Review of “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855)
Robert Browning (writer).
Read in 2025.
The name “Roland” is mentioned only on the final line, and then only as part of a quote from “Edgar’ Song” in Shakespeare’s King Lear. The earlier play is referenced in a parenthetical preface to the poem, in Browning’s collection (Men and Women). Shakespeare, in turn, may have based his choice of the name on The Song of Roland (ca. 1115). Whether it’s the name of Browning’s main character and narrator, I don’t know. The poem has very little diegesis, and most of that is a landscape, which the poem subordinates to a good sense of dread and despair in his extended riff on the knightly romance.
References here: Visitor of a Museum (1989), Diamond Dogs (2001).