Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came painted by Thomas Moran in 1859

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is a poem by Robert Browning, written in 1855, first published that same year in the collection entitled Men and Women. The title, which forms the last words of the poem, is a line from William Shakespeare's play King Lear. In the play Gloucester's son, Edgar, lends credence to his disguise as mad Tom by talking nonsense, of which this is a part. Shakespeare took inspiration from the fairy tale "Childe Rowland", although the poem has no direct connection to the tale. Browning claimed that the poem came to him, fully-formed, in a dream, and said of it, "When I wrote this, God and Browning knew what it meant. Now God only knows." Image File history File links Thomas_Moran_Childe_Roland_to_the_Dark_Tower_Came_1859. ... Image File history File links Thomas_Moran_Childe_Roland_to_the_Dark_Tower_Came_1859. ... Thomas Moran. ... Robert Browning Robert Browning (May 7, 1812 – December 12, 1889) was an English poet and playwright. ... 1855 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... King Lear and the Fool in the Storm by William Dyce (1806-1864) King Lear is generally regarded as one of William Shakespeares greatest tragedies. ... Childe Rowland is a fairy tale, the most popular version being by Joseph Jacobs in his English Folk and Fairy Tales, published in 1892, and written partly in verse and part in prose. ...

Browning explores Roland's journey to the Dark Tower in 34 six line stanzas with the rhyme form abbaab and iambic pentameter. It is filled with images from nightmare but the setting is given unusual reality by much fuller descriptions of the landscape than was normal for Browning at any other time in his career. In general, however, the work is one of Browning's most inaccessible. This is, in part, because the hero's story is glimpsed slowly around the edges; it is subsidiary to the creation of an impression of the hero's mental state. Iambic pentameter is a meter in poetry. ... In common current usage, the term nightmare refers to dreams of particular intensity, with content that the sleeper finds disturbing, related either to physiological causes, such as a high fever, or to psychological ones, such as unusual trauma or stress in the sleepers life. ...

The name "Roland", references to his horn, general medieval setting and the title childe (a medieval term not for a child but for an untested knight) suggest that the protagonist is the paladin of The Song of Roland, the 11th-century anonymous French chanson de geste. However, The Song of Roland does not feature a tower or a solitary quest by Roland, and is not clearly related to the Browning poem. Roland pledges his fealty to Charlemagne; from a manuscript of a chanson de geste. ... The silver Anglia knight, commissioned as a trophy in 1850, intended to represent the Black Prince. ... The Song of Roland (La Chanson de Roland) is the oldest major work of French literature. ... The chansons de geste, Old French for songs of heroic deeds, are the epic poetry that appears at the dawn of French literature. ...

The poem opens with Roland's speculations about the truthfulness of the man who gives him directions to the Dark Tower. Browning does not retell the Song of Roland; his starting point is Shakespeare. The gloomy, cynical Roland seeks the tower and undergoes various hardships on the way, although most of the obstacles arise from his own imagination. The poem ends abruptly when he reaches the tower so we never learn what he finds there nor do we know the outcome of any final encounter. In this case it is more important to travel than to arrive. The Song of Roland (La Chanson de Roland) is an 11th century Old French epic poem about the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (or Roncesvalles) fought by Roland of the Brittany Marches and his fellow paladins. ...

Judith Weissman has suggested that Browning's aim was to show how the military code of honour and glory "destroys the inner life of the would-be hero, by making us see a world hellishly distorted through Roland's eyes". William Lyon Phelps proposes three different interpretations of the poem: In the first two, the Tower is a symbol of a knightly quest. Success only comes through failure or the end is the realisation of futility. In his third interpretation, the Tower is simply damnation. William Lyon Phelps (2nd January 1865 - 21st August 1943) was an American author, critic and scholar. ...

Influences on other works

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"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"

"Childe Roland" has served as inspiration to a number of popular works of fiction, including: Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Wikisource – The Free Library – is a Wikimedia project to build a free, wiki library of source texts, along with translations of source-texts into any language and other supporting materials. ...

• American author Stephen King for his Dark Tower series of stories and novels (1982-2004).
• Welsh science-fiction author Alastair Reynolds for the "Diamond Dogs" novella (2001).
• Canadian science-fiction author Gordon R. Dickson for his "Childe Cycle" series of novels (1959-2001).
• American science-fiction author Andre Norton for the fourth novel in her "Witch World" series (1967).
• The 'Doctor Who' Twentieth Anniversary special 'The Five Doctors' takes much imagery and several key phrases from the poem which has been cited as a source by screenwriter Terrance Dicks.