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| works of robert browning | |
| british poems | |
| 1855 works | |
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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. 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. 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. 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. INFLUENCES ON OTHER WORKS "Childe Roland" has served as inspiration to a number of popular works of fiction, including:
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