Some of the poems weren't too bad, once he gave them a chance. One was about a kind of knight — except in the poem he was called a "Childe" — and his search for a dark tower and whatever secret it contained. The poem didn't really seem to end properly, though. The knight reached the tower and, well, that was it. David wanted to know what was in the tower, and what happened to the knight now that he'd reached it, but the poet obviously didn't think that was important. It made David wonder about the kinds of people who wrote poems. Anyone could see that the poem was really only getting interesting when the knight reached the tower, but that was the point at which the poet decided to go off and write something else instead. Perhaps he had meant to come back to it and had simply forgotten, or maybe he couldn't come up with a monster for the tower that was impressive enough. David had a vision of the poet, surrounded by bits of paper with lots of ideas for creatures crossed out or scribbled over.
Werewolf.
Dragon.
Really big dragon.
Witch.
Roally big witch.
Small witch.
David tried to give a form to the beast at the heart of the poem but found that he could not. It was more difficult than it appeared, for nothing quite seemed to fit. Instead, he could only conjure up a half-formed being that crouched in the cobwebbed corners of his imagination where all the things that he feared curled and slithered upon one another in the darkness. John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things (2006), pp. 30-31
- The maze and pilgrimage of poetic creation in Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came"
- The Narrator of "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
- Arnold's scholar-gypsy, Tennyson's Ulysses and Galahad, and Browning's Childe Roland
- Undercutting the Heroic Ideal
- The maze and pilgrimage of poetic creation in Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came"
- Setting and Psychology
- A Brief Discussion of Victorian Fantasy — Setting and Character
- Duty and Sacrifice
- Roland's decision (from Johnson's Alien Vision)
- Reading and Discussing Questions (Allingham)
- Reading and Discussing Questions (Everett)
Form: 34 six-line stanzas — Meter: iambic pentameter — Rhyme scheme: abbaab.
Last modified 23 August 2007