The first footnote beneath the text of Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” explains that, when asked if the meaning of the poem can best be summarized as “he that endureth to the end shall be saved,” Browning replied, “Just about that” (251). The end spoken of being, at least in part, death, this reveals a great deal about the psychological atmosphere with which Browning composed the work. The apocalyptic imagery, the chaotic state of the narrator’s consciousness, and even the image of the Dark Tower itself imbue the poem with a distinct deathly tone. And yet most intriguing is the image of the “hoary cripple” (2), whom the narrator — the titular Childe Roland — asks the way. It is this figure with whom the narrative begins, and also with whom Browning begins a motif of imagery focused on facial expression, blindness, and sight. Using this motif of facial expression and eyesight, Browning establishes that reality is ultimately subjective, and may be largely dependent on one’s imagination and how well attuned one is to the realm of the spiritual.

From the outset of the narrative, Roland distrusts the cripple, noting his “malicious eye” (2). What of this cripple, though? Is the narrator’s assessment of the figure as malicious accurate? The aspect of the would-be hero’s journey — and the apparent aimlessness with which it is ultimately made — lends a bit of irony to the narrator’s attitude toward the cripple. It is quite possible that in the wasteland Browning describes — “grey plain all around [...] to the horizon’s bound” (53-2) — the direction given is irrelevant, or even that the cripple tells the narrator the truth. For instance, that Roland feels he has been lied to, and yet eventually finds his way to the prophesied Tower, is at least some evidence to contradict his suspicions.

Following the description of the cripple’s eye as “malicious” (2), the narrator describes his mouth: “scarce able to afford / Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored / Its edge” (4-6). This image brings the reliability of the narrator’s regard for the “hoary cripple” (2) into further question. If suppression of the cripple’s glee is possible at all, how are we to prove that there is any glee in his expression at all? Might not this merely be the narrator’s own distrustful tendency — lack of faith, one might put it — bleeding into his interpretation of this particular perception? One might be so bold as to argue that the figure is merely smiling.

Browning’s emphasis on imagination, on the fantastic, only intensifies as the narrative moves into its second stanza, wherein Roland “guessed what skull-like laugh / Would break” (10-11). The image of laugh as skull-like is purely the narrator’s own speculation, and yet the image is too deliberately strange, too deliberately original, to be dismissed. Given the absurdly elusive nature of the Tower, and the supernatural image of Roland’s peers gathered “in a sheet of flame” (201) to glimpse him arriving at his lifelong quest’s end, the use of the skull in place of the previous descriptions of the cripple does not seem overbearingly outlandish. In fact, it only serves to reinforce the work’s unifying mood of weariness and death; one might go so far as to conclude that the cripple “with his staff” (7) is the traditional figure of Death Incarnate found throughout art and literature, particularly in the paintings of the Romantic Period or mythological figures like the Greek Charon. Of course, we are limited to drawing such conclusions on the basis of the narrator’s questionable descriptions, which makes any claim to certainty on the matter dubious at best.

Even the desolate landscape through which the road to the Dark Tower winds is regarded as having a kind of face, or at least a capacity for facial expression. At the day’s close, it casts “one grim / Red leer to see the lain catch its estray” (46-8). Its estray, in this instance, is surely the narrator; and given the construction of the previous lines, it is unreasonable to suggest that the subject of this sentence could be anyone or anything but the day itself. Roland goes on to describe the “starved ignoble nature” (56) of the wasteland, even claiming that “inertness and grimace, / In some strange sort, were the land’s portion” (61-2). Again, the land — this time the barren earth, instead of the setting sun — is personified, and moreover, with a grimace. Since objective reality as we understand it has no capacity for facial expression, we must conclude that such sinister sights are merely illusions born of the narrator’s imagination.

Nature itself speaks in favor of this understanding: “See” (63), it says, “Or shut your eyes” (64). There is perhaps a kind of irony in this statement, if the act of Nature speaking is to be taken literally, but its meaning seems the primary intent of the lines. If sight in the traditional sense of the word is deceptive, and therefore it would be better to shut one’s eyes rather than to continue eyeing false perceptions, then almost certainly Browning is illuminating a key truth about human consciousness: To see, one needs not eyes but imagination; that the sight afforded by the mind is at least as important as mere ocular perception. Since the footnote mentioned at the start of this essay reveals that the poem came to him “as a kind of dream” (251), we can be certain that Browning holds the vision of the mind’s eye in high regard.

Two stanzas after Nature speaks directly to the narrator, Roland encounters a “stiff blind horse / [...] stupified” (75-6). While he is uncertain whether the animal is alive or dead, and stops to ponder the question, he gives no sign of uncertainty regarding the creature’s blindness; and yet, in the following stanza, the horse is described as having “shut eyes underneath the rusty mane” (81), which seems to trivialize or at least draw attention to the narrator’s claim of the horse being blind. So much of Roland’s regard for his fellow travelers among the apocalyptic plain is, given the scope of the text and the images therein, more or less unfounded. We are given the statement, and then in most of the aforementioned cases, one specific image serves to contradict the narrator’s perception — which is, more often than not, that the reality through which he is traveling is unsatisfactory or even, in the case of the crippled, skull-like figure, malicious. Without bringing into account the meta elements of the narrative, it seems that it would be to the benefit of Roland — as well as that of readers — for him to shut his eyes and seek the path toward the Dark Tower within, rather than without.

Having been thus instructed by Nature in its wisdom, Roland explains that “I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart” (85). Looking inward, the first image he sees is that of his fellow knight’s “reddening face” (91), which extinguishes his “heart’s new fire and [leaves] it cold” (96). Once back in the realm of raw perception, he describes the road to the Tower as “my darkening path [...] / “no sight as far as eye could strain” (104-5). And so, having experienced the vision of mind and memory, his eyesight has been further diminished. When at last he arrives within reach of the Dark Tower — “[a]fter a life spent training for the sight” (180) — Roland describes it as “blind as the fool’s heart” (182). Concealed by “two hills on the right” (176) and “a tall scalped mountain” (178), the Tower has eluded him not because his eyes were poor but because he failed to consider the idea that it might be hidden. The years he has spent wandering about the world in search of the Tower at last come to fruition, and even now he fails to see the purpose of his quest. “Not see?” he asks, “because of night perhaps?” (187).

There is a sense of tragedy to this final failure, although it does not seem to matter, in the end. A “ghost not fit to cope” (22), Roland is but a spirit of great persistence, come at last to fulfill his quest. In the moment of his completion, of his death, and of his journey’s end, his lost peers “stood, ranged along the hillsides [...] / To view the last of me, a living frame” (199-200). The sheet of flame mentioned offhandedly in this stanza may be seen as not only Roland’s noble end, then, but perhaps more specifically as “the Last Judgment’s fire” (65) said by Nature to be the only end to “set my prisoners free” (66). That Roland’s long-lost brethren await him in flames at the Tower says much of its purpose. As it was always his destination, and sole occupation, as a lifelong questing knight, it is first and foremost the place of his fulfillment. Because of the apocalyptic nature of the poem, and the fantastic manner in which his fellow knights are described in the final stanza, one can rightly argue that the Tower — the Dark Tower, most importantly — is a symbol of the death that awaits us all in the completion of our lives. Childe Roland describes the Dark Tower as the sight for which he has spent his whole life training (180). Sight, then, can be seen in this powerful and artistically rich work as vision, as the ability to reunite with the supernatural — his fallen peers — and as the acknowledgment of one’s own inevitable finitude without sacrificing the honor of succeeding in one’s purpose.

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Rpt. in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, Concise Edition. Eds. Thomas J. Collins, Vivienne J. Rundle. Toronto: Broadview, 2005. 251-5. Print.