who Browning is, but also lack the information about the literary tradition he can be described as belonging to, along with at least some idea of the source materials his poem is drawing on.  Once you begin to do a bit of digging, however, and start to familiarize yourself with how this iteration of the Dark Tower ties into Browning and his milieu, then it becomes possible to suggest at least one "probable" explanation for what's happening to Roland, and the meaning of his quest in verse.  With that in mind, what I'm going to focus on for now is the more or less unconscious literary sources that Browning drew upon in constructing his poetic secondary world.  The reason for this is because, like I said, this is a story whose meaning, if any, is to be found in its intertextual, allusive qualities.  If you want to get anywhere close to an understanding of what the poem is up to, then this is the breadcrumb trail you'll have to follow.  Once we've done that, the basic nature of the story will be able to emerge from the relative obscurity of its verses.  Then, with a clearer understanding of what we've just read, we can then circle back to Browning's place in Victorian literature, and the essential message that Childe Roland seems intent on delivering to its era.

With all this criteria in mind, the best place to start is with something that Chesterton noted about the writer in the section above.  According to his biography, Chesterton claims that while Browning was by no means a scholar, the essentially quirky nature of his haphazard education meant that he did come away with a head full the Victorian Era's dreams about the Middle Ages.  There's nothing particularly unique about such a setup.  If anything, all it does is paint Browning as more of a natural inheritor of the same Child's Nursery tradition as that experienced by his contemporaries and artistic descendants, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edith Nesbit, and even Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in America.  What unites them all is this shared, formative reading experience which was dictated in large part by the predominance of popular retellings and bowdlerizations of what Tolkien referred to as the Medieval Romance genre.  This was the original version of what we now call Fantasy, and what made Browning's experience of it unique was that he soon developed a level of reading comprehension that allowed him to more or less bypass the popular retellings of Beowulf and The Norse Myths that were being brought out at the time by adapters like Andrew Lang, and go right to the adults section of his parents library.  It was there that young Robert was able to read the original tales from the days of Chivalry and Enchantment.  This is the key point of Browning's Inspiration that has to be stressed above all else.

When we talk about where the poems came from, all we're talking about is the contents of Bob Senior's old collection of books.  The ones that he later passed on to his son.  It was this personal library which seems to be the crucial aspect of the poet's career, as it may not be all that great an exaggeration to claim that a lot of what he wrote came from the family's book collection.  The fact that the vast majority of the poetry concerns these forgotten relics of the past, such as Paracelsus, might work as an indicator that Browning's father was one of those fond collectors of rare antiquities.  In his case, it was ancient texts dating back to the time of Chaucer, the more off-in-the-corner the better.  Browning 's father seems to have expended his interest in the well trodden paths of literature, and was now in search of the textual equivalent of deep tracks.  He seems to have found what he was looking for as well, if his son's familiarity with the writings of Paracelsus are anything to go by.  While what I'm about to say next will have to count as no more than an educated guess, it is possible that it was from within the confines of these family stacks that Browning "might" have run across his Inspirations for Roland and the Tower.

When it comes to the poem itself, we seem to be dealing with two influence mashed together into one.  A hodgepodge pair of sources that were able to blend into this new poetic identity.  The two greatest sources from which the poem draws upon are as follows.  One of them is an ancient Medieval epic known as The Song of Roland, while the other appears to be a popular folktale whose origins are now obscure.  The latter Inspiration was known as Childe Rowland and Burd Ellen.  I've already written up another article on the latter story, and we'll have reason to come back to it in due course.  For now, however, this seems like the best place to complete a process begun on that previous essay.  It's where I first started to follow this whole convoluted breadcrumb trail.  This whole time I've been trying to to see if it was possible to trace down the various Inspirations, or perhaps a better way to say it is to call this an archeological study of the various bricks that make up Stephen King's Tower.  I'm sure there are multiple candidates out there for which source may count as the key stone (in a manner of speaking).  However, for my own money, it can all be traced back to an anonymous Epic poem whose origin has been traced back to somewhere within the 12th century.  It all first began with The Song of Roland.

Here is where famed Mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers is better at providing the necessary background materiel than me.  When she's done her part, it'll be up to me to offer a suggestion how this overlooked Saga formed a part of Browning's Cauldron of Story.  So according to the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, this is what happened.  "In the year 777, a deputation of Saracen princes from Spain came to the Emperor Charlemagne to request his assistance against certain enemies of theirs, also of the Moslem faith. Charlemagne, who was already engaged in a war against the Saxons, nevertheless accepted their invitation, and, after placing garrisons to fortify his frontiers, marched into Spain with all his available forces. He divided his army into two parts, one of which crossed the eastern Pyrenees in the direction of Gerona; the other, under his own command, crossed the Basque Pyrenees and was directed upon Pampeluna. Both cities fell, and the two armies joined forces before Saragossa, which they besieged without success. A fresh outbreak of hostilities by the Saxons obliged Charlemagne to abandon the Spanish expedition. As he was repassing the Pyrenees, the rear-guard of his army was set upon by a treacherous party of Basques, who had disposed an ambuscade along the high wooded sides of the ravine which forms the pass. Taking advantage of the lie of the land and of the lightness of their armour, they fell upon the rear-guard, slaughtered them to a man, pillaged the baggage-train, and dispersed under cover of the falling night. 

"The chronicler Eginhardt, who recounts this sober piece of history in his Vita Caroli, written about 830, concludes: “In the action were killed Eggihard the king’s seneschal, Anselm count of the palace, and Roland duke of the Marches of Brittany, together with a great many more.” Another manuscript of the ninth century contains an epitaph in Latin verse upon the seneschal Eggihard, which furnishes us with the date of the battle, 15 August 778. The episode is mentioned again in 840 by another chronicler, who, after briefly summarising the account given in the Vita Caroli, adds that, since the names of the fallen are already on record, he need not repeat them in his account. 

"After this, the tale of Roncevaux appears to go underground for some two hundred years. When it again comes to the surface, it has undergone a transformation which might astonish us if we had not seen much the same thing happen to the tale of the wars of King Arthur. The magic of legend has been at work, and the small historic event has swollen to a vast epic of heroic proportions and strong ideological significance. Charlemagne, who was 38 at the time of his expedition into Spain, has become a great hieratic figure, 200 years old, the snowy-bearded king, the sacred Emperor, the Champion of Christendom against the Saracens, the war-lord whose conquests extend throughout the civilized world. The expedition itself has become a major episode in the great conflict between Cross and Crescent, and the marauding Basques have been changed and magnified into an enormous army of many thousand Saracens. The names of Eggihardt and Anselm have disappeared from the rear-guard; Roland remains.

"He is now the Emperor’s nephew, the “right hand of his body”, the greatest warrior in the world, possessed of supernatural strength and powers and hero of innumerable marvelous exploits; and he is accompanied by his close companion Oliver, and by the other Ten Peers, a chosen band of superlatively valorous knights, the flower of French chivalry. The ambuscade which delivers them up to massacre is still the result of treachery on the Frankish side; but it now derives from a deep-laid plot between the Saracen king Marsilion and Count Ganelon, a noble of France, Roland’s own stepfather; and the whole object of the conspiracy is the destruction of Roland himself and the Peers. The establishment of this conspiracy is explained by Ganelon’s furious jealousy of his stepson, worked out with a sense of drama, a sense of character, and a psychological plausibility which, in its own kind, may sustain a comparison with the twisted malignancy of Iago. In short, beginning with a historical military disaster of a familiar kind and comparatively small importance, we have somehow in the course of two centuries achieved a masterpiece of epic drama—we have arrived at the Song of Roland.

"The poem itself as we know it would appear to have achieved its final shape towards the end of the eleventh century. It is not difficult to see why the legend should have taken the form it did, nor why it should have been popular about that time. The Saracen menace to Christendom became formidable about the end of the tenth century, and led to a number of expeditions against the Moors in Spain with a definitely religious motive. At the same time, a whole series of heroic legends and poems were coming into circulation along the various great trade-routes and pilgrim-routes of Europe—legends attached to the names of local heroes, and associated with the important towns and monasteries along each route. The pilgrim-road to the important shrine of St James of Compostella led through the very pass in which Charlemagne’s rear-guard had made its disastrous last stand: what more natural than that the travelers should be entertained with a glorified version of the local tragedy? It was also the tenth century that saw the full flowering of the feudal system and the development of the code of chivalry which bound the liegeman in bonds of religious service to his lord and loyalty to his fellow-vassal. And finally, the preaching of the First Crusade set all Christendom on fire with enthusiasm for the Holy War against the followers of Mohammed.

"We have little external evidence about the Song of Roland. Such as it is, it seems to agree with the internal evidence (of language, feudal customs, arms and accoutrements, names of historical personages anachronistically annexed to the Charlemagne-legend, and scraps of what looks like authentic knowledge of Saracen territories and peoples) in placing the Chanson de Roland, as we have it, shortly after the First Crusade. I say, the Chanson as we have it—for the legend of Roland must have begun much earlier. Our poet, in beginning his story, takes it for granted that his audience know all about Charlemagne and his Peers, about the friendship of Roland and Oliver, and about Ganelon: like Homer, he is telling a tale which is already in men’s hearts and memories. What no scholar has yet succeeded in tracing is the stages by which history transformed itself into legend and legend into epic. Roland, duke of the Marches of Brittany, must have been an important man; but no further historical allusion to him has as yet been traced—why should he have been chosen for this part of epic hero to the exclusion of others who fought and fell with him? How was the story transmitted, and in what form? Ballads? 

"Earlier improvisations of a primitive epic kind? We do not know. We can only fall back on the vague but useful phrase “oral tradition”, and refer, if we like, to Sir Maurice Bowra’s monumental work, Heroic Poetry, which reveals how quickly and how strangely, even at this time in parts of Central Europe, the history of to-day may become the recited epic of to-morrow. One thing is certain—the extant Chanson de Roland is not a chance assembly of popular tales: it is a deliberate and masterly work of art, with a single shaping and constructive brain behind it, marshalling its episodes and its characterization into an orderly and beautifully balanced whole (7-10)".  What all that has to do with Browning boils down to two things.  A more accurate way to say it is that it might have to do with two items of his father's library.  If we can take Chesterton's comment that a lot of the poet's schooling came from his parents more than any tenured academic setting, then it is not out of the question to claim that a great deal of what Robert Browning first knew of the world was what he learned from the books kept on the family shelves.  It's worth harping on this particular household item, because the historical record does leave ample evidence that it was through such personal collections that a lot of the great literary names of the Victorian Era first discovered how to master the craft of their later chosen professions.

The author of Childe Roland seems to have been no different in this regard, while also marking himself out as something of an exception.  The results of the poet's itinerant and inconsistent experience with public schooling has already been remarked upon.  What still hasn't received its proper notice is the way the elder Browning's personal literary holdings could very well have functioned as the unindicted co-conspirator in the vast majority of his poetic son's professional career.  The reason I'm willing to say this with some degree of plausibility is because it seems just as likely that it's from this overlooked collection of books that Browning might have first learned not only about an obscure physician like Paracelsus, but also of the figure of Roland.  If we posit that the poetical mind behind the Dark Tower first learned of both the Gunslinger Knight and the later accompanying Gothic Structure from this family bibliography that Chesterton mentions, then at least it allows us to posit a guess as to where the two crucial elements of Childe Roland come from.  Situating the origin of the poem's contents within the Browning reading room does offer the possibility of constructing a chronology of Inspiration if we assume that it was through the library that young Robert began to learn of Roland and his exploits.  Maybe it all started out first at his father's knee as the old man regaled him with the story Rowland and Burd Ellen.  If he was delighted, the child would have wanted more, and he got it.

This could be where The Song of Roland eventually came in.  Since that older poetical text counts as an example of sophisticated reading, even back in the days of Dickens, it makes sense to speculate the of the father telling his child that Roland did indeed have other adventures.  Some of which might have been too terrible for young ears.  The child Browning could have been disappointed to hear this, and would have made his displeasure known to his parent.  The father could then promise the lad that one day he would be ready for it, and maybe sooner than he thought.  This could have perked up the future poet's spirits, and made him look forward to the time when he could be allowed to read Roland's Song for himself.  Let's suppose then that the opportunity did come round, like King's fabled Wheel of Ka, and that Browning soon immersed himself in the world of Medieval sagas with an interest that was similar to, yet never quite of the same nature in enthusiasm as that of Tolkien's experience with the Norse Sagas.  It was more in the way of promised gift being fulfilled, more than anything else.  The developing poetic mind may have taken the Song into his heart, but it doesn't seem to have determined the entire trajectory of his career the way that the Tales of Asgaard did for the rest of Tolkien's output.

Instead, all that may have happened is the figure of Roland and his two adventures (one for children, the other for adults) eventually lodged themselves at the back of the poet's mind, and later emerged, by his own account, in the form of a dream that Inspired Browning to write it all down in the format of poetic verse.  Once more, all I have done here is resorted to the same level of critical speculation that even Browning's professional critics have had little recourse except to fall back on when it comes to trying to pick the lock on his artistry.  The signature Reticence that Melchiori writes about really does seem to have been a lifelong feature of Browning's artistic practice.  The one benefit of the surmises above is that it does allow us a reasonable picture of how the poem might have come about.  If Browning ever heard of Roland first through the Robert Jamieson-Joseph Jacobs folktale, and later through the Epic cycle which some attribute to a Medieval poet called Turold, then the least it does is provide both readers and critics with a workable timeline of influence, Inspiration, and literary-artistic composition. It provides a further service in allowing room for the speculation that the Burd Ellen fairy tale is yet another example of Sayer's "magic of legend" or Medieval mythmaking at work.  Much as ancient storytellers like Turold might have turned a historic knight into a tragic hero of fiction, so later authors might have expanded on the Roland legend, by creating marvelous tales of his young boyhood.

It offers a neat explanation for how Childe Rowland might have eventually come about if we posit its creation as an example of what happens when a literary Chanson De Geste manages to find its way into the open forum of the popular culture of the Middle Ages.  From there, the basic idea of Turold's Song began to take hold of the public Imagination.  Even if some of the exact details of the Saga were sketchy for a majority illiterate audience, they still didn't need pen and paper to help memorize the myths that they loved, especially not with a social practice that can trace its lineage all the way back to Ancient Greece.  The same process could still have been an operational part of a pre-literate society that was still receiving the gist of actual literary texts (what few there were) into the cultural mainstream.  From there, the initial public awareness of the Roland narrative might have gained enough popularity to achieve a peculiar and particular brand of mythic status.  It was a kind that was more common to Late Antiquity, though it's also possible a form of the practice still exists in our own era.  This is where the fame and enjoyment of a work of fiction manages to break into the realm of popular folk culture.  If any narrative of the time could find its way into this segment of what might be termed the ancient Public Arts, then it was more or less allowed to branch out into its own lore, such as Rowland and Ellen.

If all of this speculation of how a fairy tale can emerge from the folk tellings of poetic legend sounds like a stretch, it helps to bear in mind that a similar process was already at work by this time in the creation of the Tales of King Arthur.  Roland seems to have been something of a byproduct beneficiary of this same process, albeit one that never quite went as far as the entire worldbuilding for the entirety of Camelot.  It sort of paints this picture of Roland as the key character in an unmade Medieval mythos.  One that could, potentially, have encapsulated the character from his days of young knighthood, all the way up to the events of Turold's Song.  If there is any truth to this conjecture, then it shines an intriguing light on what Browning might have been doing with this archetype.  I'm pretty sure we're at the point where any possibility of constructing a complete narrative saga of the Chanson Roland is long gone.  It's an aborted project, one that seems to have never quite been able to capture the Imagination of the Middle Ages the way that the legends of Arthur did.  Instead, Roland has gone down in history as the knight that lived in Camelot's shadow.  Hence, perhaps an explanation for why King sees fit to place the modern iteration of Browning's protagonist in a literal line of descent from the Once and Future King.  Nor do I think that Browning was ever able to start such a ball rolling with his own poem.  All that happened was that his Imagination was able to take up two strands of the myth and combine them.

The idea that once upon a time there might have been a brief window of artistic opportunity in which this now obscure figure of Roland the Knight could have begun to garner a kind of mythos about him, the kind of cycle of legend which eventually began to accumulate about the Round Table, has so far proven to be the most novel notion put forth about the origins of both Browning's and King's stories.  I'm sort of surprised I really didn't stop to consider this before.  What seems to have set this chain of reasoning going is noting the Burd Ellen offshoot, which seems to mark the first appearance of an ominous Tower, which then proceeds to be linked up with the main character of the Charlemagne legend.  The appearance of this ancient fairy tale bears all the hallmarks of the type of folklore that began to accumulate around similar figures such as Robin Hood.  Indeed, it might help to note something that scholar and children's book editor Roger Lancelyn Green once wrote about the famous Outlaw of Sherwood Forest, because what he has to say can grant a better lens through which to view the fortunes of the Roland archetype.  With this in mind, here is what Green has to say in his introduction to his edited collection of Sherwood tales for kids.

"To retell the adventures of Robin Hood is a very different matter from writing of King Arthur and his Knights. The Arthurian poems and romances, even if we take Malory as the latest, would fill a bookcase – and in that bookcase we would find some of the great literature of the world, in several languages.  Robin Hood had no Malory, and he has had few poets. A late medieval metrical romance, A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode: a collection of Ballads most of which are the merest doggerel and some of which may be as late as the eighteenth century; a prose rendering of several of the Ballads, and two plays by Anthony Munday, a contemporary of Shakespeare, called The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon constitute nearly all that we may call the original Robin Hood Literature. If we add to this several short scraps of medieval folk plays which merely follow extant ballads, a brief appearance in Robert Greene’s play George-a-Greene the Pinner of Wakefield and its exactly parallel prose romance, and a rather fuller appearance in Ben Jonson’s unfinished pastoral play The Sad Shepherd, our sources are complete.  

"It was only after the ballads, romances, and plays were collected and reprinted by Joseph Ritson at the end of the eighteenth century that Robin Hood found his way into real literature. Even so he found his best expression as a minor character, as all readers of Ivanhoe will agree. The majority of the ballads, with a glance at the dramatic background, gave Thomas Love Peacock the outline for the best prose story of Robin Hood yet written, his Maid Marian (1822), and the same sources (to which Peacock and Scott also lent something) produced Tennyson’s play of The Foresters (1881) – a pleasant re-arrangement of the old materials, but of no special merit either as poetry or as drama. It was left for the twentieth century to give us the nest poetic play yet written with Robin as hero, Alfred Noyes’s Robin Hood (1926 – acted the same year).There have, of course, been many other minor contributions made to the literature of Robin Hood in the form of plays, operas and adventure stories. But by far the largest number of books about him during the last hundred years consist of various forms of retelling of the old legends – none of which has found a permanent place on the shelf reserved for The Blue Fairy Book, The Heroes and Tanglewood Tales (7-8)".  Now before the links between these passages and Browning's poem can be established, it still important to further note what the reader has been given here.

What Green has established in his paragraphs is what's known as a history of literary reception.  Basically, it's a way of tracing the fortunes of that vapor Mark Twain liked to call Fame.  In simpler terms, it's how you gage the popularity of a work of fiction by examining the commentary upon it, both popular and critical, throughout the historical record.  Something similar can and has been done for the work of Rudyard Kipling, and imaginary people like Sherlock Holmes.  Something similar can be done for fictions like Star Wars and Star Trek, though probably not right away, and this is all that Green has done for Sherwood Forest's most famous resident.  The editor has provided us with not just a history of reception, but also one of transmission; how the character's popularity allowed them to be taken up and carried further on by any and every chronicled artist who came along later.  What the reception history of Robin Hood tells us is that he's not a minor character in the Public Imagination, by any means.  He also doesn't seem to count as the figure who stands out the most from the Well of Medieval Folklore.  That honor goes to Malory's Once and Future King.  There's a lesson in all that which has a bearing on the fortunes of Roland's sporadic fame.  In order to get a clear picture of it, we'll need to make a similar comparative study of the public reception of Charlemagne's knight, and what his fortunes tell us.

Here's where the diligence of King Scholar Michele Braun comes in handy. For she's the one who has been able to assemble as complete a chronicle as possible of Roland's reception and popularity within the History of Storytelling.  In the pages of an edited study by Patrick McAleer, she writes, "In the Afterword of The Gunslinger, Stephen King describes how Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” was  his inspiration for Roland the Gunslinger. But Browning’s knight also had his predecessors, such as Orlando in the sixteenth century Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto or Charlemagne’s knight in the eleventh century Song of Roland. The genre and heroic conventions change across these four texts but despite the different contexts, we can see similarities in the construction of the hero... Stephen King’s Roland reflects twentieth century North American culture and the Rolands who precede him. The epigraphs at the beginning tell the story of these four Rolands. The first is a knight of Charlemagne’s army. The story in the Song of Roland is an account of the last battle of the knight Roland, based on Charlemagne’s retreat from Spain through the Pyrenees Mountains in AD 778 when his rearguard was decimated by a rival king. 

"His story is recorded in a chanson de geste, or “song of heroic deeds,” written down centuries later and named for him. Roland is surrounded by a host of noble companions, including a young knight named Oliver who is wise, unlike Roland who is proud, heedless and haughty. When the rearguard is first attacked, Oliver suggests Roland call for help, but the knight refuses, declaring that his proficiency  with the sword is all they need. But they sustain multiple losses until Roland finally realizes they will need help to which Oliver responds: “‘Companion, you got us in this mess. / There is wise valour, and there is recklessness: / Prudence is worth more than foolhardiness. / Through your o’erweening you have destroyed the French; […] Your prowess, Roland, is a curse on our heads.” Roland finally calls for help but by the time Charlemagne arrives, Roland’s hubris has left no French survivors of the attack. 

"The second epigraph is drawn from a romance called Orlando Furioso, or The Mad Roland, written by Ludovico Ariosto in 1516. The story tells of Orlando “driven raving mad by love—and he a man who had been always esteemed for his great prudence. […] Orlando, who had long been in love with the beautiful Angelica, and who […] had now returned with her to the West, to where, at the foot of the lofty Pyrenees, King Charlemagne and the hosts of France and Germany were assembled.” Appropriate to a romance, the knight’s madness is a form of love sickness, but both before and after his madness, he is a knight and warrior, tearing enemies apart with his bare hands.5 The third Roland, the antecedent to King’s Roland, is from Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Browning claimed the poem came to him in a dream and he wrote it all down at once, an explanation and defense that accounts for the ambiguity within the poem as well as its speaker’s intense emotional responses. The battle of the previous tales is replaced by a quest, which means that the character of the hero must also change. Excellence in the quest requires courage and loyalty, as it would in battle, but it also requires perseverance, patience and sensitivity to the nature of the quest. 

"Childe Roland is a more complex hero who “is haunted by the question Browning’s other simple- minded heroes never ask: when the crucial trial finally faces him, will he be fit?” Browning’s poem displays the Romantic ideal of the sensitive hero, who responds to the landscape and his memories by a kind of identification with them in which he reads the state of his own soul (66-68)".  Braun offers us some interesting food for thought when it comes to the poem's ultimate meaning.  For the moment, however, let's stick with the idea started by the Robin Hood passages quoted above.  Much like with the Green book, what Braun has offered her readers is a survey of Roland's literary history.  As of this writing, it may perhaps have to qualify as the only one of its kind that I'm aware of, just as Green's catalogue of Robin's reception history is able to stand out for being the single example with a modicum of shelf life remaining to it after 70 something years.  What unites the popular history of these two characters from Medieval folklore boils down to three details.  Each of them lives within the shadow cast by King Arthur, to begin with.  That part must also be kept in mind, because to do otherwise misses the significance of Robin and Roland's reputations.  Arthur and his Kingdom beat them as competition.

It's this initial fact which leads on to the second item on the list of shared traits.  There's a considerable dearth of either primary or secondary source material available with either Roland or Robin.  When Green said that hunting down the sources for either the King, the Knights, or figures like Merlin and Morgan La Fay would lead the student or scholar through some of the greatest works of world literature, it seems his statement was meant as no exaggeration.  For an imaginary character whose roots are to be found in British history, what marks the figure of Arthur out as unique among all the myths of the Middle Ages is the ability of his exploits to somehow transcend national boundaries.  He was not only a well known figure in his native country.  His fame managed not just to travel all the way to the inns and courts of  pre-modern France and Germany.  Instead, what happened was that the Myths of Avalon and Cornwall wound up impacting and even structuring the kind of stories that the separate peoples of these differing homelands told to one another.  To this day, it still stands as one of the most remarkable achievements that any single story or mythos has ever been able to accomplish.  The only comparable examples of the modern day would have to be the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault.  It might be possible to add Star Wars and Lord of the Rings to that mix, yet the details of global influence begin to get sketchy from that point on.  The achievement of Arthur remains a rarity.  Neither Roland nor Robin has been able to reach a similar level of influence as that of Camelot.

I suppose it's possible that Robin has achieved a kind Atlantic centric fame.  Though it's clear this doesn't extend very far beyond Western borders, or even all that much beyond English speaking countries.  Roland, meanwhile, barely seems to be a blip on the radar of pop culture, then or now.  This fact of literary history points to the third and final fundamental of Roland's career.  He has never been able to reach the same level of popularity of either Guinevere or Lancelot.  If there ever was such a window of opportunity in which this fictionally heightened soldier from Charlamagne's army could have built up a reputation similar to that of Arthur and Merlin, then it must not have been to long before it was lost, whether or not it was for a lack of trying otherwise.  Part of the reason why might be because of the last similarity that Roland shares with Robin.  Neither of them were able to find their proper chronicler on the level of Malory, as Green says.  Or rather, if they did, then it still wasn't enough to leave the kind of impact that comes from just a single Arthurian image like the Grail, or the Sword in the Stone.  Incredible as it is, if you mention either of those items, the vast majority of today's audience will still know immediately who you are talking about.  If you mention a Dark Tower, by contrast, some will think you are talking about Stephen King's books, while the rest won't have a clue what you mean.

Mark Twain once said that fame was a vapor, and that's certainly what the reputation of Roland has turned out to be.  All of the processes that went together to construct the Arthurian myth might very well have been in place for the French Knight, yet it never caught on, and so, nothing happened.  Rather, let's say that what did occur was Roland having to live within a shadow resting in an even greater shade.  The biggest tie between the myths of Roland and Robin Hood is that the Knight's reception history provides us with a snapshot of what the Sherwood Outlaw's fate might have been if he hadn't gained the level popularity that wound up happening.  His name and exploits (whether many or few) would have sunk back into the Cauldron of popular legend.  His legacy dwindling to the level of a kind of half-recalled memory.  Something that would be picked up at random with a level of the haphazard that would all but guarantee his third tier status in the realm of Medieval myths.  This result has come true so well, that it's almost no wonder that Roland has had just four chroniclers in his career.  Two of them being none other than the English poet Robert Browning, and an author named Stephen Edwin King.

Conclusion: A Clarion Call for the Romantic Spirit in a Disenchanted Age.

All of which history brings us to the poem itself, and its meaning, if any.  I think it's possible to give an answer to both those questions, though perhaps it's best to tackle things one at a time.  Let's start with the basic action of the verse narrative.  We begin in the seeming middle of things, right after a conversation, or palaver of sorts, has taken place.  A man has just received directions to get to the place he must go.  We catch up with the narrator, who also turns out to be the main character, somewhere right after, or else not too long since the conclusion of the conversation.  The main lead is looking for something.  He doesn't seem all that interested in someone.  It seems to be more of a location or place that he's after.  The poem tells us that what our protagonist is after is "that ominous tract in which, all agree, lies the Dark Tower".  It's this gnomic edifice in and of itself that the narrator is looking for.  His name is Roland, though title aside, this is something that the reader either does or doesn't figure for themselves until the last line of the poem is reached.  We also never find out what business the wanderer had with Tower.  Nor why is it so important that he get there.  The protagonist doesn't even seem capable himself of explaining why there's any good reason for his journey.  We also never learn the nature of the Tower itself.  What it's meant for?  Who built it?  What are the contents of its insides.

Perhaps the most worthwhile questions a modern reader might ask is what purpose does the Tower serve, and is it really the end goal, or just a way station with a mere part to play in a much grander narrative?  These are all riddles that the poem never provides us answers with.  Rather, let's say that the answers it does provide all point to a solution to Browning's puzzles that argue for a more symbolic as opposed to a realist and/or concrete narrative purpose.  Before we get to that part, however, lets continue to follow the progress of our aimless looking pilgrim.  The journey that Roland goes on in this story is a trek that is both mundane and surreal by turns.  A bare bones summary of the matter is that he makes his way through a barren looking country, and meets not much of anyone else until he arrives at his destination, and that's about it.  A Naturalist description of the narrative would say that all we've got is just some gloomy looking guy traipsing his way with purpose through some sort of dry country.  If we turn to the vantage point from which the poem is told, though, things take a very different turn.  I've said that this is a work which puts me in mind of the best poetry written by none other than Edgar Allan Poe.  It turns out that's no real exaggeration.  Nor does it fail to du justice to the contents of this poem.  

As refracted through the lens of the main character, Browning's words paint us a portrait of this phantasmagorical landscape in which everything seems meaningless, except that's not quite right, is it?  Nothing seems to be happening, and yet there's this free floating paranoic sense that something could be lurking somewhere just out of sight.  Is that something big and ferocious?  Does it have teeth and claws that know how to rend and tear?  Is it behind or somewhere just ahead of you, maybe beyond the next ridge?  Is it even there to begin with?  Does it even matter?...Onward we go, I suppose.  I think the words I've chosen here might do a bit of a service in suggesting the atmosphere of the tale. However, it really has to be said that the only way to truly grasp the fundamentally Gothic nature of Browning's secondary world is to read the actual words the poet wrote down himself.  To hear the narrator tell it, Roland is making his way not just through what King would call "the apotheosis of all deserts (1)", but something like a world that can't decide whether it wants to be real or a dream, and there are unnerving hints that this indecision is starting to make the landscape loose its mind, maybe just a little, anyway.

Browning's poetic verses put me in mind is something King said in the pages of his nonfiction study, Danse Macabre.  He was speaking of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, yet his words find their antecedent echo in the contents of Browning's verses.  Indeed, Roland's surrealist landscape fits the following description that King gives to a remarkable degree.  "We see a horror story developing here that Lovecraft would have embraced enthusiastically", and there is evidence out there that the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos might have had a healthy appreciation of Browning's poem.  Whether he had a clear idea of its meaning is another matter, as we'll see.  King continues, "It might even have taught the Old Providence Spook a thing or two. H.P.L. was struck by the horror of wrong geometry; he wrote frequently of non-Euclidian angles that tortured the eye and hurt the mind, and suggested other dimensions where the sum of a triangle’s three comers might equal more or less than 180°. Contemplating such things, he suggested, might be enough in itself to drive a man crazy. Nor was he far wrong; we know from various psychological experiments that when you tamper with a man or woman’s perspective on their physical world, you tamper with what may actually be the fulcrum of the human mind.  

"Other writers have dealt with this fascinating idea of perspective gone haywire; my own favorite is Joseph Payne Brennan’s short story “Canavan’s Back Yard,” where an antiquarian bookdealer discovers that his weedy, ordinary back yard is much longer than it seems—it runs, in fact, all the way to the portholes of hell. In Charles L. Grant’s The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, one of the main characters discovers he can no longer find the borders of the town where he has lived all his life. We see him crawling along the verge of the highway, looking for the way back in. Unsettling stuff. But Jackson handled the concept better than anyone, I think— certainly better than Lovecraft, who understood it but apparently couldn’t show it. Theo enters the bedroom she will share with Eleanor looking incredulously at a stained-glass window, a decorative urn, the pattern in the carpet. There is nothing wrong with these things taken one by one; it is just that when we add up the perceptual equivalent of their angles, we come out with a triangle where the sum of the comers equals a bit more (or a bit less) than 180°.

"As Anne Rivers Siddons points out, everything in Hill House is skewed. There is nothing which is perfectly straight or perfectly level—which may be why doors keep swinging open or shut. And this idea of skew is important to Jackson’s concept of the Bad Place because it heightens those feelings of altered perception. Being in Hill House is like tripping on a low-watt dosage of LSD, where everything seems strange and you feel you will begin to hallucinate at any time. But you never quite do. You just look incredulously at a stained-glass window... or a decorative urn... or the pattern on the carpet. Being in Hill House is like looking into one of those trick rooms where folks look big at one end and small at the other...Jackson suggests (always in her low, insinuating voice— this, along with The Turn of the Screw, may very well be where Peter Straub got the idea that the horror story works best when it is “ambiguous and low-key and restrained”) these things quietly and rationally; she is never strident. It is just, she says, that being in Hill House does something fundamental and un¬ pleasant to the screen of perception. This is what, she suggests, being in telepathic contact with a lunatic would be like (305-7)".

It might sound digressive, yet it's the best way I have of describing the schizoid nature of the landscape that Browning is able to paint for his readers with nothing but his words.  He's able to conjure up this Gothic no-place where if you chance to spy the sight of an emaciated horse on your way through, you aren't just looking at some old pasture geezer whose long past his prime.  Instead, what you've stumbled across a steed that might have belonged to that fabled Pale Rider that an old Book talks about.  And the simple act of crossing a river leaves you uneasy, because you'll swear you keep snatching glimpses of the dead men's faces staring up at you through smooth patches in the stream.  Either that or maybe it's all just a trick of the light.  All you can do is to hope that it's not a cracked and flaking skeletal cheek you've just stepped on, and that what you heard after you decided to stick a spear into the river was just the screech of a water rat, and not one that belonged to a human...or other things.  With Browning tossing off visual cues such as this, it's easy to understand why a poem like this might have appealed to a college student with King's frame of mind.  It all reads like something you'd find in one of his novels. or something out of E.A. Poe.  Nor is the comparison with the author of The Raven made in vain.  

Much like with the best examples of Victorian Gothic poetry, there seems to exist some clear yet indefinable link between the outer qualities of the observed landscape, and the distorted inner nature of the protagonist.  This is trope that was not invented by writers like Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Yet together, the both of them seem to be the most responsible for this becoming one of the defining features of the Horror story.  It's the idea that the outer appearances of reality can often end up becoming mirror reflections of the minds of the cast.  Before then, the best statement of this notion would have to be none other than Shakespeare himself.  Thanks to the conventions of the genre, using this concept in a work of Horror fiction means that the inner image reflected in nature's outer mirror is always seen through a grotesque distortion lens.  It's the an example of the stage setting serving as a reflective microcosm of either the external imbalance of the culture that has created it, or else as a dark reflection of the inner demons of the one of the dramatis personae.  There's an essay that discusses this topic better than I can.  It's called Waiting for the End by scholar John G. Parks.  It concerns yet another Jackson novel, and yet the reason I have for taking the critic's words and applying them to Browning's poem is twofold.  In the first place, Parks words carry a general weight which allows them to be applicable to the situation and nature of the Dark Tower lyric.  In the second place, King makes clear that the content of Parks' article has had a clear influence on how he views and writes his own work.

This influence also extends to how the author of the Gunslinger saga views the genre that works in as a whole.  It is therefore not too far out of speculation to claim that a careful quotation from Parks' essay will grant us at least a potential window onto how King might view Browning's verses.  With this in mind, a paraphrasing of the relevant passage goes as follows.  "We can see in" Childe Roland "several features of what Irving Malin calls the...gothic. First, a microcosm serves as the arena where universal forces collide. The gothic" landscape "functions as an image of authoritarianism, of imprisonment, of "confining narcissism," as well as a receptacle of lost values. The voyage", as when Browning's wandering pilgrim makes his way toward the title structure of the poem, "is an attempt to escape" this "cloying authoritarianism...The journey is also dangerous and terrifying", or at least this is how Roland perceives it. "Nearly all of the characters of (the Gothic, sic) are narcissistic, in one form or another, weaklings who try to read their own preoccupations into reality (web)".  Hence Parks gives us a very good explanation as to symbolic nature the landscape that Browning's straying protagonist finds himself in.  Much like T.S. Eliot would later go on to do in a similar poem, we find Browning drawing upon the long established Wasteland motif, and utilizing its contents as a reflection of Roland's own mindset.

This is something that was not lost on the publisher's of the popular Lit Study guide site, SparkNotes.  In their page on the poem, it's noted how "Browning’s vision of the wasteland prefigures...Eliot's...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 (web)".  The notion that most of what Roland sees on the way to his destination is not a new conceit.  It's an idea that has been taken up by other scholars such as Joyce S. Meyers.  Who argues that "the meaning or purpose of this quest...has remained elusive, for Roland offers no explanation beyond the narrative itself, and this is too full of discrepancies to be taken at face value. The many distortions of the natural world, the frequent use of the pathetic fallacy, and the ambiguous sense of time and space make it clear that Childe Roland is not telling an objective tale but is narrating a psychological experience (335)".  In some ways, it is easy enough see how and why someone might arrive at an interpretation such as this.  At the same time, I'm not quite sure Meyer's take does justice to the full scope and purpose of Browning's poetry.

This is because a proper understanding of the context undergirding the quest of the Victorian Roland goes a long way toward a more complete understanding of not just the inherent nature of the wasteland that the pilgrim traverses his way through, but also of the meaning that his journey leading both the protagonist and the reader towards. It's already possible to figure out a rough idea of the surface meaning of the poem's narrative.  All it amounts to is the writer's Imagination stumbling upon a half-forgotten figure from the world of Medieval legend.  An archetype that shapes together into an amalgam of Roland stories.  The first element is Turold's Song, while the second is that of the folktale of the character as a young gunslinger knight, journeying to rescue his sister Burd Allen from the Dark Tower, the great stronghold of the King of Elfland.  What Browning's Imagination has done is melded these two folk narratives that grew up around the figure of the ancient, Anglo-Saxon Huorolandus, and transfigured it all into a new myth, one that is capable of speaking directly towards the modern era.  

While it might be possible to say that some of the meanings of the earlier Song and Ellen fairy story might have managed carry over (in however much of a modified form) what can't be denied is that all the rest of previous plot elements that made up the mythos have been so recast as to become unrecognizable.  If we knew nothing about the origins of the Paladin in the legends that attached themselves to the battle of Charlemagne, then there's little wonder if the protagonist speaker of the poem would come off as someone none of the audience had ever heard of before.  As the verse narrative stands, it still takes a great deal of literary excavation in order to get at the full context of this work.  We don't murder to dissect, yet we do have to disassemble  the pieces of the puzzle before putting it all back together, in order to get as clear a picture what the poet is even writing about.  Doing so, crazy as it may sound, has allowed us to gain a clearer image of what is happening in the story.  The plot shows us the Roland of Turold and the Ellen folk story, and quite possibly even the Orlando of Ludovico Ariosto, and yet if there's any sense in which the main lead of this poem can be said to be the same as all the other incarnations, his personality, mythos, and quest have all been streamlined due to a number of factors.  Most of it having to do with the passage of time.  This is apparently what happens to forgotten myths. 

They may not stayed buried forever, yet the sketchy nature of human memory seems to mean there's always the danger of the overlooked archetype somehow getting distorted, refracted, and sometimes even getting lost in translation from one age to another.  Anyone who has struggled with a good way to bring poems like Beowulf or Gawain and the Green Knight to life in such a way that resonates with modern tastes will know something of what I'm talking about.  The task that Browning found himself faced with was a bit less and more challenging than this.  His Imagination presented him with little more than half-remembered fragments of myth and legend to work with, something even more obscure than the origins of Robin Hood and the Slayer of Grendel.  As the result of having his stories lost to the mists of time, all the archetype behind the Roland figure has left to work with are what T.S. Eliot referred to as "A heap of broken images", some of whose meaning has become all but obscured.  That's a hell of a spot for even a good writer to be put in.  What makes such talents stand out from all the rest, however, is there ability to rise to the challenge.  The same happened to Tolkien, for instance, and look what he accomplished.  Browning may not have gotten quite so far, yet the effort is admirable all the same.  Even a poetic image half-remembered can still counts as a Creative Idea with power in it.

So that on the level of basic plot, even if all that we're left with is the situation of a forgotten knight making his way to an elven Tower, one whose purpose everyone seems to have forgotten about.  That idea still seems to carry enough narrative force to act as a lure for generations of readers lucky enough to stumble upon it.  All the remains of a once mighty mythos is Roland and his journey to the elven King's stronghold, yet somehow that is enough.  The only new feature of this ancient setup, the one that would have struck a chord with the audience of Browning's day, and still seems able to do so for contemporary readers, is the note of modernistic, existential dread that permeates the poem, and explains the surreal, Gothic nature of the wasteland the protagonist travels through.  That's because its a version of Faeryland as it was known by Turold, Ariosto, and even Spenser when it is translated and refracted into a fundamentally disenchanted age.  What my own efforts at studying Browning's poem has lead me to believe is that the final product was in some ways an unconscious response to that age.  

I think that when taken together, both Stubbs and Chesterton can help us see how a work like this comes about.  In order to do that, we need to hear what they have to say about the times in which Browning wrote.  Heath-Stubbs seems like the best place to start, as his words paint a very good overview picture of the poem's context.  He begins setting the stage of Browning's context by demonstrating how the Victorian Era was, in many ways, an inheritor of the Romantic Movement in English Literature.  "It is during this historical period (of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sic) that the Romantic response to the universe most clearly and completely dominated European art and letters, and we are therefore justified in applying the term “Romantic” in a secondary, historical  sense, and in a general way, to a certain style or way of writing, which was dominant at this time. It is the successor to the other post-Mediaeval styles which we can identify in the historical development of European literature, and, by analogy, in painting, architecture, and music as well. These we may conveniently term the Renaissance style (represented in England by the Elizabethan), the Baroque (which dominated the first half of the seventeenth century), and the Augustan or Classical, characteristic of the late seventeenth and of most of the eighteenth century. 

"But in the history of English poetry the term Romantic is...applicable to the poets who flourished during the last decade of the eighteenth century, and the first three of the nineteenth. These are great names-—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, with Blake, though in some respects anomalous, as in many ways their forerunner. This was a turbulent and revolutionary generation; the poets were largely made vocal, indeed, by the idealism and the hopes which the French Revolution of 1789, and the revolutionary wars which followed, called forth, though Wordsworth and Coleridge were later to wean them selves from the aspirations of their youth. Even Keats, who of all of them seems to be most preoccupied with purely aesthetic experience, was politically a Radical, and in Hyperion he treated, under the guise of the myth of the conflict between the Titans and the Olympians, of the super session of an outworn world order by a new and higher one. But in the world of poetry alone, these men succeeded in sweeping away the canons of taste that had dominated the eighteenth century, and creating a “shift of sensibility” which, within their own lifetimes, gradually altered the responses of readers. This shift in sensibility prepared the way for the Victorian poets, of whom, by general consent, Browning and Tennyson are the two most typical and significant figures.

"The style of Tennyson’s early work, for instance, is essentially a continuation of the style of Keats, though, before the publication of his first volume of poems in 1830, he had passed through phases in which he had assimilated the work of Byron and Shelley as well. Yet it is obvious that a gap, of feeling and stature, as well as of time, separates these Victorian poets from their Roman tic predecessors. The temper of the Victorian Age was very different from that of the High Romantic period. Prosperous and peaceful, it was outwardly of less violent and revolutionary temper than had been the earlier decades. But the rise of science, and of a materialist philosophy which laid claims to a total explanation of the universe, produced profound internal conflicts, and a disintegration of long-accepted religions ideas. Much of the poetry of the Victorians, in contrast to that of the earlier Romantics, is a poetry of doubt and questioning. The writers feel themselves to be on the “darkling plain - 'Where ignorant armies clash by night' - envisaged by Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach (x-xii)".  The point of all this background information is to set the stage for Browning's poem by showing not only the context in which it was written, but also how that same cultural atmosphere was shaped by its immediate literary past.

What stands out about Stubbs' description of that era is just how pessimistic it is.  It's worth noting, because it's part and parcel of the judgment calls he makes on Browning's work as a whole.  These are verdicts handed out in passing, yet they tell us a great deal of what he thinks about the limits of the Dark Tower poet's creative capabilities.  If I had to summarize the vantage point from which Stubbs approaches Browning and his era, then it almost makes sense to label it as a sense of idealism tinged with betrayal.  It is possible to critique the critic a bit here.  To offer the countercharge that Stubbs is guilty of a certain amount of aesthetic partisanship here.  While earlier on in his preface, he tries to put on a masque of bold restraint by saying that,  In a sense, we must all ultimately attempt to be Classicists", he also decides to immediately qualify this statement by claiming, "but we have to be Romantics first of all, before we can achieve this; and few of us, in this life, can hope to pass that stage (x)".  What i think we've got here is the case of a critic with both feet in two borderlands.  Stubbs seems torn between meeting the demands of literary Modernist decorum, and the siren song of the Imagination that guys like Coleridge and Blake were always going on about.  My own reading is that I'm dealing with someone who counts as a closeted Romantic, if that makes any sense, and he seems to know this.

What really matters in all this is the portrait of Browning that Stubbs presents us with.  He sees the Tower poet as a failure of personal, and hence of artistic coherence.  For Stubbs, "The optimism of Browning is more emphatically than consistently or convincingly expressed. From an intellectual point of view, he has been criticized for ignoring the existence of evil. But an examination of the actual imagery and subject-matter of his verse reveals a mind continually drawn to a contemplation of the dark places of human experience. With no characters is he more commonly occupied than the moral or artistic failure and the hypocrite, and he has an almost pathological obsession with crimes of violence and cruelty (xiii)".  Of the poem that inspired Stephen King later on, Stubbs has the following to say.

"After the first visions of the Romantics faded, the Victorian Age failed to find a philosophy sufficiently universal in scope, whereby the nature of evil might be envisaged. Nor can the Englishman of the period be pronounced guiltless of a de liberate refusal to face the fact of evil in the universe. A facile optimism and belief in the inevitability of progress too often went hand in hand with a failure to recognize, on the one side, the nature of the social and economic abuses arising out of industrial capitalism, on the other, of the whole complicated problem of sex. The age of acute sexual repression in ordinary social life, saw, in literature, among other things, the development of the ghost story as a fine art form. The works of Wilkie Collins...and others —above all Sheridan Le Fanu (many of whose tales, such as Green Tea, could quite easily be restated, in the light of modern analysis, in terms of neurotic psychology) —achieve a subtlety of atmosphere, which renders them as far superior to the productions of the Gothic amateurs of the eighteenth century, as they are to those of their few modern successors. This horror is a reflex of lust operating in the subconscious world of dream and death-imagery and of social fear.

"In the poetry of Browning and Tennyson the element of the Horrible persists, though it peeps out obscenely, and for brief moments only, from amid the gilded decoration of Tennyson’s verse, and Browning’s tortuous thickets-of half-digested thought. Browning indeed, though he possesses a less restricted and more vigorous fancy (and far less of purely poetic sensibility), has a distant affinity to Beddoes. He was capable, in Childe Roland, of a pure exercise in the Horrible. It is to be noted that, for all its masterly handling of atmosphere, the emphasis in this poem is not on moral evil, but on sheer physical pain and beastliness: '—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! It may have been a water-rat I speared. But ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.' But usually the horror is felt only as a momentary shudder...such images have nothing to do with the^ intellectual creed of courage and optimism which was the outward face Browning turned to the world (59-60)".  Thus one country is heard from.  The real question now is whether Stubbs' final verdict can be said to hold true or not?

For what it's worth, there are one of two things about his words that bother me.  Let's get the strengths out of the way and admit that he doesn't have to be all wrong.  His statement that the Victorian Age failed to live up to the promise of the Romantic Movement does bear a certain amount of validity, when looked at in the proper perspective and context.  The only mistake that Stubbs could be accused of making here is to ask whether or not this same rubric applies to the advent of the Modern Fantasy novel, as brought about by a talented collection of names such as Williams Morris, E. Nesbit, Lewis Carroll, and Rudyard Kipling?  If we add these achievements into the mix, then the picture becomes a bit more open-ended and less dreary than the summation that Stubbs is able to provide.  It is possible to make a case that the names listed above stand out as the true inheritors of Blake and Coleridge.  All they did was to take the various strands of phantasmagoria to be found in verse collections such as The Book of Urizen, and apply to the prose narrative.  All that a novel like The Magic City amounts to is a re-rendering of the Fantasy landscapes that populate the poetry of Coleridge and Keats, and which they in turn got from being among the first recipients of the classic Nursery Childhood.  And there are moments in a text like The Jungle Books that reach for the same heights of sublime vision as that found in Blake.

When these elements are factored into fuller picture of the Victorian Age, then while it's possible for Stubbs' prognostications to hold true from the standpoint of English Poetry, from another angle, it's a more straightforward case of the next generation of prose talents picking up where their poetic predecessors left off.  It then becomes a question of whether or not Stubbs is right to claim that Browning counts as one of the great artistic failures of his era?  What I keep zeroing in on is the critic's statement that the poet's work is made up of little more than "tortuous thickets-of half-digested thought".  It's funny because it's almost easy to see why he might think this, bearing in mind the obtuse practices that Browning ended up utilizing for the entirety of his career.  At the same time, it is Chesterton who has provided the most logical explanation for why Robert's poem's are like that.  It also afford a possible alternative window onto the poet's art by viewing it as a form of, as was said, rough primitivism.  The only other thing that might get in the way of a full comprehension are a combination of the verse writer's indirect style of speaking, and his commitment to obscure, esoteric subject matter. 

At the same time, Chesterton is quick to rush to Browning's defense when it comes to the matter of his famous obscurity.  The extensive and lengthy passage I'm about to recite him from next could almost function as a pre-emptive response to the major criticisms that Stubbs lobbed in the poet's direction.  He takes a different poem as his starting point in justifying Browning's artistry.  Yet the good news there is that what he has to say is still applicable to this version of The Dark Tower.  Before he gets started, I almost feel like I have to preface the critic's words with and apology of sorts.  The when I say the argument in Browning's favor that you're about to read is lengthy, I mean just that.  It runs the risk of being involved in an article which is already in danger of being more than a regular blog post.  My only excuse is that it is Chesterton is capable of engaging Stubbs criticisms of Browning milieu from the best possible vantage point.  Namely, being to write about that era as someone who grew up in the very middle of it, while it was all happening.  Gilbert Keith was just a fifteen year old boy still finding his footing in the world when Browning passed away in 1889.  As a result, the critic had plenty of time to study the poet with a certain degree of immediate historical veracity that John Heath-Stubbs (who was born in 1918) was never able to have.  It means Chesterton understands a greater deal of the context of the late Victorian Era as Browning lived it because he was able to have the same experience.  So there's a greater share of expertise in what follows.  If it's too much, feel free to skip the next few 8 paragraphs, if it's a more succinct summary of his main talking points you're looking for.  So, to commence things. 

Chesterton writes, " Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question very relevant to the fame and chai-acter of Browning which is raised by" Childe Roland "when it is considered, as most people con sider it, as hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In the first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and very public life, there is not one iota of  evidence that lie was a man who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way.

"He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and even more of the physical health which he con tried to bestow for a certain period upon his wife...He was vain of his masculinity, his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they all agree in one point—that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. 

He talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to give that neat and æsthetic character to his speech which is almost invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was mostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and contempt of his readers. There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of fame and intellectual consideration. 

We constantly hear the statement that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later poems, but the statement is simply not true. Sordello, to the indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, was begun before Strafford, and was therefore the third of his works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring Pauline, the second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious.

"A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of this beautiful optimism. Sordello was the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man. In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulæ that every one understands...But if a young man really has ideas of his own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories unknown to the rest of the world...

"It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception that he was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. For his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. "Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and abstruseness of his message. 

He took pleasure beyond all question in himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the æsthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one.

The Browning then who published Sordello we have to conceive, not as a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realize that the cause lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of Sordello illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part of the difficulty of Sordello, for instance, is in the fact that before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all human epochs— the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in mediæval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a student of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it talks English to an Italian organ grinder (35-41)".  However much he belabors things, everything Chesterton says above goes right back to the point he made earlier on in the review.

It all boils down to the matter of Browning's insular education, coupled with the fact that he never seems to have realized that not having the same sort of formal education as others (in particular with regard to any and all necessary language and grammar classes, where he could have learned how to compose verses in the more proper formalistic styles and manners of expression, like the poets he admired) would result in the kind of artistry that would leave even his most fervent advocates in a state of permanent bafflement.  The funny thing is how this might explain Stubbs complaint about the words somehow no matching up with the sense or vitality of emotion that the Dark Tower is trying to convey.  At the same time, there is the matter of Browning's exceptional knowledge of history and folklore, and his way of displaying it in his verse.  Chesterton gives an example of this by harking back to a famous an defining Civil War in Italy's history.  The problem there is that it's something that concerned the remains of the post-Roman Empire world, and not much of anywhere else.  So most Anglo-American will have no clue as to what a poem like Sordello is even about unless you familiarize yourself with, of all things, the political context of a poem like Dante's Divine Comedy.  I only know what little I do about the Guelphs and the Ghibellines because of gaining an interesting in works like The Inferno.

If I didn't, there's no way on this or any possible green Earth that I would have been able to understand what either Chesterton or Browning were going on about.  Are you starting to see what I mean when I claim that Browning is the kind of writer who almost seems to always accidentally go looking for his own artistic obscurity?  It's not the kind of thing he ever means to do on purpose.  It's just that a lack of the right formal education can do a number on your ability to make yourself clear.  A poem like Sordello is not unreadable.  It's just never going to have much in the way of a mass audience, outside of maybe a very scholarly niche of readers.  The entirety of Browning's output relies on a level of cultural literacy (as opposed to any question sophistication) that I'm pretty sure almost none of us have anymore.  The real hilarious part is that I'm almost certain this same stipulation applies to Stubbs' reading of Childe Roland.  None of the words in the poem connect with him because he doesn't have the same level of cultural literacy under the hood that Chesterton was able to have due to being very well read for a fellow Victorian in Browning's later years.  For the record, Chesterton was also kind enough to leave us his own thoughts about what he thinks the Dark Tower poem means.  It comes attached with a bit of extra context that I've decided to include, because it seems to come very close to describing not just the nature of a work like Childe Roland, but also the peculiar literary achievement of the poet.

"But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange and unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always trying experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often he triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. But whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The last book he published in his life-time, Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than Paracelsus. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable example can be found in that splendid poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."  It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes.

"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."  This is a perfect realization of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If it does, there is but one further truth to be added —that everything means nothing (158-9)".  To summarize, then. Chesterton seems to think the poem is less about Roland's journey through a pre-Eliotic wasteland, and something more akin to the celebration of a mood or poetic atmosphere.  The work functions better s a Tone Poem, so far as he is concerned, or can tell, anyway.

It's kind of a letdown on Chesterton's part, if I'm being honest.  He makes so many interesting comments on the nature of Browning as a poet that could be considered supportable to a surprising degree.  Not only is his writing on the  obscurity of the poetry able to highlight important factors and source, he also allows later reviewers more than a few good starting places to help piece together an answer to Browning's poetic techniques, and their peculiarities.  So naturally, when it comes time to look at the one poem that's under discussion here, he dismisses it with a shrug and claims its all probably just an effective mood piece.  I think where Chesterton drops the ball here is in forgetting that the thing about mood is that it is all the result of a suggestion of meaning.  It the possibility of an aesthetic atmosphere of some kind, one that is capable of reaching into certain levels of the Sublime, can be applied to a work like this, then such results can only come about due to the importance of the poetic signification that the mood either contains within its emotional response, or that the Stock Reactions works as a potential pointer towards.  In other words, mood has to imply meaning, more often than not.  And after all his helpful commentary its Chesterton's greatest fault that he seems uninclined to take any greater notice of the breadcrumb trail the poem lays out, or to follow it to a possible source.

All of which leaves such an important task to the remainder of this essay.  What does the story of Childe Roland mean?  Stubbs says that it counts as a failed literary experiment, while Chesterton claims it as a successful exercise in poetical ambience, and little else.  Both conclusions seem ineffective to me, and part of the reason why is because of what happens in the conclusion of the piece.  Near the end of the poem, Roland thinks that he is well and truly lost.  He seems to have come to a dead end, and with no real way out.  The Paladin Knight stops in thought, wondering what he can possible do after all this  Then, almost as if he's witnessing some kind of demented magic trick, the entire stage setting appears to resets itself around the Knight, so that for the first time he's allowed a clearer view of the settings the stage he's playing in.  It may be no more than the result of a part in the clouds, granting just a little light.  Or else its more a matter of mere, plain daybreak.  Whatever the case, when Roland next looks round, he realizes he is smack in the middle of a great ringed valley.  Similar to the what King appears to utilize as the Golgotha, or Valley of the Dry Bones, where his version of the Gunslinger and the Man in Black hold their little Tarot palaver over fate, destiny, and whether the universe implies nothing or something.  In Browning's version, all Roland finds waiting for him is the Tower itself.  Just before the poem closes, the Paladin has one final vision of his fallen comrades, before he sounds a battle call.

The reader never finds out what, if anything ever happens after that.  The whole poem just ends as suddenly as it began.  When pressed for answers, Browning had just two comments to offer in terms of "What does it all mean"?  One of them was straightforward, the second was a bit more peculiar.  His first reply to enquiries from readers is given in full at the beginning of Chesterton's book.  "When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means (2)".  The second answer the poet gave sometime after is the one that proves a bit more eyebrow raising.  It can be found in the contents of an article with the fitting title of How did Stephen King to the Dark Tower Come? by Peter Armenti.  It's there he shares with us a bit of trivia about the second response Browning gave to fans of this singular poem.  "Browning himself, in addition to stating the poem had no allegorical meaning, shied away from offering readers his own interpretation of the poem. The closest he came to offering or confirming a specific reading of the poem occurred when fielding a question from a visitor. As recounted in The Browning Cyclopaedia (1892): 'Indeed, when the Rev. John W. Chadwick visited the poet, and asked him if constancy to an ideal—”He that endureth to the end shall be saved”—was not a sufficient understanding of the central purpose of the poem, he said, “Yes, just about that” (web)".  So the author endorsed a specific reading of his poem.

What's interesting to note about it is that it's not something the writer came up with on his own.  Instead, it's more an example of a reader response that the artist chooses to engage with.  The key thing to pay attention to is this overlooked bit of exchange between author and fan is this.  The correspondent proposed an optimistic reading of the poem, in terms of both its themes and its ending.  The writer of the story then answers back, and confirms this interpretation.  To be fair, I'm not sure how often anything like this has ever happened anywhere in the history of the Creative Arts.  From what I've seen and read, nine times out of ten, both artist and audience are stuck on the same even keel when it comes to interpreting the meaning of their writings or films.  The most optimistic results you can hope for is when guys like Tolkien or King are capable of seeing at least bits and pieces of what their efforts mean, and then share it around the fanbase as best they can.  Beyond that, when it comes to how well any artist understands the full extent their work, I think something Ray Bradbury said in a preface to a reissue of The Martian Chronicles is as close as either side of the coin will ever come to a definitive answer: "Don't tell me what I'm doing; I don't want to know".  I should be clear, I'm not approaching this from the perspective of one of those Ivory Tower types who advocate for the Death of the Author, or for trying to decipher the meaning of the the text in total isolation from any other context whatsoever.

Both approaches strike me as a good way to abolish the possibility of either Art or any valid form of criticism.  Instead, I go with the views of educators like E.D. Hirsch Jr. who holds that cultural literacy is everything when it comes to ever having a fair shot at understanding a story.  In fact, I think it's possible to see how such a historical contextual meaning can help prove that Browning's agreement to an optimistic reader of The Dark Tower is possible.  In his case, the literacy surrounding his poem has all to do with the particular literary and social milieu in which it was written.  Here is where the observations of John Heath-Stubbs can be of help when applied properly.  In the Darkling Plain, he speaks of Browning's Victorian time frame as a period of disenchantment and disillusionment, and this sense of loss and what can only be described as an impending sense of meaninglessness was on display in a lot of the artistic products of that Era.  A good example that Stubbs is able to give of this poetical fallout comes from the work of one of Browning's contemporaries, the novelist and fellow poet, Thomas Hardy.  Like the author of Childe Roland, he was well respected in his day.  Yet according to Stubbs:

His "his intellectual attitude is the product of his age and of his environment. Hardy’s ironic pessimism is personal, but it can also be traced to his intuitive perception of the social decay of the countryside in which he grew up. From the philosophical point of view it has its roots in that combination of a narrow scientific materialism with an impoverished Puritanism which, for want of a better faith, the late nineteenth century forced upon him. The ruler of Hardy’s universe is the cruel predestinating deity of Calvinism, stripped of his anthropomorphic qualities and theological trappings. He is also the amoral evolutionary law of Huxley and Darwin. Hence, in spite of his genuine poetic perceptions, it is questionable whether Hardy is a great tragic artist. His people, peasants whose traditional liberties (such as they were) have been taken from them, are not sufficiently free. They are incapable of that sin of pride of which according to the old poets, the tragic catastrophe should be the consequence. They fall victims to the chances which have been prepared for them" more by Random chance, to use Stephen King's favorite terminology here, than by any questions of actual Purpose.  "Yet", Stubbs writes, "impoverished as Hardy’s world is, his verse lives by its obvious sincerity. In him the old tradition puts forth its leaves once more, though the branches have become gnarled and wintry in the bleak social and intellectual climate which has fallen upon the countryside (93-4)".  It was also true of Browning's city.

Both the rural and urbane environments of Victoria's reign seemed to be undergoing a kind of collective social crisis of the same sort that T.S. Eliot wrote about in The Waste Land.  Another way to describe it is to speculate that what Eliot was writing about in his most famous poem might not, in fact, have been the first time that Great Britain suffered under such a stifling social malaise.  If Stubbs' prognosis can be described as correct in general (his comments on Browning aside), then it seems as if Eliot's attempt to "Make it New" are really not so unique if the same, or similar socio-cultural conditions where a part of the same environment that poets like Hardy and Browning encountered here and there every day.  It might also help to explain the warped sense of Gothicism that underlies his version of the Tower if we concede the idea that it is this same sense of social (as opposed to personal) crisis that serves as the engine and origin point for the landscape that Roland travels through.  In that case, what the anonymous critic from the SparkNotes site claimed about the poem being a precursor to The Waste Land can be substantiated as part of an essentially correct take on its meaning.  It then might allow us to fit the Tower setting easily within John Parks notion of the then emerging modern Gothic stage as a microcosm of narcissistic and stifling conformity reflective of the despair of Browning's precise cultural moment.

The world of the poem is one in which the protagonist is well aware of its general toxicity, and much like the various speakers of Eliot's poem, it's a condition that Roland wishes to transcend.  The only real difference, then, between the Dark Tower and The Waste Land is less one of content, and more of style.  Browning's poem carries a greater sense of narrative focus, where Eliot's is more deliberately diffuse and multi-vocal.  Roland's journey also has the better sense of forward momentum in its pacing, in comparison with Eliot's almost documentary like panoramic survey.  The one thing both poems have in common is their use of symbolism from the world of folklore, fairy tales, and myth.  What might allow Browning's efforts room for a minute form of distinction is the way he uses his mythic material in the Childe piece.  Start to tie in Margaret Fuller's observations of the poem's stage as a fundamentally fairy tale landscape here.  Try and demonstrate how this is a pointer to Browning's mostly unconscious desire to revive the sense of enchantment touted by the Romantic Movement.  I'm willing to stake a claim that this is the closest I'll ever come to a valid understanding of Childe Roland, and that a final duo of critics can help complete the picture once we take their separate observations and piece them both together.

Doing so should begin to give a final form to the context that not only helped to construct Browning's Tower, but also to give it its meaning, or thematic weight and substance.  The first new source belongs to Stephen Prickett's Victorian Fantasy.  The second I've already mentioned in passing once or twice before, Barbara Melchiori's Poetry of Reticence.  I'm going to have to start with Prickett's insights first, because he is the one who provides the last bit of stage setting necessary to complete the portrait of Browning's cultural time, and his place in it.  Prickett starts off by offering something of a palliative, or balance to the pessimistic picture that Heath-Stubbs presents of the time period shared by both Browning and Chesterton, even going so far as to invoke the latter in making his argument.  "In an impressionistic and personal little book, The Victorian Age in Literature, G. K. Chesterton for example summarizes the prevailing mood of the mid-century as the “Victorian Compromise.” What gave the era its distinctive flavor, at once urban and yet culturally provincial, self-searching and yet smug, he argues, was that it rested upon a peculiar emotional and intellectual compromise between forces whose conflict would otherwise have threatened the stability of the whole social order. In short, for the sake of certain immediate  practical advantages, it was as if Victorian society tacitly agreed to pretend that quite incompatible beliefs and aims could successfully coexist.

"Such an argument clearly deserves respect if only because, as he himself reminds us, Chesterton was born a Victorian, and he can convey a sense of what it actually felt like to be one that is difficult for even the most scholarly historian to recapture. He was also a prolific creator of fantasies. His argument summarizes what many late Victorians, from Thomas Hardy to Edmund Gosse, came to feel about their own upbringing. As a modern literary historian has put it, “Despite the resounding clash of individual wills, there was until late in Victoria's reign, a desire for cultural synthesis urgent enough to inspire from even the most rebellious a concession to an established social morality.” Certainly it is difficult for us to sympathize with the accepted bases of Victorian society unless we grasp that England in the 1840s was engaged in one of the greatest moral and social cleanups that, short of actual physical revolution, any society has known. During the 1830s there had been a series of wide-reaching political reforms—extending the franchise and attempting to check some of the cruder forms of electoral corruption. Slavery was abolished; a few of the worst excesses of child and female labor conditions were tackled, and in many occupations working hours were limited for the first time. Even the labyrinthine processes of ecclesiastical reform were put in motion (37-8)".  Prickett then concludes his summary like this.

"For all its faults, and its fundamental instability, what Chesterton calls “the Victorian Compromise” was one that managed to hold Dickens, Browning, and Tennyson for much of their lives (39)".  While it would be a mistake to not acknowledge the facts he gets right in pointing out the strenuous efforts at social reform that took place during the reign of Victoria, there's still the risk that Prickett will tend to paint a portrait of the age in colors that shade a bit too much in the opposite direction of things.  If it's possible to make a case that Stubbs' portrait of mid to late 19th century Britain is too pessimistic, then while the one Prickett offers never quite manages to go too far in the opposite direction, it does threaten to cross an invisible line of reader credulity.  The good news for the Victorian Fantasy study is that it never falls off the tightrope.  Instead, Prickett is to be congratulated for giving us further clues to the context of Browning and his poem.  It comes in the form of a comment the author makes in passing, right in the middle of explaining how "Dickens’s greatest Christmas myth was first and foremost a response to contemporary revelations about the state of the poor (53)".  It's within this contexture of the Victorian struggle with economic inequality that the author of Child Roland enters the picture in a very indirect way.  "Earlier in 1843" Dickens "had been deeply disturbed to read a Government Blue-book on the conditions of children’s employment (the same report that had moved Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write her poem, The Cry of the Children (ibid)".  The vital clue here comes right at the end quotation.

It's Prickett's brief mention of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the poet's wife that I'd argue gets us closer to the meaning of the Dark Tower in its poetic retelling.  Specifically, it is her poem The Cry of the Children that Barbara Melchiori is convinced acts as an unremarked upon bit of Inspiration that the Roland poet drew upon in constructing his own world that has Moved On.  The way she sets about proving this starts with her making what might sound like a rather startling claim about what she sees as an overlooked element of the poem.  Her idea might sound out of left field, yet I found it clarifying, as it was the right word at the right time.  It helped a lot of my thoughts about this verse narrative coalesce together, and fall into place.  Thus I was given the final piece of the puzzle I'd been looking for to help understand the meaning and purpose of this iteration of The Dark Tower.  I'll explain what I'm talking about in a minute.  Right now, let's hear the relevant passages from Prof. Melchiori's critical study:

"The waste land of "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is the waste land of legend - it has been laid waste by a dragon.  This monster never actually appears in the poem, but the atmosphere of horror and fear are the more convincing because we know it is there.  For the unseen is always more terrifying than the seen, and "Childe Roland" has many of the components of nightmare.  (Influential William Blake scholar and critic, David V. Erdman, sic), in the single best essay to be written about this much-discussed poem, realized this when he entitled his paper "Browning's Industrial Nightmare", where he pointed out the main import of the poem as Browning's awareness of the evils of industrial competition, and showed how much it was influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children".  Everything which I have found in my reading of and around the poem supports this finding of Erdman's, not least a letter from Robert to Elizabeth postmarked 19 January 1846: '...night dreams have invariably been of one sort.  I stand by (powerless to interpose by a word even) and see the infliction of tyranny on the unresisting man or beast (generally the last) and I wake just in time not to die:.  Cruelty to children, as expressed in sentimental terms by Elizabeth in "The Cry of the Children" and a sense of guilt for involvement in the system (the sort of involvement guilt we feel today over the atom bomb) must underlie the factory-engine torture-tools quoted by Erdman

"In his "conscious" poem on a factory child, Pippa Passes, written some thirteen years before "Child Roland", Browning's approach was quite different.  Pippa has the same genesis as Dickens' Bob Cratchit, there is the same optimistic  idea of the goodness of the poor.  Though slower in obtaining recognition, Pippa was nearly as popular as A Christmas Carol, and for the same reasons.  Yet Dickens and Browning both knew well that extreme poverty brutalizes, and the fact that Browning avoided saying so openly has made his hidden declaration so much more intense.  To return to the invisible dragon.  We find traces of its recent passage: '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 (114-115)".  A few pages further on, Melchiori arrives at a very simple and succinct conclusion.  "Childe Roland is called upon to face everything which most filled Browning with horror: last and not least death itself (118)".  It was a handful of observations such as these which really served to clarify my own thoughts about the poem's meaning, both in terms of narrative, and its thematic implications.  Melchiori goes on tryin to decipher the rest of the imagery, yet I think she's inadvertently arrive at the final import of Browning's words within her essay's opening paragraphs.

Roland's journey is meant to be seen as a poem of two component parts.  One of them is satirical, the other Romantic.  The satire comes from the author's use of the wasteland motif.  Browning is neither the first writer to utilize this poetic image in the service of telling a story.  Nor was there any question of his ever being the last.  Much like with the Enchanted Forest that all of us know in some fashion or another from the likes Tolkien or the Brother's Grimm, there's just something creative idea of a sterile and barren landscape which never ceases to set the human imagination on fire.  Part of its might come from deep rooted responses ingrained into us through centuries of struggle for survival.  On a purely natural level, the idea of having to make your way through such an arid desert in the hope of some far off greener pasture you're not even sure is there ought to be enough to send a primordial chill or two down your spine.  It's the natural notion of the wasteland as a threat to one's life, and the literary application of this simple fact of life as an artistic representation of deep-seated fears accounts for the most basic reason why it keeps cropping up in our minds.  The other is down to the various symbolic qualities that the image either possesses, or else just seems to draw around itself as a matter of course.  The Valley of the Dry Bones is one of those pictures whose metaphorical qualities seems to have been recognized well beyond the reach of recorded human history.  It's a great canvas on which to attach various meanings.

The wasteland's appearance in the written record tells the tale of how it was often associated with the idea of failure and judgment in the minds of even our earliest ancestors.  It's set down in ancient texts as what might have to be described as the Ultimate Bad Place.  Endsville, as Stephen King refers to it in The Dark Half; "the place where all rail service terminates(46)".  In Desperation, another of his novels, King equates the desert as a place synonymous with what he calls "The Siren Song of Zero...In all this, King is doing no more than drawing on a pedigree so old no one can remember how the idea first cropped up.  All that will ever be known for sure is that from our earliest self-understandings onward, the wasteland stands as a creepily vibrant symbol for for concepts like badness or failure.  It's a stage setting in which something as gone, or else just naturally is wrong.  With an artistic lineage such as this, it should be easy enough to figure out the basics of how the early mythologists eventually arrived at concepts such as the Fisher King and the numerous other tropes associated with the idea that writers like Eliot would go on to make famous.  It's therefore not too difficult to figure out how the image a place gone wrong would sooner or later lend itself to the thematic exploration of times that are out of joint.

If I had to take a number and choose who I would nominate for the first European author to employ this motif for satirical purposes, then it might have to be a Medieval fella who is mostly anonymous by now, even if we know his name, William Langland.  His Piers Plowman consists of the author's satirical jabs the corruption infecting the various institutions and social circles of the Middle Ages in which he lived, and the idea of the wasteland is just one of several colorful tropes that Langland exploited in constructing what does have to count as one of the first major satires in English literature.  With this in mind, it almost makes sense enough to think of a later poet like Browning as an inheritor of a long respected tradition in British letters.  Satirizing the foibles and failures of culture doesn't always have to be humorous in order to work.  Sometimes one of the most effective ways to drive an ethical point home is to rely on the good, old fashioned fear tactics of the Gothic genre.  It's what Browning's poem seems to be up to, anyway.  And the surprising thing about Melchiori's reading of the piece is how well it holds up, at least on this point.  There really does seem to be a sense in which the poet's Tower acts as a commentary for mental sterility of British culture in the wake of the Victorian Compromise.  It's a work that seems to cast its glance upon a scene very similar to the one T.S. Eliot observed in the aftermath of the Great War.  An empire crumbling, it's people starving, and few willing to help out.

The key struggle of Browning's incarnation of Roland is that he's stuck with a crisis of self.  He's made up of two opposing frames of mind uneasily coexisting together in the same skull.  On the one hand, he's a Paladin, a Knight straight out of the world and legends of Arthur and Charlemagne.  The trouble is that the narrative paints him as possessing a very modern mindset.  One that would have been familiar to Browning his fellow contemporaries.  It's here in this split of the character's mental space that the whole drama of the poem unfolds.  We have a protagonist confronted with two facts going in opposite directions.  He's figure from the world of Chivalry, yet he's occupying a secondary world and framework that belongs to an Era of Disenchantment.  This zeitgeist is something that has clearly seemed into Roland himself.  "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".  These snippets of internal monologue might just count as the most important out of all the others.  For they go on to color the entire story and its events as Roland narrates them to us.  Just like J.G. Parks has said above, the outer landscape mirrors the inner disorder of the hero, as appropriate to the Gothic tale.

What important to keep in mind is that none of the materials Browning has to work with are new.  The character of Roland, the setting of the wasteland, and even the Tower itself all hail from days of old, when nights were bold, and we all lived in the forest, because no one could really live anywhere else.  The knight on a quest through a treacherous land is a poetic that could only have come about during the height of the Middle Ages.  As such, they are the products of a worldview which is very different from the perspective that Browning writes in.  The peasants and Old Wives who came up first with Roland, then Burd Ellen and the Dark Tower later on created or uncovered these archetypes as symbols, or classic expressions of the Medieval frame of mind.  It's an entire mental paradigm that can sometimes be as quirky as it is out of date.  Nor do I believe for a second that men like either Browning or Tolkien were in any way eager to see their culture slide back into all of that.  What each of them seems to have really valued was the sense of Enchantment that somehow managed to underlie even the most darkest of Old Wives Tales.  It's this sense of Wonder that Browning seems to have been fond of.  A poem like Childe Roland, therefore, might act as a satiric commentary on what the modern age has lost for itself.

The whole point of this proposed satire can be seen in how the poem sets up a thematic dichotomy to its mythological sources.  If the original Roland and his various journeys are painted in shades of bright Enchantment, then Browning presents the reader with all of these classic fairy tale tropes as seen through the lens of a disenchanted, Victorian naturalism.  What the poem gives us, then, might be thought of as a snapshot of the typical children's storybook world when the value is drained out of it.  All the basic tropes still remain in place.  However, the normally bright hues and tones of the typical realm of magic have all begun to take on a dry and sterile look.  The implicit implication of the story seems to be that this sense of decay is brought about due to Victorian Man's decision to consider such material as lacking in any kind of intrinsic value.  As a result, it's not just the world of fairy tale that grows desiccated and impoverished.  The failure of modernity's Imagination finds its outer echo in the various real life hypocrisies, social inequalities, and Imperial crimes committed by the British Empire in the name of progress.  This is an aspect of the poem that Barbara Melchiori highlights for us in her study on Browning.  It's there she posits that  "his night mare was not merely industrial, but was filled with war imagery (116)".  She ably substantiates her claim by point out a passage in the poem.  

It's one where Roland makes his way through the aftermath of what are clearly meant to be seen as the remains of a war.  All around the protagonist are broken fragments of artillery and machinery, and the punchline is that nothing of what what the Gunslinger ever wandering Knight sees can really tell him anything about the conflict.  There's no indication which would let him or the audience know what happened here.  What was the nature of the battle?  Who were the participants?  Who was the winner?  Who lost?  Was there even anything important going on here?  All the Paladin can see is just the burnt and hollowed out husks of the modern war machine.  All of it has been put to its full use, and so everything was reduced to ruin. The entire passage is meant to highlight the ultimate futility of combat, and the pointlessness of the sort of Might Makes Right mindsets that set such results in motion.  

What makes this passage something of a standout moment is the way it highlights how the surrealism of the poem works its own peculiar brand of Gothic magic.  It seems pretty clear we're meant to view Roland as looking more or less like his original, Medieval self.  He's this Knight of the Middle Ages traveling alone through barren countryside.  Maybe he's on horseback.  He could also just be traveling on foot.  That part doesn't quite matter so much as just this.  What Browning has given his readers in the battleground aftermath sequence is a deliberate anachronistic setup.  It all starts out looking prototypical enough.  You've got this knight traveling through a wasteland.  There's not much scenery to go around, yet based on how things start out, nothing seems that far out of the ordinary.  It could even function as a scene straight out of David Lowery's The Green Knight.  Then we arrive at the scene of the battle aftermath, and things take a turn straight out of left field.  Up till then. nothing that the narrator tells us would have been out of place in a story by Chaucer, or a Medieval Books of Hours.  It's when bits and broken fragments of modern day combat machinery begins to appear on all sides of the protagonist as he makes his way through the scene of battle that the poem sounds, not its first off note, just the major one.  We're being given two poetic images meshed together in a way that they really should be.

If the story concerns a knight on a quest, then that idea, just by itself, is enough to conjure a set of standard narrative expectations in our mind.  From a starting point like that, there are any number of directions a fable like this can go.  Melchiori highlights one example by pointing to the possibility that a dragon haunts the landscape of the poem, somewhere just out of sight.  Nor is the idea of the hero stumbling upon a battle or its remains something that you can consider out of bounds for a setup like this.  Indeed, it's almost standard operating procedure in a Fantasy setting.  What we're not expecting, what the poem hasn't prepared us for up to this point, is for the brave knight to stumble across the finale of a war that was waged using the weapons, munitions, and armaments of the modern day military campaign.  A good way to suggest the surreality of this moment would be to picture this.  You've got this knight, he's riding through a desert on horseback.  For a moment, you might think he's somewhere in the Middle East, maybe during the Crusades.  Then he crests the top of a hill, and looking down, both he and you can see the junked out tanks and jeeps dating to, say, the recent War in Afghanistan.  All the basic tools of engagement are there, complete with blasted out turrets, and gatling guns fastened to campers.  The knight's only response to this scene is to give it the once over, shake his head, and move on.  That's a good way to plant a boatload of questions and puzzles firmly in the mind of the audience.

The image constructed above is so jarring precisely because it is made out of deliberate historical contrasts.  Most of us are quite willing to admit that a knight counts as a form of soldier.  Seeing such a figure march into battle is one thing.  Seeing that battle consist of current day weapons is enough to knock our minds for a loop.  Not just because we weren't expecting it, but because we know such events could never take place.  So this is just the situation that Browning leaves us with.  His poem starts out in the typical fairy tale setup, and then he grants us the image of a Medieval knight carefully picking his way through a modern day battle field, most likely complete with guns.  The only way the dissonance of a picture like can be perfected would be if you were to, say, have I Only Have Eyes for You, by the Flamingos playing on the soundtrack.  You're welcome, by the way.  It's strange as hell, and that seems to be precisely the point.  It signals that the secondary world of the poem is meant to be viewed more as a symbolic one, rather than a straightforward presentation in narrative realism.  It's also the kind of creative move that I'd argue works in the story's favor.  It sharpens the clarity of the otherwise obscure satire at work in the piece.  Realizing that Roland is making his way through a scene of modern warfare goes a long way toward helping us to understand the multi-faceted target of Browning's commentary. 

At least part of the meaning of this poem lies in its attack on the Victorian Compromise that critics like Chesterton highlighted above.  Much like his wife Elizabeth did with The Cry of the Children, or Dickens with A Christmas Carol, part of the thematic weight of the Dark Tower stems from its ability to address a time that was out of joint, and the way this caused the people of Great Britain to suffer at the hands of the ruling classes.  In this regard, part of the work's makeup is accounted for by the social conscience of the poet.  It's a mindset that Chesterton once again seems the most capable of telling us about.  Speaking of the formative years in the growth of the artist's mind, G.K. notes an interesting thing about the contexts in which this imaginative development happened:  

"(The) forces that were moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their characters practically formed in a period long previous to their appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realize Garibaldi as a sudden and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic Poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution.

"The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that  period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great Jacobins who does not realize that to them breaking the civilization of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was rebelling against Satan.

"There began to arise about this time a race of young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all sides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middle classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired office-boys.

"Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, in the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often fanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding which attaches to most other poets...Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the Browningite and the anti Browningite, is that the second says he was not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else.

"The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathizers feel if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume called Incondita were noticed to contain the fault of "too much splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than any one I have ever seen"...Every tale that remains of him in connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely romantic spirit by which he was then possessed...Such...of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as...climbing up into the elms above Norwood to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of Pippa Passes. 

"At the end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since become less common in Camberwell. When Browning as a boy was intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotized himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as the hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those early days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth was so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating in great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a young man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance now except in Italy." "Well," said Browning, "I should make an exception of Camberwell."

"Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilized things as an optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert Browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that he cannot understand (15-20)".  There are a number of important elements to unpack about what might be called the critic's primary thesis about the nature of Browning.  In order to put them all into their proper context, we'll have to bring John Heath-Stubbs onto the stage.  Because what Chesterton says above acts as an indirect challenge to the portrait the later writer paints of the artist.  For one thing, both me are at odds in terms of where to place Browning on the literary timeline.  Stubbs sees him as a late-come inheritor.  A less than talented follower of the Lake Poets who, in Heath's eyes, is never able to measure up to the heights and depths of such a work as The Prelude.

It is possible to answer this charge by asking just how any attempted poet is supposed to scale any literary mountain higher than the one Wordsworth claimed his autobiography in verse?  Eliot, for instance, was able to carve his name forever in history with The Waste Land, yet in terms of mere estimation, I find myself forced to place defining poems of the Modernist and Romantic Movements side by together on the same shelf.  In terms of literary quality, I can only see each of them as equals, and no more.  Neither Eliot nor Wordsworth can claim superiority to one another in my book.  In proof of this, I can find it possible to rate the quality of Browning's own efforts with the Dark Tower not just on the same shelf between Wordsworth and Eliot, but I also know where to place him among the two of his other fellow versifiers.  He belongs in spot after Wordsworth and just before Eliot in terms of cultural aesthetic impact.  I agree with those critics who would see Browning's work in general, and a piece like Roland in particular, as the development of a particular form of Romantic style.  One that does not eschew the basic thinking of earlier authors like Keats and Coleridge.  It's merely that in brining the poetic monologue into a new form of maturity, Browning was able to craft a number of sophisticated subjective statements that advanced the treatment of character and situation in the Romantic formula.  He took the first person I of works like The Prelude, and gave them variety.

It allowed Browning to take up where Wordsworth left off, while also finding a greater range of dramatic uses for the techniques the Lake Poet had pioneered.  Another way in which Chesterton is able to get the better of Stubbs' judgment calls on Browning is simply by paying attention to dates of birth and death.  In laying out the writer's intellectual mind frame, Chesterton is quick to associate Roland's second modern chronicler with models such as Shelly and Bryon.  It becomes easy to figure out the logic of this critical conclusion when we pay attention to the fact that Browning was born in the year 1812.  Keats and Shelley were not just alive and well when the future Tower poet was born.  They were both still in the prime of their lives.  They also stuck around just long enough for the young Robert to become thoroughly acquainted with not just their work, but also the philosophy behind it.  The same one that Chesterton outlined above.  Keats and Shelley met their end 1821 and 1822 respectively.  Browning may have been no more than 9 or 10 at the time it all happened.  Yet already his father had begun to educate him in the ways of the Poetry of the Lake Districts, and writers like Coleridge would still be able to hold on (both in life, as well as the growing artist's Imagination) until 1834, when Roland's third writer was just getting started on his twenties.  More than enough time to know that by acquainting himself with the Romantic Poets, he'd sort of made himself belong to their worldview.  

When he looked back on the progress he'd made, not just as a writer but also a reader, the young poet found (perhaps not too much to his own surprise) that their Movement was more or less where he belonged.  Is he as good as someone like Coleridge?  Well, I personally am inclined to rate the author of Christabel just a tad higher, yet I can never really call Browning a bad poet.  His work can sometimes be difficult, yet it's not impossible to decipher.  Nor is this the same as saying I think his style is a poor one, either.  A brief run through of the descriptions Roland gives of his journey should be proof enough of that.  There is where we're given a work of such quality that it can stand equal with both Coleridge and Poe.  Ours is not an age given to subtlety and nuance, so its an open question of how much an example like this is clear or not.  However, it's my judgment call and I stick with it.  There are just two more items in Chesterton's delineation of the poet's outlook, and that is the social element, and what Browning does with the materials he's inherited from the Romantics.  He mentions Pippa Passes in passing.  Thanks to Melchiori, we now have a bit of backup to her argument that Childe Roland is, at least in part, a satire of the hypocrisy of the Victorian Compromise, and the abuses of the ruling class.  What needs stressed above all this, however, is the artistic uses, and dramatic purpose that this mindset wound up getting applied to.  And it's here that we come to the second element contained in the poem's artistry.  It's the ability of Browning to work with the archetype in fashioning new and creative uses for the material of Medieval legend. 

He actually seems to have reshaped the entire idea of Roland's mythos, and the only way that could have happened was if there was almost nothing left to work with.  This is what happens when a myth never manages to take hold of the public Imagination.  In the process of doing so, the poet has sort of boiled the protagonist and his adventures down into its most base elements.  We maybe be dealing with a character birthed second hand from events in history, yet the context around him has both vanished and returned in a transfigured fashion.  This is what Roland's world of Medieval myth looks like when seen through the eyes of a world that has almost lost sight of it.  The once familiar landscape of legends and adventure that used to be a shared coin of the realm between the likes of Arthur, Robin, and Roland has now almost been flattened out, and robbed of all but the most necessary of its features.  It's as if Browning has given us a snapshot of what the Medieval stage setting looks like once most of its features have escaped the memory.  In doing so, the poet may also be said to have given us a notion of how the popular Fantasy world might have appeared to a Victorian Era world in which the advances of Lewis Carroll, William Morris, Nesbit, Kipling, and Tolkien had yet to come along.  It's what the Perilous Realm looks like in a time before anyone believed the viability of the Romantic Fantasy.

What the poem seems to suggest is an image of what happens to the land of once upon a time when it loses its value.  It trades in the nature of one aspect of its set design for another.  It goes from being the enchanted glade to a wasteland.  The other implication of Browning's words is that even when a culture ceases to find a value in the world of Romance, that's still not enough to make it cease to exist.  Just as there seems to be no foolproof way to eliminate the mental function known as the Imagination (whatever it may be) so it is also appears to be impossible to get rid of the tropes it relies on to tell its tales.  The Fairy Tale may lose its value, yet it never quite manages to go away.  There might even be a paradoxical quality to this set of circumstances.  As it does seem that the more its demanded that Fantasy be seen as something of no value, the more its figures, creatures, and heroes find a way of haunting the mind that would try to put them away.  It's a phenomenon that's very familiar to psychologists, and guys like Jung would argue that to even try to do away with myths and fairy tales is akin to trying to fit the universe in your hip pocket.  It can't be done.  There's good reason to try and do it.  And besides which, he also argued that the archetypes of myth were necessary for human sanity. 

As such, when Browning had his Inspiration for Childe Roland in a dream, all that seems to have been happening was the Imagination coming to its own defense.  It was a flair sent up in justification of the mental health purposes that Fantasy serves, and perhaps its fitting that it did so by conjuring up materials from a mythos that never was.  Perhaps the Fantasy genre's slump in its social reputation during Browning's age is also an indicator of why the story presents itself as a journey through the wasteland.  It's a warning of sort.  An admonition to not let the inner riches of the mind and its capabilities in the real world go to waste.  Part of this obtuse yet fertile creative strategy is the creation of deliberate chronological anachronisms, such as having he Medieval protagonist's journey carry him the kind of combat zone that is symbolically reminiscent of the various wars that were waged in the author's time as part of the then ongoing project of Imperial Expansion.  It's a form of surrealistic narrative experiment that functions as its own risk or creative gamble, yet it not only pays off in the work's favor.  It also might point to a further source of Inspiration.  The poem's deliberate establishment of cutting and pasting various time periods and genres together also seems a harbinger for Stephen King's decision to emulate precisely these very aspects of the poem in the crafting of his own Roland.  

Throughout the whole process, there are two final things that think need to be kept in mind.  It's that Browning's poem embodied two facts in one.  It was a poetic harbinger of things to come, and it was a clarion call, of sorts.  Childe Roland was written in 1852, according to the author's testimony. It wasn't until 1855 that the figure who would one day become the Gunslinger saw first major public debut.  What's notable about it is that this simple bit of gnomic verse was, in fact, the best candidate for anything like a major work of Fantasy fiction up to that time.  It was not the first Victorian work in that genre, by any means.  That honor still belongs to Charles Dickens tale what happened one night to a miserable soul known as Ebenezer Scrooge.  Instead, it's more that The Dark Tower amounts to the only major work of the Fantastic to appear in, and perhaps even bridge the gap the arrival of the Christmas Carol in 1845, and the first published work of fantasist William Morris later on in 1858.  Until these three names put the efforts listed above on the map, the realm of the Fantasy genre as we now know really did have to count as little more than a blank slate.  That's because in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, none of the major names who would go on to define what Fantasy had yet begun to leave their definitive marks in the field.  The major cartography didn't begin until the the mid-1860s.  That's when Lewis Carroll told the world about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and  it all got started.

It seems to have been the initial success of Carroll that kickstarted everything into overdrive.  The nature of Alice's success really does seem best described as being of the type that we'd call Inspiring.  It's what gave the later defining names of the genre (Edward Lear, Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and Edith Nesbit) the spur each of them seems to have needed to try and place their own Fantastic Imaginings out there.  It's all amounted to one great, big, genre-defining shuffle that Browning's name and effort tends to get lost in.  However, I think a case can be made here that his work on Roland and the Tower has to be seen as an inherent part of the birth pangs of Fantasy.  It's best to think of the poet sitting alone, all by himself at twilight, perhaps in the midst of that same barren waste that the Gunslinger Paladin traveled through.  We see him trying to light a fire, which represents the Inspiration for what would become the poem of Roland.  It's a fitful process.  Some of the piled embers refuse to light at first.  Yet soon the author's has begun to shoot of flints and sparks, which travel high enough into the air that they are able to get the attention of other dwellers in the wasteland, until soon the entire desolation has been lit up with similar campfires.  Some of they may burn brighter that the one set by Browning, yet it's clear none of them would exist without his initial attempts at setting off that first spark.  That, I think, is the true impact of Childe Roland.

It was poem, or narrative, composed by a mind alight with fire of the spirit of the Romantics.  Much like William Blake, Browning seems to have known himself to be living in a disenchanted age.  One in which the poet found himself surrounded on all sides by those Dark Satanic Mills that his earlier predecessor had so vehemently railed about.  What must have startled and dismayed Browning was the way in which it was clear his own age was beginning to acquiesce to the mindset that lay in back of Blake's twisted spirit of the era.  It was something he and his wife tried to tackle in a head-on, conscious way, with poems like Pippa Passes, and The Cry of the Children.  It was only when the Dream of Roland came about that the poet seems to have found the right set of poetic images, drawn from Medieval myth and legend, which could embody the values of all he was trying to say all in one place.  Part of the reason it's so difficult for readers nowadays to get this kind of clearer grasp of the poem's themes is because a lot of the context that birth the Dark Tower has been lost in various ways.  Part of its is that Browning's reputation as an artist has gone so far underground that it's this one bit of verse narrative left that anyone remembers him from.  Another thing is that while a lot of what he fought against was happening here in America, Browning was never a celebrity here until much later onwards.

Even when he achieved a certain amount of status in American Letters, it was never all that big, and besides which, even our context shared a certain amount of overlap with his, that still wasn't enough even then for readers to connect the dots between the two.  In fact, it's difficult to tell if Childe Roland was even the most well regarded of the poet's works.  We know it got it fair share of critical remarks, yet I've not been able to find much in the way of sustained commentary on the Tower in the way essay has functioned.  All of that came later on, after the Browning and his fellow Victorians had all gone on toe clearing at the end of the path, and the successes of T.S. Eliot gave permission for scholars to turn a critical lens to poetry of a similar bent and slant from the then recent past.  It was only at that point that Browning's fortunes began to take a turn for the better.  What I think got lost in the shuffle, however, was that the historical importance of the poem.  As one of the first major works of Fantasy to be published in the modern era, it's greater significance tends to get overlooked.  It wasn't just a trailblazer of sorts, like Dickens' Carol, it also turns out to have been something of a rallying cry.  When Roland reaches the Tower at the end of his quest, he sounds a challenge call with his slug-horn.

What a closer examination of the Dark Tower's place in the history of British Letters reveals is that the thematic import of this final action of the protagonist seems to have had a larger symbolic significance.  Much like Browning's contemporaries, this prototypical Fantasy hero finds himself caught up in a time and place where even his own person seems to be of little of any importance.  Even the goal of his quest acts as riddle he's lost the answer to.  It isn't until he finds himself at the foot of Tower itself, and has a vision of all the heroes of the past that Roland appears to come to some form of self-realization.  "How such an one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate".  This sense of recall seems to imply that an unspoken change has taken place in Roland's character and outlook at the conclusion of the journey.  He's not only found the Tower, he's also discovered what it means, both to him, and as a thing of value in itself.  The perfect irony, of course, is that the poem concludes before the reader can figure out what this holistic meaning is supposed to be? The best way I can described it is to claim that it was an appeal for the merits of the Imagination to a public for which this vital function of the human mind had lost all value.  It's the basic situation that Roland finds himself in at the start of the poem.  

At the close of the action, however, the protagonist seems to undergo a rediscovery of meaning.  A recognition of purpose, both in terms of his quest and his own nature as a hero, that flies in the face of all the randomness of life's vicissitudes.  In the last resort, if I have to offer up an answer for what the Dark Tower means in Browning's poem, then I'd have to say represents the philosophy, or Tradition in which the narrative itself is written or inscribed.  The Tower, in other words, is meant as a symbol for the spirit of Romanticism.  The same way of thinking that Inspired Browning's own personal heroes, like Wordsworth and Keats.  They were all on the way out of the picture when the poet was born, and by the time Roland arrived at his destination, they might as well have been those shades whose figures the future Gunslinger spied ranged along the hills.  Perhaps there's a sense in which those brief ghosts are meant to represent just that.  If they do so, then it's important to keep the final viewpoint that the Paladin has of them before he performs the story's final action.  What began in despair and randomness ends in hope and purpose.  Whatever doubts and puzzles Roland has for himself and his journey at the start, all of its seems to be answered with a sense of renewal, with a resounding call for a Romantic affirmation.

It was this sense of Enchantment that Browning (much like J.R.R. Tolkien later on, in the aftermath of the First World War) seems to have been eager to revive in whatever mode of expression was capable of meeting their modern moment.  The interesting part is how this conclusion jibes with an observation that King made in one of his Tower adjacent tomes, called The Talisman.  There's a moment in this novel King wrote in partnership with Peter Straub, where the main lead pauses in his journey for a moment to take in a kind of magic arial display, as a group of players glide through the air on manufactured wings.  Pretty soon the observer realizes that what he's seeing is all part of some elaborate, fantastical game, and he marvels at the sudden realization it causes in his mind.  "Joy.  They live in a mystery, these people live in a mystery.  It's joy that holds them up (280)".  If you were to ask me what kind of Romantic idea ultimately lies in back of Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, then it would have to be summed up like that.  In many ways, this has been one of the most fascinating, not to say arduous tales to both read and unearth.  It's also weird to realize you've made it right to the end.

It all started out as a curiosity about what went into the making of King's very odd and ultimately unsuccessful attempt of crafting a fantasy world.  I think I've gotten as close to the answer of it as I ever will, so that's alright.  What I'm not sure I ever expected was just how long it would take for me to get to the bottom of things, or that I was ever a hundred percent aware that this was where it would all lead.  Hell, I didn't even expect to be introduced to the writing of forgotten fantasists like Ludovico Ariosto, yet it's all been there and done that now.  So like I say, it's all been weird, yet ultimately gratifying.  I'm able to say I've been able enjoy my time excavating for the roots of King's Tower series.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that all of the literature he drew on managed to be a lot more entertaining than expected.  It's a case where the author's sources end up as more of a collective joyride than what he tried to do with it later on.  That proves no different where this little, obscure, yet gripping poem by a forgotten name called Robert Browning is concerned.  On it's own terms, his narrative in verse amounts to this fascinating mind trip.  It's a poem that looks both backwards to the phantasmagoria contained in the poetry of Coleridge and E.A. Poe, as well as forward to the likes to Eliot, Tolkien, and that of King.

The most fascinating thing about Browning's best known work is how well its managed to hold on to tis shelf life, while also acting as a this quirky, creative sounding board for other artists on both a direct and indirect level.  It's a poem that keeps flitting in and out of the spotlight.  Here one moment, gone the next.  It's one of those literary pieces that remains a perhaps submerged background influence while other artists a crafting it into bits and pieces of their own efforts.  For instance, I sometimes wonder if the same Inspiration that gave Browning the Tower is also responsible for a song like 40,000 Headmen, by Traffic.  There's an oldie but goodie with a great deal of the same gnomic eloquence as Browning's wasteland epic, and it even features actions that you can imagine guys like the Gunslinger or Bilbo Baggins getting caught up in.  I'm pretty certain a case can be made that the archetype that Browning utilized has also gone on to scattered its creative DNA all over the artistic landscape through the years.  

What I can say beyond this is that it's a poem that deserves to be read.  It's not the same as a typical prose story, I grant you.  The good news is there's no inherent reason why a myth told in irregular couplets can't be just as good as one related in the expected modern style.  Even the Orlando Furioso is worth making an effort at.  Browning's rhyme scheme took me a minute or two to figure out on my own first try, yet once I was able to tell which words carried the same harmonic sound to one another it's not that different from the sort of rhythm and cadence we used to find our old Dr. Seuss books.  Granted, Ted Geisel never once wrote a prototype to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, yet that's apples and oranges in the long run.  What Browning has given us here has to count as one of the great, unsung Fantasy Quest narratives, one of the first before the genre really took off in a big way.  It only makes sense to see him as one of the brick layers for the modern foundations of this type of story.  It stands as an overlooked, and therefore criminally unrecognized poetic tour-de-force.  One that's able to prove an Epic doesn't have to be long in order to live up to the title.  It's a great Gothic tale of meanings lost and found.  Of duty and self-discovery.  And it's able to bridge whatever gap might exist between the works of Tolkien and Stephen King.  That's why I'm able to say Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came deserves a read.