1. Representative examples are Nettleship, J. T., Robert Browning: Essays and Thoughts (New York: Scribner, 1895), pp. 89–113Google Scholar; The Browning's Society Papers, I, 21–27Google Scholar; Golder, Harold, “Browning's ‘Childe Roland,’” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 39 (1924), 963–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; DeVane, W. C., “The Landscape of Browning's ‘Childe Roland,’” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 40 (1925), 426–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stevenson, Lionel, “The Pertinacious Victorian Poets,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 21 (1952), 239–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lindbergh, John, “Grail Themes in Browning's ‘Childe Roland,’” Victorian Newsletter, No. 16, (Fall, 1959), pp. 27–30Google Scholar; Melchiori, Barbara, Browning's Poetry of Reticence (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), pp. 114–39Google Scholar; Meyers, Joyce S., “‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’: A Nightmare Confrontation with Death,” Victorian Poetry, 8 (1970), 335–39Google Scholar; Thompson, Leslie M., “‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ and the Gothic Tradition in Literature,” Browning Newsletter, No. 9 (Fall, 1972), pp. 17–22Google Scholar; Bloom, Harold, “Browning's ‘Childe Roland’: All Things Deformed and Broken,” The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 157–67Google Scholar; Shapiro, Arnold, “‘Childe Roland,’ Lear, and the Ability to See,” Papers on Language and Literature, 11 (1975), 88–94.Google Scholar

2. Langbaum, Robert (The Poetry of Experience [New York: Norton, 1957], pp. 197–99)Google Scholar, Shaw, David (The Dialectical Temper [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968], pp. 126–35)Google Scholar, and Raisor, Philip (“The Failure of Browning's Childe Roland,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 17 [1972], 99–110)Google Scholar analyze Roland's character, but do not relate it to the development of the imagery. Shapiro's character analysis focuses on the Lear allusions. The most detailed examination of the characterizing function of the imagery is that of Willoughby, John, whose “Browning's ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,’” Victorian Poetry, 1 (1963), 291–99Google Scholar, treats major types and effects of figurative language in the poem (especially simile, personification, and paradox) but not the overall pattern of recurrent images and its relation to the character of the speaker and the major meanings of the poem. Kintgen, Eugene V., “Childe Roland and the Perversity of the Mind,” Victorian Poetry, 4 (1966), 253–58Google Scholar, discusses “devil” and disease/death motifs as they pertain to Roland's mental state but does not analyze the larger image pattern and its thematic implications.

3. I have discussed this technique more extensively in “Patterns of Imagery in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi,’” Studies in Browning, 3 (Spring, 1975), 62–63Google Scholar. Essentially, Browning used images in much the same way as a composer uses symphonic or operatic leitmotifs, developing them as thematic vehicles which could be elaborated, clustered, and interwoven to evoke meanings otherwise inexpressible. The technique was one of his most important in achieving his primary aesthetic goal: to create poetry which, as he puts it in The Ring and the Book, “means beyond the facts.”

4. Although in almost all the mature monologues Browning uses setting symbolically (e.g., the twilight autumn scene which reflects Andrea del Sarto's character, or the sunset which suggests at once the ebbing life of the aging Cleon and the waning Hellenism he represents), in “Childe Roland” it is especially significant: the landscape is both the primary source of imagery and ultimately the most important symbol. Several commentators have noted the similarity of The Waste Land to “Childe Roland” (e.g., Willoughby, passim; Langbaum, , pp. 192–96Google Scholar; Shaw, , p. 129Google Scholar; Melchiori, , pp. 114–19)Google Scholar; but Eliot's probable debt to Browning's monologue has yet to be thoroughly explored. Browning's treatment of the archetypal quest motif anticipates Eliot's not only in its symbols and images (e.g., sterile, blighted nature; fire; blindness; a river which, associated with death, inverts the normal meanings of water symbolism; a drowned man; shipwreck; tolling bells; traps—to mention only a few) but also in its extensive, ironic use of literary allusions and its deliberate ambiguity and paradox, which are especially notable in the double reference of the landscape and the attitude of the protagonist but extend to rhetoric and imagery as well. “Childe Roland” also prefigures The Waste Land by treating time and space symbolically rather than “realistically.” These and other striking similarities are rather ironic in view of Eliot's usual disparagement of Browning. One is reminded, however, of the extent of Eliot's general indebtedness—largely through Pound's influence—to Browning for his development of the dramatic monologue form: as F. O. Matthiessen remarks, “Eliot's development of the dramatic soliloquy cannot be divorced from the impetus furnished by ‘Men and Women’ to ‘Personae’ (The Achievement of T. S. Eliot [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1935], p. 73).Google Scholar

5. The resemblance between the old cripple and the “olde man” of Chaucer's “Pardoner's Tale” strengthens the link between Roland's guide and death. All quotations from “Roland, Childe” are taken from The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, ed. Birrell, Augustine (London: Macmillan, 1929).Google Scholar

6. Lowe, Robert L. (“Browning and Donne,” Notes and Queries, 198 [1953], 491–92) notes, but misses the irony of, the allusion to Donne's simile.Google Scholar

7. The link between Roland and the fool is further reinforced by the fact that in the proof version of the poem Browning erroneously attributed the song of the title, which Roland repeats in the last line, to the Fool in Lear (see Peterson, William S., “The Proofs of Browning's Men and Women,” Studies in Browning, 3 [Fall, 1975], 35). In view of Roland's transformed awareness, one also recalls that Shakespeare's character is the wise fool whose ironic statements ultimately expose the deepest truths.Google Scholar

8. The similarity between Roland's circumstances and Teufelsdröckh's in “The Everlasting No” has been noted by Sanders, C. R. (“Carlyle, Browning, and the Nature of a Poet,” Emory University Quarterly, 16 [1960], p. 206)Google Scholar, who points out that at the time Browning composed “Childe Roland” he was strongly under the influence of Carlyle. Insofar as Roland may be seen as a representative of modern humanity, another striking Carlylean parallel deserves notice. In “Characteristics,” first published in 1831, Carlyle portrays the modern world in a gloomy description which prefigures Roland's situation and many of the major images of the poem: “Now this is specially the misery which has fallen on man in our Era. Belief, Faith has well-nigh vanished from the world.…For young Valour and thirst of Action no ideal Chivalry invites to heroism, prescribes what is heroic: the old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete, and the new is still invisible to us, and we grope after it in darkness …; the Thinker must, in all senses, wander homeless, too often aimless, looking up to a Heaven which is dead for him, round to an earth which is deaf.…Truly may it be said, the Divinity has withdrawn from the Earth; or veils himself in that wide-wasting Whirlwind of a departing Era.…Not Godhead, but an iron, ignoble, circle of Necessity embraces all things; binds the youth of these times into a sluggish thrall, or else exasperates him into a rebel. Heroic Action is paralysed; for what worth now remains unquestionable with him? At the fervid period when his whole nature cries aloud for Action, there is nothing sacred under whose banner he can act; the course and kind and conditions of free Action are all but undiscovered.” (Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Traill, H. D. [New York: Scribner, 1900], III, 29–30.) In “Childe Roland” Browning depicts the psychological process by which one may rediscover “the course and kind and conditions of free Action.”Google Scholar