“Childe Roland”: the greatest horror poem in the English language

I’m not a huge fan of Robert Browning – more of  a Tennyson man, myself, whatever his faults - but there’s one poem of his that, for me, stands head and shoulders above the rest: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”.

The title, as my erudite readers will know, is from King Lear, where the line is uttered by Edgar, feigning madness.

Browning’s poem has nothing to do with Shakespeare. Childe Roland is an untested knight, one of a brotherhood whose life is spent in a quest which is never explained, but which involves a search for the Dark Tower. Here, Roland, the last only surviving member of the brotherhood, finds it.

Nothing much happens to our hero during the course of this longish (204 line) poem. A “hoary cripple, with malicious eye” tells him how to find the tower. Worried that the directions might be false – designed to lure him to his death, perhaps – Roland traverses a dreary, unpleasant, lifeless landscape, without meeting any resistance, and finally reaches the tower.

The sense of horror arises not from dramatic incidents, but from superbly detailed descriptions of the disquietingly nightmarish landscape and the meagre, non-human life it supports:

                    As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair

                    In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud

                    Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.

                    One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,

                    Stood stupefied, however he came there:

                    Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!

                    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,

                    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,

                    And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;

                    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;

                    I never saw a brute I hated so;

                    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

Charming!

Of course, as with all true horror, it is Roland’s “self-affrighting” mind which is terrifying him rather than external reality. Even the last gleam of the setting sun seems malevolent. The day, he tells us, which:

                    Had been a dreary one at best, and dim

                    Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim

                    Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.

His disgust at what nature has created on this dreary, hopeless plain comes to a head when he reaches a “sudden little river’ over which “Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit/Of mute despair, a suicidal throng”. 

The crossing itself is uneventful, but horrible:

                    … 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.

Brilliant.

Even when the Dark Tower finally hoves into view, the sight of it affords him no pleasure:

                    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!

Of, course, this supposedly dead landscape is pulsatingly alive – in Roland’s mind, at least. (The next writer who would conjure such an overwhelming sense of threat from natural forms would be H.P. Lovecraft.)

                    The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,

                    Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,---

                    ``Now stab and end the creature---to the heft!''

That really is a marvellous image! But what is Roland hunting? Is the tower the lair of an evil creature? If so, is it physical or supernatural – dragon or demon?

Despite the reader not having a clue what Roland has achieved, or why he has been searching for the Dark Tower, or what he is supposed to do now that he has found it, the appearance of the poem’s title in the last line is deeply stirring, yet doom-laden - (“they” refers to the dead members of the brotherhood):

                    There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met

                    To view the last of me, a living frame

                    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.''

After all the fear, ugliness and unnaturalness we have encountered whilst sharing the knight’s journey over the previous thirty-four six-line stanzas, this feels like a call to arms to the dead knights on the surrounding hillsides – and to us. We can sense that evil is about to be confronted: we desperately want the exhausted, despondent knight to triumph against his foe – whatever it might be - but we somehow doubt he will.

Coleridge, whose opium addiction caused him to be plagued by terrifying nightmares all his adult life, was good at horror: there are large elements of it in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and that creepy narrative verse ballad, “Christabel”. Edgar Allan Poe, too, wrote celebrated horror poems, but they were never as effective as his short stories. 

But the best horror sequence from a longer poem – “Childe Roland” has the tang of true horror throughout – is the section of Wordsworth’s Preludewhere he describes how, as a boy, he steals (borrows) an unattended boat and rows in moonlight across one of the lakes. As he moves over the water, he has an terrifying experience which seems a punishment for his act of larceny:

                    …a huge cliff,

                    As if with voluntary power instinct,

                    Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,

                    And, growing still in stature, the huge cliff

                    Rose up between me and the stars, and still

                    With measured motion, like a living thing

                    Strode after me.

Now, that is pretty creepy: “uprearing” with its implicstion of shocking suddeness, the blotting out of the stars, the pursuer’s implacable “measured motion”, and, of course, the personal threat implicit in “after me” all add to the atmosphere of terror. The boyb steals hurriedly back to shore, and runs home. But the real genius – the real tang of horror - lies in Wordsworth’s description of the aftermath of the event:

                           …for many days my brain

                    Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

                    Of unknown modes of being. In my thoughts

                    There was a darkness—call it solitude

                    Or blank desertion—no familiar shapes

                    Of hourly objects, images of trees,

                    Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields,

                    But huge and mighty forms that do not live

                    Like living men moved slowly through my mind

                    By day, and were the trouble of my dreams.

“Unknown modes of being” is perfect, as is the sense that the thing which strode after him actually caught up and forced its way into his psyche.  In fact, these few lines capture exactly that sense of the familiar turning strange which all writers of horror fiction are ultimately trying to convey (Arthur Machen was a real master at this).

Wordsworth is not my favourite poet, but I am convinced that he is the greatest poet England has ever produced. 

Back to Browning: many author have used elements of “Childe Roland” in their work: the most notable recent example is Stephen King in a series of novels and short stories collectively entitled The Dark Tower.