Dramatic Romances Part 21

Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold.

XVII

Giles then, the soul of honour--there he stands Frank as ten years ago when knighted first.

What honest man should dare (he said) he durst.

Good-=but the scene shifts--faugh! what hangman hands 100 Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!

XVIII

Better this present than a past like that; Back therefore to my darkening path again!

No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.

Will the night send a howlet or a bat?

I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.

XIX

A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes. 110 No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof--to see the wrath Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

XX

So petty yet so spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit. 120

XXI

Which, while I forded,--good saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!

--It may have been a water-rat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek.

XXII

Glad was I when I reached the other bank.

Now for a better country. Vain presage!

Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage, Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank 130 Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank, Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage--

XXIII

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.

What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?

No foot-print leading to that horrid mews, None out of it. Mad brewage set to work Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

XXIV

And more than that--a furlong on--why, there!

What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, 140 Or brake, not wheel--that harrow fit to reel Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

XXV

Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood-- Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth. 150

XXVI

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

XXVII

And just as far as ever from the end!

Nought in the distance but the evening, nought To point my footstep further! At the thought A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend, 160 Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap--perchance the guide I sought.

XXVIII

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, 'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains--with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.

How thus they had surprised me,--solve it, you!

How to get from them was no clearer case.

XXIX

Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick Of mischief happened to me, G.o.d knows when-- 170 In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then, Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts--you're inside the den!

x.x.x

Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left, a tall scalped mountain... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! 180

x.x.xI

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?

The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

x.x.xII

Not see? because of night perhaps?--why, day Came back again for that! before it left, The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, 190 Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,-- "Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"

x.x.xIII

Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of all the lost adventurers my peers,-- How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

x.x.xIV

There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met To view the last of me, a living frame 200 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."

NOTES: "Childe Roland" symbolizes the conquest of despair by fealty to the ideal. Browning emphatically disclaimed any precise allegorical intention in this poem. He acknowledged only an ideal purport in which the significance of the whole, as suggesting a vision of life and the saving power of constancy, had its due place. Certain picturesque materials which had made their impressions on the poet's mind contributed towards the building up of this realistic fantasy: a tower he saw in the Carrara Mountains; a painting which caught his eye later in Paris; the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room--welded together with the remembrance of the line cited from King Lear, iii. 4, 187, which last, it should be remembered, has a background of ballads and legend cycles of which a man like Browning was not unaware. For allegorical schemes of the Poem see Nettleship's "Essays and Thoughts," and The Critic, Apr. 24, 1886; for an antidote to these, The Critic, May 8, 1886; an orthodox view, Poet-lore, Nov. 1890: for interpretations touching on the ballad sources, London Browning Society Papers, part iii. p. 21, and Poet-lore, Aug.-Sept. 1892.