Browning's "Childe Roland": the visionary poetic.

   Did the personality of such an one stand like an open
   watchtower in the midst of the territory it is erected to
   gaze on, and were the storms and calms, the stars and
   meteors, its watchman was wont to report of, the habitual
   variegation of his everyday life, as they glanced across its
   open door or lay reflected on its four-square parapet?
   "An Essay on Shelley" (1)

Browning's description of the objective poet anticipates some of the concerns of the poet's celebrated quest poem written within a month of the publication in December 1852 of his "An Essay on Shelley." The object of Roland's search turns out to be "blind as the fool's heart" (l. 182), not vigilant as the watchtower that is representative of Browning's objective poet. The latter's "openness" permits the empirical facts of the universe to be registered of reflected along the parapet without tinge of the watchman's personality. The former's blindness, on the other hand, threatens destruction to anyone dependent upon this "mocking elf' that "Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf / He strikes on" (ll. 184-6).

Browning's essay on Shelley goes on to describe the poet of opposite genius, the subjective artist, who, unlike his objective counterpart, the watchtower, is likened to a painter. The objective poet is the poetes or fashioner who creates from himself an artifact betraying no semblance of its creator. The subjective poet is the vates, the seer, whose creations, though "projected from it [his personality]," are nevertheless "not separated" from his person. Such a poet, Browning writes, "does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls, but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes: we must look deep into his human eyes to see those pictures on them."

Browning's prose essay on Shelley suggests that these two poetic tendencies have throughout history alternated the way thesis inevitably inspires its antithesis. Browning's hope, however, is that this dialectical tension between antithetical poetics will lead in the nineteenth century--and in his own poetry--to a productive and creative tension between the poetic and vatic aesthetic orientations. (2) "Nor is there any reason," he contends, "why these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works, examples of which, according to what are now considered the exigencies of art, we have hitherto possessed in distinct individuals only."

Harold Bloom has spent considerable critical effort attempting to explain the essential relationship between Browning's only prose piece of criticism and one of the poet's most famous poems. (3) Other critics, while noting the proximity in time of these two works, have attempted to explicate the poem as a metaphor of either the objective or subjective mode of poetic faculty. (4) What I want to examine in the following pages is the possibility that Browning regarded "Childe Roland" as an experiment in which these poetic modes could be, and in tact are, maintained in dialectical tension. (5) Let me cite, at this point in my examination, one anomaly suggestive of such a creative interaction.

Near the conclusion of his quest, in the line immediately before announcing his discovery of the tower, Roland speaks of having spent his life "training for the sight" (l. 180). Having acknowledged his dedication to the quest, the knight suddenly sees what he has sought. The poem, however, concludes not with an expression of triumph at having succeeded where his predecessors failed, at having discovered, that is, what had for so long been sought. The poem ends, rather, with Roland's acknowledgement that he is seen. Of his predecessors in the quest, Roland remarks in the concluding stanza, "There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met / To view the last of me, a living frame / For one more picture!" (ll. 199-201). The long quest journey to find the tower ends by focusing on Roland himself being found or seen. The juxtaposition again of tower--of object gazing out upon the landscape--and pictures--the self subjected to an other's gaze--is dramatized at poem's end as it is in the essay on Shelley. Terms--objective and subjective--which in the prose essay can be juxtaposed but not reconciled are, in the poem, I argue, imaginatively synthesized to explain not only the text but also the poetry of the poem. (6)

I

One of the intriguing elements of "Childe Roland" is the poem's circularity. Like the snake with its tail in its mouth, the image Coleridge used to describe a great work of art, Browning's poem concludes where it began, with the line/title "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." The repetition becomes significant, not as an aesthetic criterion, but as the resolution of an apparent logical problem. Roland begins his rencounter (the unexpected meeting with the hoary cripple and with himself) with the words, "My first thought was ... (l. 1). Logically, first demands at least a "second." No such division, however, is verbally signaled in the course of the poem, except, that is, suggestively when Roland regards his seen self as a living frame for one "last" picture. (7) The image called to mind by the concluding lines of the poem is of a slide projector that, in displaying the final slide of a carousel, inevitably comes back upon the first slide shown. (8) Such an image makes it impossible for the viewer--or, in this case, the speaker and reader--to entertain the initial thought as "first."

The net effect of this repetition is the superimposition, renewed with each reading, of the former self upon its present historical representation. The rhetorical self of the childe, the poem's narrative voice, becomes a framing device into which renditions of Roland are sequentially entered. The temporal implications of this progression of semblances is that Roland is continually becoming in the present what he was not in the past. (9) The synergistic development thus initiated coincides with Browning's notion that the artistic product of the subjective poet's creation is simultaneously something projected, but not separate, from the artist's self, that artistic creation becomes synonymous with the very being of the artist who continues to display on the retina of his eye images of what he was and is becoming in any particular moment.

Roland's awareness of himself, and his awareness of others' awareness of him, as the framing device for pictures, like Browning's identification of the subjective poet's act with pictorial mountings, suggests an ekphrastic understanding of selfhood and the poetic process. The result of the creative act is an image, something to be seen. And poetry becomes the verbal deliverance from the mute visual of the message the artist intends. (10) Roland's giving voice--his slug-horn blast--to the "last" of himself framed before his predecessors' gaze, however, is not simply an act of defiance asserting his refusal to be regarded as "last"; it is also a recognition of the threat posed by the gazing predecessors ranged along the hillsides to view his apparent end. Like his most famous ekphrastic poem, "My Last Duchess," "Childe Roland" acknowledges both the terror and the triumph of seeing and being seen. If the objective poet avoids such exposure by factually representing what is, and if the subjective poet opens himself to the full force of his reader's/viewer's threats by equating his self with his creations, the objective/subjective poet can at least attenuate these threats by concealing himself in the poetic personae of his creations. (11)

The important consequence, however, of this intermingling of artistic tendencies is not relative anonymity or exposure but the dialectical tension necessary for the very act of creation itself. The stammering Duke who confesses to the envoy his verbal limitations--"Even had you skill/In speech--which I have not" (ll. 35-6)--becomes as critical to Browning's dramatic monologue as does the verbally confident husband who recounts how and why his last duchess has been silenced. The Duke in seemingly concluding his monologue inadvertently takes his interlocutors back to the beginning of his negotiations ("I repeat, /The Count your master's known munificence/Is ample warrant" [ll. 48-50]); in doing so, he, like Roland, wittingly or unwittingly undermines with a sense of the indeterminate the finality or closure that the poem's end appears to provide.

Browning's hope in the essay on Shelley that in the future poetry may somehow represent both the objective and subjective tendencies is as much an effort to impose the era's dialectical orientation upon the resolution of antithetical elements as it is a means for the poet to ensure the drama or dynamism of his work. "Without contraries," Blake asserts in Plate 3 of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," "is no progression." And for Browning, without antithetical elements in perpetual and inconclusive tension there can be no art.

II

Browning the essayist seems little troubled by the polar opposition of the elements he defines. He never provides insight into how the binary tendencies of objective/subjective are to be reconciled or held in tension or into how the opposition of these elements fuels the artistic process. "Childe Roland," however, demonstrates the nature of this opposition and how these polar opposites--in the form of the conflict between seeing and being seen, for example--function poetically. Before examining the forms this opposition takes and how they operate in the poem, I want briefly to examine earlier Browning poems that reflect a pattern clearly evidenced in "Childe Roland."

Browning's earliest published work, "Pauline" (1832), and the negative critical reaction it inspired from writers like John Stuart Mill, is instructive in understanding the poet's 1853 experiment to deal aesthetically and poetically with these antithetically opposed poetic types. In "Pauline," criticized as being one of the era's most intensely self-conscious poetic efforts, Browning has his narrator simultaneously seek to reveal and to mask his identity or being. Pauline is asked to drape her loosened hair and her body over the reclining narrator so he can in the security provided by this "screen" (l. 4) both "shut me in" (l. 5) and "unlock the sleepless brood/Of fancies from my soul, their lurking-place" (ll. 6-7). For one aware of his "shame" (1. 62) and his "fallen" (l. 80) condition, the speaker's desire to expose, that is to project himself onto the screen of Pauline's body, appears incongruous. The poem, as the subtitle indicates, is a "Confession"; it attempts to give voice to that which shame suggests should remain mute. But these incongruous motives are the very bases of much of the poetry of Browning's poems, and they indicate the disturbingly anomalous nature of what "Pauline's" narrator attempt. For in unlocking his sleepless fancies and projecting them upon the screen of Pauline, the narrator risks discovering that these projected manifestations of self can just as easily become hostile forces that prey on his being as companionable semblances that affirm his identity. Self-consciousness in this context can produce self-alienation; the confessional self may discover condemnation rather than the intended redemption.

Browning's most famous dramatic monologue features this essentially solipsistic endeavor to appropriate something other than the self for the purposes of objectifying aspects of the self. A paragonal contest occurs between the muted, veiled image of the Duchess and the inspired verbal volubility of a Duke exposed to and exposed by his "last" wife. No matter how painful her "spot of joy" remains and how necessary that it be veiled, the Duke cannot help vicariously rendering articulate a woman from whom words never emerge. Nor can the Duke resist unveiling the spot of joy he commanded to cease, thereby indicting himself anew with each new assertion of the self in the object possessed. No matter the contrivance used to ensure that he has seen the "last" of her, the Duke continues to be viewed by his "last" duchess, and each new regard of her reaffirms the indictment against appropriation of an other.

More telling for our purposes here, however, is the dilemma arising from the contest in the artist between objective and subjective tendencies in a poem like "Pictor Ignotus" (1845). If the unknown painter can be regarded as representing in Browning's work the conflict between the warring tendencies a poet must address, then the Pictor dramatizes, not the dialectical or paragonal relationship of these tendencies, but the requisite disjunctively to choose one and repress or deny the other. Browning's Pictor acknowledges that great art requires of the artist the "seconding my soul" (l. 7), "Of going--I, in each new picture--forth" (l. 26). The Pictor's monologue, however, makes clear that such personal exposure or equation of artifact with self is precisely the price for being known and that, conversely, the anonymity he chooses will forever relegate him to the "same[ness]" (ll. 60,61) artists of a lower order achieve. The Pictor, of course, does not equate the known artist with the subjective poet nor the unknown artist with the objective. But what he does convey is the dilemma confronting all aspiring artists who must choose how to resolve aesthetically the tension between self-disclosure and self-denial. What is unfortunate for the Pictor is how he resolves this tension. Instead of entertaining the possibility of dialectically holding these antithetical tendencies in tension, he chooses instead to consider them disjunctively and accordingly rejects self-disclosure or "seconding" for the self-annihilation synonymous with artistic anonymity.

The narrator of Browning's "Cleon" (1855), a man of multiple talents similarly acknowledges the fear that artists are threatened--"mock[ed]" (l. 319)--by their own creations and that immunizing the self from such self-inflicted dangers requires the suppression of self in mimetic activities pointing away from and to something other than the self. Objective art becomes a refuge for the poet temperamentally indisposed to mount pictures of his seconded selves on the retina of his eyes. The salvific consequence of the objective mode of art is that it can at least claim truth or conformity between the perceiving mind of the artist and the empirical world he attempts to represent.

In "Old Pictures in Florence" (1855) Browning acknowledges the god-like stature of the artist who in his works reutters "The Truth of Man, as by God first spoken" (l. 85). Mimesis becomes divine because it results in artifacts warranted by the divinity they imitate. Such consolation sufficed, in classical times at least, to mitigate the possible disappointment artists felt in subordinating their selves to a power other than themselves. Browning's narrator in "Old Pictures in Florence" recognizes, however, that the objective mode of art necessarily yields to the subjective when instead of imitators, artists become "now self-acquainters" (l. 147) and in the process necessarily express themselves and not a divinity other than themselves. The problem with romanticism or expressivism's subjective orientation is its requirement to find a basis of truth or conformity in nothing outside the self. Solipsism becomes the inescapable mode of thought following such a "revolution" (l. 157) and pathetic fallacy becomes its prevailing modus operandi. The conflicting claims of the objective and subjective artistic operations appear irreconcilable: the one mode of art finds conformity everywhere based on an immutable source other than the self; the other predicates conformity on the mutable grounds of a self terrified at the prospect of public disclosure or sight. The subjective poet could indeed revel in his newfound divinity, the reuttering or seconding of his own being rather than the repetition of something antecedent to his self. The objective poet, however, suffers the inescapable suppression of self required by his reliance on the "Truth of Man" as uttered eternally by the divine.

Browning's Roland seems conflicted by these alternative approaches to existence. But it is less the seeming incompatibility of these diametrically opposed modes of thinking that troubles him than the recognition that nothing in his world squares with anything else. His "first" thought is falsified not only by his discovery of the tower at the end of the path the cripple directs him to take, but also by his own admission that the path taken was indeed the "tract which, all agree,/Hides the Dark Tower" (ll. 14-15). And the "last" picture we have of Roland fails to square with the "first" because the childe is in the closing ongoing now of the poem something other than he was at the outset.

Roland's reaction to such diametrical opposition parallels Browning's own response to the poet's attempt at resolving in Men and Women (1855) the binary opposition of subjective-objective tendencies facing romantic artists. Romanticism's seeming repudiation of mimesis in favor of expressivism amounted less to a disjunctive rejection than a dialectical accommodation. In "One Word More," the poem Browning wrote as dedication to his wife of Men and Women, the poet asserts that the fifty men and women represented in the collection are "Naming me" (l. 2). The anonymity secured through the fifty screening devices of the collection's personae cannot fully mask the fact that the individual poems are "secondings" of the poet's very being. Browning's wife, like Pauline, can watch the creator of 50 men and women "enter each and all, and use their service,/Speak from each mouth,--the speech a poem" ("One Word More," ll. 141-2) only to have him confess the je ne sais quoi of his efforts. "Let me speak this once in my true person," Browning writes to Elizabeth Barrett, as if the images and framed figures of Men and Women were now no more than mute idols betraying the creator, himself left mute by his attempts at speaking authentically.

But authenticity is precisely the critical issue confronting the poet/lover who simultaneously strives to name himself while preserving the ongoing becoming essential to life understood dialectically. To be named or regarded as "last" requires a finality inimical to the "Incomplete" (The Ring and the Book ll. 1556) Browning strove to represent in his works. And Roland, it strikes me, defiantly rejects the closure he assumes his predecessors seem to represent at poem's end. To be enclosed in a "living frame" constitutes a contradiction as central to the development of selfhood as does the holding in tension of the objective-subjective poetic tendencies to the artistic enterprise. The "last," that is the latest or most recent, framed image both memorializes a dead self and testifies to the self about to be.

Romantic introspection had fostered this duality, producing self-alienation of the kind Wordsworth describes in The Prelude:

   So wide appears

   The vacancy between me and those days
   Which yet have such self-presence in my mind
   That, musing on them, often do I seem
   Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
   And of some other Being. (2: 38-43)

Browning himself registers the significance of this fact when, in "Old Pictures of Florence", he discusses the "revolution" (l. 157) begun when thought and creative activity were "turned ... inwardly one fine day" (l. 114) and artists were enjoined "'To become now self-acquainters'" (l. 147). Browning's doctrine of artistic imperfection--"The Artificer's hand is not arrested" (l. 125); "What's come to perfection perishes" (l. 130)--requires for its dynamic force the existence of elements in irreconcilable tension. The concern regarding inauthenticity provides that source of dynamism by acknowledging that named self and "true person" are not and never can be synonymous in an evolutionary scheme.

Romanticism's isolationist orientation underscores two important elements involved in the dual consciousness emerging in the poetic act: first, the annihilation or concealment of self; second, the transmigratory impulse associated with such concealment. The first element, annihilation, results from the Keatsian insistence that the poet "has no Identity--he is continually in for--and filling some other Body." The second element, the transmigratory impulse, is clearly evident in the first as Keats seems to imply a deliberate subsuming of the poet's identity in the object he imaginatively inhabits. Wordsworth similarly suggests that despite the egotistical tendency of the romantic poet such subsumption of identity is required when he writes in the "Preface" that the poet must "let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs" [i.e., the persons whose feelings he describes]."

What Coleridge called the "self representative" character of romantic poetry necessitated both of these seemingly contradictory tendencies described by Keats and Wordsworth. The concealment of self could be affected by the poet inhabiting what he depicted. The protagonist of Shelley's Alastor sets out on his poetic career believing in the Wordsworthian alliance of man and nature: the world's multitudinousness provides fitting habitations for the poet's transmigrations. The narcissistic and solipsistic impulses underlying this belief, however, are undermined once the poet discovers the world's inadequacies in this respect and is forced to conclude that he "seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception" ("Preface to Alastor"). The lack of equivalency between the self and its habitations, the inhospitable character of what originally was conceived as "companionable" forms, leads Shelley's protagonist in his wanderings to "See its own treacherous likeness there" (l. 474).

What Fox, writing of Tennyson's attempts at such transmigratory poetics, called the "consciousness of contrast" between the poetic self inhabiting the world's multitudinousness--a Mariana, for example--and the self emerging from that encounter remains the least of the poet's concerns. (12) More distressing, if not potentially fatal, is the awareness that the "other" is inimical to the poet's self. To be seen by one's alleged likeness is to be threatened. When Tennyson similarly seeks for companionable forms to inhabit, what emerges are the terrifying "shadows" threatening the inhabitant of "The Palace of Art." The assumption that in inhabiting an other the poet could securely and with reserve second his self invariably gives way to the reality that the world's multitudinousness provides no hospitable analogues. "Only this is sure," Browning writes in "One Word More," "--the sight is other" (l. 191).

The options for poets dealing with objective reality's recalcitrance are the untimely death Shelley's poet in Alastor experiences, the retreat and subsequent "return with others" the poetic anima of "The Palace of Art" proposes, and the defiant response of Roland in the face of the treacherous models (Giles and Cuthbert) he calls to mind. Searching out analogues ere he begins to "play" (l. 88) his part, Roland comes to recognize that neither his predecessors nor his past selves constitute fitting prototypes for his drama. Not only must he reject as inadequate and inimical those faces ranged along the hillside to view the last of him, he must reject as well any determinate sense of his own self as the "last." Life is tantamount to being seen and therefore threatened, to seconding inconclusively the self under various guises, to rejecting actively any notion of self as final or "last." And so the slug-horn blast endlessly returns the poem at its conclusion to the opening line/title of the poem.

The psychological complexity of such an aesthetic underscores why, in the midst of the artistic revolution occasioned by the romantics, critics like John Keble, Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1831-1841, advocated artistic reserve as a mark of the great poet. The expressivist orientation of the modern poetic simultaneously espoused disclosure and concealment of self, the clothing in an empirically verifiable other of the poetic self virtually silenced by its transmigration into an other. Wordsworth and Ruskin had studiously attempted to mitigate the solipsistic excesses of the romantic poetic by insisting that the artist's emotions--the basis of poetry--remain under the control of reason lest pathetic fallacy undermine poetic greatness. Since the physical world failed in the end to serve the subjective requisitions of the romantic poet for a prototype of self, engendering instead treacherous likenesses, the object depicted had to be seen as it was in itself because it could not function as the hospitable repository of the poet's being. This notion of the fatality of regarding the objective as the correlative of the subjective is critically important to Roland, as we will see, and it explains the significance of Nature's injunction "See/Or shut your eyes" (ll. 62-63)--to the knight in what otherwise appears to be a dramatic monologue. In so many ways in Browning's quest poem, the poet juxtaposes antithetical elements and tendencies--as he does in the Shelley essay--to demonstrate that art, and certainly the new form of art Browning envisions, has as its origins the irreconcilable interplay of conflicting poetic impulses.

III

"Childe Roland" repeats a pattern Browning establishes in "Pauline," the going "through all conjuncture" and refusing to be content "with all the change of/One frame" (ll. 701-3). That pattern acknowledges the importance of three steps in the process of emerging selfhood: (1) "Myself stands out more hideously" (l. 64), (2) "I myself have furnished its first prey" (l. 652), and (3) "I supply the chasm/'Twixt what I am and all I fain would be" (ll. 676-7). Roland's acute awareness at poem's end of his standing apart from-instead of being a part of--his predecessors, of being their "game at bay" (l. 191), a "victim" (l. 6), recognizes the psychological liability of the poet's seconding himself and mounting images of his being on the retina of his eye for all to see. But it is the "chasm" occasioned by self-exposure and the consequent opening of the self to being a "prey" that is critical. The tension between what the self is and what it would be, far from an intolerable condition, constitutes the basis for the dialectical interplay of forces ensuring the "Incomplete." Every artistic seconding of self--those individual namings comprising Men and Women, for example--represents not only a factual marker of being in the historical present, but an acknowledgement by the poetic anima of the self evolving into something it no longer is. The resultant chasm constitutes that indeterminate position where identity is attempted and art occurs. It is the temporal locus in which the chronology of firsts and lasts is repudiated, where ongoing repetition attesting to fundamental differences transpires, and where the projected self becomes the prey of its own reflected being.

Roland's defiant slug-hom blast attests to this indeterminacy. The knight's acceptance of defiance as the only legitimate way of dealing with his situation, however, comes only after a prolonged effort on his part to make the objective and subjective aspects of his life square. After cataloguing in stanzas 8-14 the "penury, inertness and grimace" (l. 61) of the landscape he traverses, Roland incurs the displeasure of a Nature unsympathetic to his intolerable complaints. The paranoia Roland displays from the very beginning of his chronology, when he suspects the hoary cripple of directing him--"one more victim" (l. 6)---down the wrong road, renders readers of the childe's account similarly unsympathetic. The fact that the cripple's directions correctly identify the path leading to the tower, that the cripple suddenly disappears after Roland takes "a pace or two" (l. 50) down the path, simply corroborates the suspicion that Roland finds all in his view inimical and threatening. Objective reality serves simply as a screen onto which the knight projects the penury and grimace of his own being.

Following Nature's directive to cease his complaints and "shut your eyes" (l. 63), Roland unwittingly confirms those suspicions alter obeying Nature's injunction. "I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart" (l. 85). The interior landscape Roland describes in stanzas 15-27, though, conforms exactly to the "ignoble" (l. 56) external landscape described in the first half of the poem. The solipsistic character of Roland's account of reality, the pathetic fallacy seemingly distinguishing his descriptions, however, appears to be undermined by Nature's insinuation that some divine force created such ignobility and by her assertion that "the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place,/Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free" (ll. 65-66). Nature answers Roland's complaints with her own about the powerlessness of forces, physical or human, to alter the predetermined ignobility of things. The words of Nature in what otherwise seem to be Roland's monologue could easily be dismissed as the continued rantings of a childe ventriloquistically using an alter ego as the objective embodiment of his own complaints. Evolutionary speculation of the time, however, would appear to give credibility to Nature's intervention. Empirical testimony may not condone human complaining in this case, but it supports Roland's views of a landscape uninformed by solipsistic thinking or pathetic fallacy.

The solipsist's intention is to appropriate what is not-self and render that habitation an hospitable place from which to speak. The Duke, for example, attempts to obstetrically deliver from his last duchess the message he expects the envoy to deliver to the duke's prospective bride. His stammering midway through his monologue, however, acknowledges his inability to employ what he believes to be his. Roland, on the other hand, appears at virtually every turn to be highly successful: the road is not what he first thought, but the path that, all agree, leads to the tower; the ignobility of the external landscape is not a figment of his imagination but the exact replica of the internal scene on which he turns his shut eyes.

Such conformity or equivalence, though, is far from pervasive in Roland's world. On two occasions the childe attempts to deal with his sense of inevitable failure in the quest. On both occasions, Roland employs the metaphor of fitness implied in his closing remarks about being seen as a living frame. Having closed his eyes as Nature directed, Roland confronts an internal ignobility requiring some palliative to make the vision bearable. "I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights," he recalls, "Ere fitly I could hope to play my part" (ll. 87-8). Roland assumes that in recalling suitable analogues of self, he can either steel himself for inevitable failure or discover the pattern of success in the quest. His recollection of Cuthbert and Giles, however, provides only analogues of "disgrace" (l. 95) and traitorous behavior (l. 102). Roland's attempt here to find a "fitting" prototype of the role he is expected to play suggests the mimetic view that an individual's life drama has some antecedent existence that it simply imitates. Not only is Roland's theatrical metaphor inappropriate for someone who at the apparent "last" of this drama defiantly rejects such finality; it is also demonstrably wrong as his unwitting choice of two disgraced or traitorous predecessors in the quest indicates.

Roland's preoccupation throughout much of his drama with failure (ll. 24, 38, 41) and coming to "some end" (l. 18) expresses both his understandable teleological concern to find the goal as well as the pessimism occasioned by his apparent inability to do so. Again, the metaphor of fitness is used to define Roland's condition. For all his long wanderings, he says, "my hopes/Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope" (ll. 20-21). As if to explain his meaning, Roland alludes to Donne's "Valediction Forbidding Mourning." The childe is like that dying man who, surrounded by friends come to take leave of him, seems by his continued breathing to refuse to go. It is a "shame" to stay (l. 36), Roland suggests, particularly since he is no longer "fit to cope" (l. 21).

Roland's reference to Donne is significant for two reasons, the first having to do with the meaning of "fit," the second having to do with the meaning of "last." In his closing observation about being seen as a "living frame" into which is placed the "last of" him, Roland acknowledges that although he may still be fit or capable of continuing on, were the quest not already concluded, he does not "fit" the scenario he imagines his predecessors proposing. Like the mourners at the bed of Donne's dying figure, Roland stays, or proposes to stay or persevere. He can only be regarded as "last" if what he appears to be at the historical end of the poem is simply the latest rendition or manifestation of the childe. As such, he can fit into no niche, especially into the living frame that ostensibly and apodictically defines his being.

If Roland's defiance understood in these definitions of fit and last serves as a metaphor for Browning's understanding of the poet, the dilemma confronting the modern artist is clear. An aesthetic oriented toward antecedents requires the masking of the artistic self. The poet in such a paradigm becomes the reutterer of some antecedent, immutable Truth. An aesthetic oriented toward self-expression, however, not only repudiates the idea of such antecedent fac-similes of self, but rejects as well the notion that the self in any given historical moment can serve as the prototype of what the individual is becoming. The definitive or absolute "naming" of self in a poem or in fifty poems is tantamount to spiritual death.

IV

Browning's identification of the objective poet with an "open watchtower" suggests that Roland functions like the watchman to report on life's "variegation[s]" as "they glance across" or "lay reflected" on his being. What results in that poetic report is something "projected from himself and distinct." But Roland's introspective analogue (stanzas 15-27) of the variegations of his physical journey indicates that the artifact emerging from his having closed his eyes and "turned them on my heart" (l. 85) represents the effluence of the subjective artist's soul, "the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not separated." The emerging visions or pictures disclose remarkable equivalency, the objective and subjective views being informed by the same penuriousness.

The visual equivalency in "Childe Roland" of what Browning in the "Essay on Shelley" calls the "raw material" or outer semblance of things and the "spiritual comprehension" or interiorized vision manifests itself in the pervasiveness of pathetic fallacy in the poem. A mind unhinged by powerful emotion colors empirical reality according to the soul's impassioned condition. Such equivalency might just as easily be explained by the solipsistic attitude of someone who, in training for the sight, searches for objective representations of his own inner predispositions. Raw material in this state of mind provides hospitable habitations for the mind, whatever its disposition. The poet, understood in this context, resembles Browning's David who goes the whole round of creation, pronouncing on God's handiwork and "returnin[ing] him again/His creation's approval or censure" ("Saul," ll. 240-1). The objective poet reutters "raw material"; the subjective poet repeats that material colored by his own mental dispositions.

If, as Thomas J. Collins argues, the Incarnation symbolically represents "the synthesis of the two poetic roles [objective/subjective]" (123), Browning has made it virtually impossible for artists in the modern era to synergistically fuse these dual poetic tendencies. Synthesis, in other words, is the telos or unattainable goal toward which the poet strives. I have attempted to argue here that instead of synthesizing in "Childe Roland" the objective/subjective artistic tendencies defined in the "Essay on Shelley," Browning instead maintains them in dialectical tension. The result is that equivalencies, however arrived at in the poem, only appear to argue reconciliation of opposites--of exterior and interior views. For Roland to acknowledge conformity between his spiritual vision and the raw materials of his universe, for the knight to find in external reality hospitable correlatives of his inner state, for the childe to accept that in finding the Tower "the last" of him has been apodictically seen is tantamount to a spiritual death his "living frame" repudiates.

If Browning's historiography posits a discernible goal toward which antithetical elements like flesh and soul ineluctably move, it also predicates fundamental indeterminacy or irresolution until that end is reached. In fact, without such indeterminacy and pervasive uncompanionability among elements, whether exterior or interior, the very notion of a "living" frame becomes impossible. To maintain such a dynamic, antithetical elements must for the duration remain in irreconcilable tension. Alleged equivalency, in other words, either betrays death or is the illusory explanation for pervasive seemings and discontinuity. Acquiescence and triumph are inimical to such an understanding of life as quest.

When Browning appended as epigraph to "Pauline" Marot's lines, "Plus ne suis ce que j'ai ete/Et ne le scaurois jamais etre," he acknowledged as the basis of his poetic efforts that as artistic questor he is forever out of the present moment, that poetry at best represents a trace of what the artist was, that inauthenticity is a deliberate stratagem necessitated by that tact that "I am no longer that which I was nor will I ever know how to be again." The psychological indeterminacy or betweenness and the philosophical absurdity Roland acknowledges as he confronts the not-self might, as I have suggested, more appropriately be regarded in terms of the "chasm" metaphor Browning employs in "Pauline." As the narrator "unlock[s] the sleepless brood/Of fancies" from his soul to be projected against Pauline's enclosing form, he presumes absolute equivalency between those fancies and their objective correlatives. The "raw material" of reality and art provides a conducive medium from which the ventriloquistic viewer or artist can attend to his echoing voice.

But in the moment of meditation consequent upon such presumption, awareness of divorce occurs, the chasm emerges, the offspring delivered of the generative act comes threateningly to regard its progenitor. Byron's Childe Harold defines in obstetric terms the correlation Browning writes of in December 1852 between subjective and objective art. Like the narrator of "Pauline," Childe Harold speaks of "endow[ing]/With form our fancy" until "we give/The life we image." Implicit in Byron's definition of art as a reflex of the artist's soul is the notion of artifact as both duplicate and rival antagonist of the parenting artist. The latter may, in fact, have given birth to the former, but an equality of these separate identities is maintained because both parent and offspring, gazer or projector and gazed at or projected depend for their existence on their threatening opposite. Identity is predicated on being seen, not on "training for the sight," and neither offspring nor parent, neither objective nor subjective poet, can any longer exist independent of the other's regard.

This tension is perhaps best illustrated structurally in the fact that "Childe Roland" does not as a poem conclude where logic dictates it should. If we accept as true Roland's admission that he has spent his entire life "training for the sight," then a poem chronicling the knight's having arrived at the object of his quest should conclude with the rhetorical question of line 181, "What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?" But the poem continues for 23 lines more. And in these concluding lines, Roland--and Browning--have an opportunity to answer with a "last" the question raised by the poem's beginning: "My first thought was." More importantly, however, these last 23 lines provide irrefutable evidence denying that Roland's life was not--and is not--about the sight, but about being seen and that as a result there can be no "last" of him so long as he is a living frame.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. "Browning's 'Childe Roland': All Things Deformed and Broken" in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971.

--. "How to Read a Poem: Browning's 'Childe Roland.'" Georgia Review 28 (1974): 4-15.

--. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

--. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.

--. Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. with Adrienne Munich. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1979.

--. Robert Browning: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.

Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974.

Byron, George Gordon. The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-1993.

Collins, Thomas J. Robert Browning's Moral-Aesthetic Theory: 1833-1855. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1967.

D'Avanzo, Mario L. "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came': The Shelleyan and Shakespearean Context." SEL 17 (1977): 695-708.

Dellamora, Richard J. "Browning's 'Essay on Shelley' and 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came': Mythopoeia and the Whole Poet." The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 2 (1981): 36-52.

DeVane, W. C. A Browning Handbook. New York: F. S. Crofts, 1935.

Drew, Philip. "Browning's Essay on Shelley." Victorian Poetry 1 (1963): 1-6.

Erickson, Lee. Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.

Fox, William. "Review of Tennyson's Poems Chiefly Lyrical." In Victorian Scrutinies. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. London: Athlone, 1972.

Heffeman, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Maxwell Catherine. "Not the Whole Picture: Browning's Unconquerable Shade.'" Word and Image 8 (1992): 322-332.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley's Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford UP, 1905.

Strickland, Edward. "The Conclusion of Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.'" Victorian Poetry 19 (1981): 299-301.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Longman, 1969.

Tucker, Herbert. Browning's Beginnings. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980.

Williams, Anne. "Browning's 'Childe Roland,' Apprentice for Night." Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): 27-42.

Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson; rev. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Lawrence J. Starzyk

Kent State University

(1) All references to Browning's work are to the Cambridge Edition.

(2) Dellamora contends that "The dialectical activity [of "Childe Roland"] is restricted to the play between Roland's obsessive relation to landscape and his awareness that this relationship is obsessive" (43). For a detailed discussion of Browning's distinction between objective and subjective poets, see D'Avanzo.

(3) See, for example, Bloom's "Browning's 'Childe Roland': All Things Deformed and Broken" (1971); "How to Read a Poem: Browning's 'Childe Roland"' (1974), A Map of Misreading (1975), especially pp. 106-122; Poetry and Repression (1976), especially pp. 175-204. Bloom regards "Childe Roland" as a "sequel" to the Shelley essay (Ringers' in the Tower, p. 164).

(4) Drew, for instance, argues that Browning is primarily an "objective poet."

(5) An early critic, Joseph Milsand (Revue Contemporaire, 1856), perceptively noted of Browning's Men and Women that the collected poems represented a victorious synthesis of the objective and subjective "so as to be, not in turn, but simultaneously, lyric and dramatic, subjective and objective" (qtd. in DeVane, 211). DeVane simply asserts that "the subjective and objective elements were mixed" (p. 579). Bloom argues that Browning's dramatic monologue, in general, represents "a barely disguised High Romantic lyric, in which antithetical voices contend for an illusory because only momentary mastery" (A Collection of Critical Essays, [3]). Collins, on the other hand, understands Browning's poetry, as well as the Shelley essay, as advocating a Christian "synthesis" of antithetical elements (112-124).

(6) Such an interpretation is consistent with critical comments by Bloom (Roland is "the modern-poet-as-hero"; "How to Read a Poem," 418), Dellamora ("Childe Roland" is "a continuing meditation on poetry," 42), and Tucker (the tract Roland follows "is Browning's landscape of poetic origination," 117).

(7) Few critics have noted this "logical discrepancy" or satisfactorily explained Browning's resolution of it. Bloom, for example, argues that "First thought' here is not opposed to second or late thought, which actually never enters the poem, and so 'first thought' itself is an irony or the beginning of one" (Robert Browning: Modern Critical Views, 104-105). Erickson contends that the last line's repetition of the poem's title becomes "a demonic parody of the infinite moment" (150). My own position on this critical repetition and seeming discrepancy differs significantly from both critics.

(8) For another perspective on the concluding lines of Browning's poem, see Strickland.

(9) My reading of the concluding lines explicitly refutes Maxwell's contention that the "living frame" "can also be the actual body of [the dead] Roland" (332) and Bloom's assertion that Roland "dies as a living picture, framed by 'all the lost adventurers my peers'" (Ringers in the Tower, 165-166). My analysis also rejects the position taken by many critics that Roland dies in pursuit of the Tower, a view represented by such readings as Anne Williams's, who interprets the poem as representing "a preparation for death" (40).

(10) For a discussion of poetic ekphrasis as the obstetric deliverance by word of the message represented by mute image, see Heffernan, (1-8.)

(11) Browning's poem, "One Word More," in which he dedicates his Men and Women to Elizabeth Barrett, reflects this poetic tendency toward self-revelation and concealment. Browning confesses that his 50 men and women "name" him, but they also fail to disclose authentically his entire self.

(12) Fox in his review of Tennyson's Poems Chiefly Lyrical writes of the poet and his relations with objects that "He takes their sense, feelings, nerves, and brain, along with their names and local habitations; still it is himself in them, modified but not absorbed by their peculiar constitution and mode of being ... for a moment the identification is complete, and then a consciousness of contrast springs up between the reports of external objects brought to the mind by the sense and those which it has been accustomed to receive; and this consciousness gives to the description a most poetic colouring" (85).