Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is a poem by Robert Browning (1812 - 1889), first published in 1855 in the collection entitled Men and Women. Browning said the poem had come to him in a dream, and said of it, "When I wrote this, God and Browning knew what it meant. Now God only knows."
The name Roland, references to his horn, general medieval setting and the title childe (a medieval term not for a child but for an untested
knight) suggest that the protagonist is the paladin of The Song of Roland, an 11th-century anonymous french poem. However, The Song of Roland does not feature a tower or a solitary quest by Roland, and is not clearly related to the Browning poem. There does appear to be a connection to an old Scottish ballad and fairy tale called "Childe Roland and Burd Ellen". The connection is indirect: Browning acknowledged that the last line (which is also the title) of the poem was inspired by a line in Shakespeare's King Lear. That line, part of a nonsense stanza recited by Edgar, is thought to have been a reference to the ballad.
The American author Stephen King (born 1947) used the poem as the inspiration for his Dark Tower series of novels.
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Referenced By
Dark Tower | List of poems | Stephen King/The Dark Tower | Stephen King/The Drawing of the Three | Stephen King/The Gunslinger | The Dark Tower | The Drawing of the Three | The Gunslinger
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