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326 The nineteenth century
Its title (and last line) uses a line from one of the darkest moments in
Shakespeare’s King Lear (in Act III, scene iv). Childe Roland is a figure
associated with Arthurian legend, a ‘childe’ being a kind of apprentice
knight. He narrates his own journey across a frightening wasted
landscape to the mysterious ‘Dark Tower’; the poem ends with his
arrival – and no sign of what happens next.
There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, 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.’
In many ways, this poem is an anticipation of twentieth-century themes:
the proto-‘wasteland’, the lack of identity or purpose in the hero, the
non-resolution of the story, the mysterious symbol of the tower itself.
These are the kind of negative, empty, ambiguous images which
became more and more common in poetry, as poetic certainties
diminished and romantic ideals disappeared into history.
Browning’s was a very productive career, from Pauline (published
anonymously in 1833) and Paracelsus (1835) to Asolando, published,
coincidentally, on the day of his death in 1889. The Ring and the Book
(1869–70) was his greatest single success. It employs the dramatic
monologue in a multi-viewpoint historical reconstruction in blank
verse, telling the story of a seventeenth-century Italian murder,
examining relative ‘truth’, ‘imagination’, character and setting, in a
‘novel in verse’ quite unlike any other.
More than any other writer, Browning used his verse to go beneath
the surface appearance given by his speakers. He examines ‘between the
lines’ a wide range of moral scruples and problems, characters and attitudes.
He is the widest-ranging of Victorian poets in his intellectual and cultural
concerns, and spent much of his life in Italy. Many of his poems have
Renaissance settings which enabled Robert Browning to explore differences
and continuities between Renaissance and Modern worlds.
He met Elizabeth Barrett (Browning) in 1845, and eloped with her
the following year to Italy, where they lived until her death in 1861. She
was highly regarded as a poet on the strength of Poems (1844), and in