Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning
June 10th 2007 07:21
I like reading Browning very much. His poetry is stately. It doesn't make you feel, it makes you see. It is not built upon wispy sensations but on a train of thought. Or on that twilight zone where personality and thought merge and become indistinguishable. He does not try to understand the world through abstract arguments but by trying to reproducing mental states.His world becomes coherent when he "gets" the central cog, the cog that makes the machinery of the consciousness he is studying, work.
It is also astonishing how much he can imbue his verse with character while following metre and rhyme. He has what people say Henry James has but clearly does not -- craft. Well-crafted but able to convey passions either of the heart or of the mind.
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is one his most famous poems. The word used most often to describe it is "inaccessible" Alright, it doesn't tell us the whole story. It is a snippet of verse snatched from a dream. But does that make it inaccessible?
It is one of those poems which demand a lazy reading. It is a stream, not of the conscious, but of the sub-conscious. It does not lend itself to a reading with fully focused mind intent on seizing on meaning but rather to a not-particularly-focused reading which does not try to impose meaning or try to understand. Read in this latent manner, it immediately strikes you with the immediate veracity of dream life.
Browning is often quoted as saying, "When I wrote this, God and Browning knew what it meant. Now God only knows."
Now that we know it was conceived in a dream and written thereafter, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, it is rather pointless to ask the questions about the plot of the Roland. Pointless because the poet himself probably does not know them. So, rather than searching for "meaning "which an omniscient Browning is hiding from us, let us take the journey as Browning did, as a dream.
The poem opens dramaticcally when a knight on a quest is given directions by a cripple. This tableau from many horror movies then takes the knight on the journey to the Dark Tower. The thrill of that tableau jumpstarted the dream and the search for the Dark Tower within that dream. When the poet woke up and found himself possessed with the manic energy in the wake of that dream, he rushed to pen it down.
Browning then spends a lot of time on describing the bleak territory through which the knight is passing. It is here that the poem loses some of its initial power and becomes more and more conventionalised. The poem loses the haunting dramatic nature and the extended descriptions use transparently conscious verbiage. Browning is holding onto his dream, rather than being in it. The poet is waking up and the after-effects of the dream life are wearing thin. Still, Byron is a formidable poet and he uses every ounce of his talent to give words to his night vision before it fades away.
It is also indicative of the dream action itself. In a dream, after the initial promise we tend to search a lot and look in all the places. We become self-conscious of the dramatic impulse of the initial trigger and try and find it or retain it. Either the dream changes or it, as it does here, become an endless search through vast tracts of emptiness.
Suddenly, the poet wakes up to the fact that his longish meanderings are not going to register the impact he wants and the story takes a sudden turn. The knight crosses an abrupt river and finds the said Dark Tower. Notice how quickly Browning implants the climax. He has to resolve this issue but he can't find any resolution. If he tries too hard, the vision will fade away from him. So, he ends the poem, with the attainment of the quest but ambiguous about what it all meant.
Many people search for a meaning in the poem and wonder what it referred to. I think it is self-referential. Like every dream, it records how it felt enacting itself. Like every dream it can't find what it started out is quest for and because it has not changed course midway or forgotten itself, it implants a Dark Tower, the climax it sought fully realising that it was not the thing it sought.
They also describe the hero as cynical or paranoid and he is neither. Because he is acting and feeling, just as any dream does. A dream is like a chess game played by one person who keeps changing the rules or the moves if he does not like the reality. That explains the so-called "cynicism." The quest of the Childe Roland, is not of any particular dream, but of the dream process itself.
The text to the peom can be found here.
It is also astonishing how much he can imbue his verse with character while following metre and rhyme. He has what people say Henry James has but clearly does not -- craft. Well-crafted but able to convey passions either of the heart or of the mind.
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is one his most famous poems. The word used most often to describe it is "inaccessible" Alright, it doesn't tell us the whole story. It is a snippet of verse snatched from a dream. But does that make it inaccessible?
It is one of those poems which demand a lazy reading. It is a stream, not of the conscious, but of the sub-conscious. It does not lend itself to a reading with fully focused mind intent on seizing on meaning but rather to a not-particularly-focused reading which does not try to impose meaning or try to understand. Read in this latent manner, it immediately strikes you with the immediate veracity of dream life.
Browning is often quoted as saying, "When I wrote this, God and Browning knew what it meant. Now God only knows."
Now that we know it was conceived in a dream and written thereafter, like Coleridge's Kubla Khan, it is rather pointless to ask the questions about the plot of the Roland. Pointless because the poet himself probably does not know them. So, rather than searching for "meaning "which an omniscient Browning is hiding from us, let us take the journey as Browning did, as a dream.
The poem opens dramaticcally when a knight on a quest is given directions by a cripple. This tableau from many horror movies then takes the knight on the journey to the Dark Tower. The thrill of that tableau jumpstarted the dream and the search for the Dark Tower within that dream. When the poet woke up and found himself possessed with the manic energy in the wake of that dream, he rushed to pen it down.
Browning then spends a lot of time on describing the bleak territory through which the knight is passing. It is here that the poem loses some of its initial power and becomes more and more conventionalised. The poem loses the haunting dramatic nature and the extended descriptions use transparently conscious verbiage. Browning is holding onto his dream, rather than being in it. The poet is waking up and the after-effects of the dream life are wearing thin. Still, Byron is a formidable poet and he uses every ounce of his talent to give words to his night vision before it fades away.
It is also indicative of the dream action itself. In a dream, after the initial promise we tend to search a lot and look in all the places. We become self-conscious of the dramatic impulse of the initial trigger and try and find it or retain it. Either the dream changes or it, as it does here, become an endless search through vast tracts of emptiness.
Suddenly, the poet wakes up to the fact that his longish meanderings are not going to register the impact he wants and the story takes a sudden turn. The knight crosses an abrupt river and finds the said Dark Tower. Notice how quickly Browning implants the climax. He has to resolve this issue but he can't find any resolution. If he tries too hard, the vision will fade away from him. So, he ends the poem, with the attainment of the quest but ambiguous about what it all meant.
Many people search for a meaning in the poem and wonder what it referred to. I think it is self-referential. Like every dream, it records how it felt enacting itself. Like every dream it can't find what it started out is quest for and because it has not changed course midway or forgotten itself, it implants a Dark Tower, the climax it sought fully realising that it was not the thing it sought.
They also describe the hero as cynical or paranoid and he is neither. Because he is acting and feeling, just as any dream does. A dream is like a chess game played by one person who keeps changing the rules or the moves if he does not like the reality. That explains the so-called "cynicism." The quest of the Childe Roland, is not of any particular dream, but of the dream process itself.
The text to the peom can be found here.
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