AN OUTLOOK OF THE DARK TOWER
Reading one of my favourite authors, Stephen King, I was captured by a reference to Robert Browning in the last pages of The Dark Tower VII, and immediately I began to study “Childe Roland”, "the narrative poem that lies at the root of King's long (and trying) story; an idea suddenly occurs to him”. The myth of the Dark Tower inspired many writers in literature, starting from ancient tales. Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came" was written in 1855 and first published in the poet's most famous collection of poems entitled Men and Women. It is divided into six-line stanzas, mostly in irregular stressed pentameter lines.
Childe Roland is a very popular fairy tale. There are many versions of it and in 1892 Joseph Jacobs wrote his version of the fairy tale in his book English Folk and Fairy Tales, basing the story on Scottish ballads. This tale shares the main character's name and a tower, but nothing else with Browning's poem. The title itself, indeed, is a direct reference to Shakespeare's King Lear, in Act III, scene four. In the fourth scene of the third act of the tragedy Edgar, Gloucester’s son, appearing as Poor Tom pretends to be a madman singing a mad-song:
Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still 'Fie, foh, and fum
I smell the blood of a British man.
We already know from its title that Childe Roland is “a knight in training”. Childe, in fact, “is a term that describes a knight—or a gunslinger—on a quest. A formal term, and ancient”. His name, instead, suggest that the protagonist is the paladin of The Song of Roland, an anonymous French chanson de geste. However Browning does not retell The Song of Roland but his starting point in the poem is Shakespeare. The dark, cynical Roland searches for the tower and undergoes various hardships on his way, although most of the obstacles arise from his own imagination. He wanders through an obscure, marshy waste-land, filled with horrors and scary noises that prefigures important modernist works such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The speaker's discourse is not addressed to a silent hearer whom the speaker would have to seduce and convince but it is much more self-oriented and for this reason some critics have argued that "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is much more a soliloquy than a monologue, even though it has traditionally been referred to as a monologue, and not a soliloquy. Several things indicate that it is all a nightmare: the scenery changes immediately after Roland turns off the road: in stanza XVIII there is no sound or sight, but a little river suddenly appears and the plain gives way to mountains just as it happens "in a bad dream perhaps". So, supposing that the tale is nothing more than a nightmare, in a sense changes our expectations about this narrative. What does Browning really gain from such a suggestion? Browning felt compelled to write the poem despite his uncertainty about its purpose, in fact it was written in a single day and its figurative style generally confused anyone seeking allegorical solutions to its perplexing narrative. Much of the language in this poem reflects the ugly scenery and hellish journey it discusses and it functions as both an imaginative journey and a journey through the imagination. On one hand this work shares both fantastic setting and characterization with Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. These two authors create characters that are closer, “physiologically, at least, to what we consider real”. When the characters in these works approach realism, the things that surround them become stranger, reminding the reader of their fantastic qualities. Although these two works take place in different worlds (Tennyson's in a mythical Camelot and Browning's in a distorted falling places) they both describe a journey. Unlike Tennyson’s Idylls, Browning's narrator has been performing a "world-wide wandering” for years, and the poem is a kind of desperate quest. But in contrast to Childe Roland, Tennyson's Idylls are a sequence of poems, “each telling a separate story and there is no overarching journey. Travel does play a role in the poems”, only at the end, in "The Passing of Arthur", is Arthur's death actually considered a journey.
Roland thinks of home and old friends as he moves forward. The protagonist ends his journey abruptly when he reaches the tower but what he finds inside is never revealed. We do not exactly know the tower’s significance although over the centuries many theories have been suggested. Some critics have assigned to the dark tower the meaning of the holy grail or even God himself. Many other have argued that Childe Roland is Browning himself and his quest is to write this poem or maybe the Dark Tower contains what Browning or Roland fear most. In the book Robert Browning: How To Know him, the American writer William Lyon Phelps gives different interpretations of the poem, which are connected with both death and quest:
First, the Tower is the quest, and Success is found only in the moment of Failure. Second, the Tower is the quest, and when found is worth nothing: the hero has spent his life searching something that in the end is seen to be only a round. Third, the Tower is not the quest at all—it is damnation, and when the knight turns aside from the true road to seek the Tower, he is a lost soul steadily slipping through increasing darkness to hell.
In this essay I have focused my attention on two particular aspects: the Dark Tower as symbol of death and the remembrance of a lost “possible” love codified in a very few lines of the poem.
II
DEATH
The poem starts in medias res, a neccessary technique in dramatic monologue, “since the speaker has obliquely to suggest the context, the presence of listeners or witnesses”. It begins with Roland's suppositions about the truthfulness of the “hoary cripple” who gives him the direction to the Dark Tower. Who might this "hoary cripple" be? Accepting the assumption that the Dark Tower means death, one can assume a great deal from the disturbing description of this first character, that seems demon-like, or even the devil himself. His wicked eye and his “skull-like laugh” are emphasised. What is interesting in this analysis is that if the “hoary cripple” lied, why does Childe Roland follow his directions?:
“Maybe he is courting death”. What is the real purpose of this quest? How is it all connected with death? Through his journey Browning describes us the paths towards the obscure Tower inserting many symbols that in the Victorian Age were strictly connected with death. Fistly, the use of the colour red: the landscape has reddish shades such as in stanza VIII: “yet shot one grum Red leer to see the plain catch its estray”. Secondly, the personification of Nature shows the decadence of flowers, especially cocke and spunge. Thirdly in stanza XIII the Victorians’ obsession with hair is even present in the text, but in this case it doesn’t represents sensuality but describes the decay of grass:
As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
Furthermore, in the last lines of the XIII stanza “one still blind horse” appears, that probably is an allusion to the approach of Roland’s fall - a knight without a horse. The description of the animal is similar to a dead body and Roland is asking himself if it is still alive. Then, another element of death comes in the XIX stanza: “a sudden little river crossed my path”. Water is always strictly connected to death and to a passage.
In this case we also have the presence of another symbol: “a drenked willows” . This kind of trees in Victorian poetry are also a symbol of mourning linked with graveyards. Crossing this river, he dwells upon all the things he encounters as if it were a dead man's cheek. What he assumes to be a speared rat shrieks like a baby. Browning depicted a horrible succession of images, but it is very hard to tell which is worse: the objects themselves or his obsessive description of them. The second phase of the poem is largely descriptive and landscape occupies a central position in the poem, “creating a grim ambience that both reflects and determines Roland’s state of mind”.
Roland continues his journey between stubbled ground, wood and marsh and Browning uses several dashes in order to give a pause, some kind of skipping, interruption. But suddenly, like all the other scenes, another kind of “presage” of death is presented to us. In the XXVII stanza appears a “great black bird, Apollyon’s bosom-friend”. Apollyon is a biblical demon that is described in the book of Revelation: “They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon”. He is the king of a plague of locusts resembling horses with crowned human faces, women's hair, lions' teeth, wings and mostly ascribed as death and the devil himself.
Roland feels he is close to the end of his journey and he is burning inside all at once, as we can read from the second line in stanza XXX: “This was the place”, he has just arrived! Over there, in the middle of the hills, “crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn fight”, and a scalped mountain lay the Dark Tower, built of brown stone and without a counterpart in the entire world.
The moment of discovering the tower is a moment where both revelation and destruction are inseparable:
There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. ’Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.
Finally, with the flaming dead ranged in front of him, Roland places the horn to his lips and blows. The “slughorn” is an important symbol and it carries several meanings. Bringing his horn to his lips he blows his slogan, announcing his intention to charge. He is at the end, in the unknown future. He is now in front of all. Is he still looking for his moment of truth, in front of this unknown object? Or does he realize he has had it and that the end of his difficul quest is only to be able to announce him in front of the Dark Tower, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came”?
Browning doesn’t reveal what’s inside, leaving us to our own imagination; the sole universal element is “the journey through life, the movement towards death that we all of us brave even if we feel that perhaps this will not be worth the effort”. The writer William Lyon Phelps has argued in his book that maybe the awful mountains in the blood-red sunset dissolve and the round, squat Tower vanishes like a dream-phantom. He is also convinced that the sound of the horn is probably the last breath of the hero. Roland is left alone and he has experienced so many disappointments that all hope of finding the Tower is almost dead in his breast. In stanza VIII the protagonist himself is continuing to doubt his strength with a question after a dash: “And all the doubt was now---should I be fit?”
In my opinion, the Dark Tower is the end of all things, the passage from life to death. Undoubtedly I was certainly influenced by Stephen King’s story where there is the continuation of the story: Roland, after entering the Dark Tower, “touched the horn again, and its reality was oddly comforting, as if he had never touched it before”. Roland encounters various rooms containing signs of his past life.
When he reaches the top of the Tower, he finds a door marked with his own name and opens it. Roland instantly realizes, to his horror, that he has reached the Tower countless times before. It’s like a karmic circle, which repeats again and again until he does no more evil deeds in his life, such as the indifference he had towards Jake, a child along his way.
This scene is very similar to the one described in Browning’s poem, stanza XIII where the half-dead horse receives only hate and no pity from Roland. In King’s story the protagonist is transported back in time with no memories of what has happened. The serie ends where it all began in the first line of the first book, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed him” recalling Browning’s “hoary cripple”
III
LOVE
It is not simple to have an unambiguous description of Roland’s feelings, especially because the term “love” appears only once in the whole poem in stanza VI: Roland oddly compares himself to a sick man who only aims “not to shame such tender love” of the people to whom he has already bid farewell, by staying alive. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” conveys an image of the progress of a “solitary archetypal human being” seeking his own destiny and for this reason it is very difficult to find an explicit connection with love. But it is immediately obvious that it could have symbolic meanings and it must mean more than it says. In fact, if we focus on some elements, we find more than a simple quest.
Throughout the text there are only three human characters that are described: the “hoary cripple” that we have already discussed in the first pages, a friend, Giles, described as “the soul of honor” and then Cuthbert. Even if there is no female figure in the poem, I have focused my attention on the latter character, Cuthbert, that seems to be described by Browning in a particular way in stanza XVI:
Browning in the first line uses the colour of passion to describe Cuthbert: “reddehing face”. Furthermore in the same line the verb “fancy” suggests a more intimistic desire than other verbs which deal with the meaning of “imagination”. Then, in the second line the sensuality of Cuthbert in the words: “garniture of curly gold” which almost seems a description of a woman profile is underlined. Here we don’t have a femme fatale, but a description of a shy and angelic youth.
The third line starts with “Dear fellow” which can be translated as companion and not a simple friend and this theory can be strengthened thanks to the next words “till I almost felt him fold an arm to mine to fix me to the place, the way he used”. At the end of this verse, after a tragedy ( probably after the death of Cuthbert) the heart of Roland becomes cold.
Cuthbert is dead, with all the lost adventurers that are waiting for him behind the Tower: “There they stood”, to view the last living part of the protagonist, as if they were waiting for his own death. After the loss of Cuthbert, and the other member of The Band, Roland seems to be obsessed with the quest of this Tower, focusing on the end as his ultimate goal, maybe to join again with his lost love. The tower is not defined except that it is dark: “We are not told why and even if we read the whole poem we miss any information which would enable us to make a certain logical sense of when and why” and for this reason there is no unique interpretation, probably this quest is also a means to reconciliate with Cuthbert; starting from the assumption that the tower is death, it is therefore the only way to stay close to Cuthbert and his lost friends.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Baker, Franklin T. Ed. Browning’s Shorter Poems. UK, The Macmillan Group, 2005.
- Bloom, Harold. Robert Browning. UK, Chelsea House Pub,2009.
- Brewer, Dereck. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came: An Approach to English Studies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984.
- Bristow, Joseph Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
- King, Stephen. The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower. Hampton Fall, Donald M. Grant Publisher, Inc. 2004.
- King, Stephen. The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger. New York City, Plume, 2003.
- Phelps, William Lyon. Robert Browning, How to Know Him. UK, Turtle Point Press, 2002.
- VIII.Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Milano, Mondadori, 1979.
SITOGRAPHY
- Egervary, Alex. “A Brief Discussion of Victorian Fantasy. Setting and Character”. <http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/egervary12.html>
- English Fairy Tales. Childe Rowland <http://www.authorama.com/english-fairy-tales-24.html>
- Everett, Gleen. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came- Reading and Discussing Questions”.<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/roland/rolandlq2.html>
- Grave Saver. Browning Poems study. <http://www.gradesaver.com/robert-browning-poems/study-guide/section24/>
- Jackson, Michael. “Setting and Psychology in Childe Roland”. <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/roland/roland3.html>
- Perquin, Jean-Charles. “The maze and pilgrimage of poetic creation in Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came”.<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/roland/perquin.html>
- Revelation 9:11. The Holy Bible BibleGateway.com <http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=revelation%209.11&version=NIV>
- VIII. Welan, Michael. The Dark Tower Art Gallery. <http://www.michaelwhelan.com/gallery/illustration/dark-tower/>