< previous page page_145 next page >

Page 145

subjective, philosophical speculator with dramatic action concerning people of this world. Joseph Milsand, a contemporary of the poet, suggests that Browning sought “to reconcile and combine” the subjective and the objective, “in order to find a way of being, not in turn but simultaneously, lyric and dramatic, subjective and pictorial” (Milsand 1856:545). In Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, Browning attempts this fusion with the dramatic monologue.

II Performing appropriation

Browning’s effort to fuse objective with subjective perspectives manifests itself in two poems that appropriate Shakespeare: ‘‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” which was composed (January 1852) soon after the “Essay on Shelley” and was based on King Lear, and the later poem “Caliban upon Setebos” (published 1864), which rewrites Shakespeare’s Tempest. In these two poems, we see Browning struggling with his role as poet; in “Childe Roland” he aligns himself firmly with the goals of objective poetry, yet in the later poem, Browning seems to return to the agonistic stance of the Romantic or subjective poet, competing with Shakespeare even as he empathizes with Shakespeare’s maligned character.

“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” involves a young knight, a “Childe,” on a quest to find the mysterious “Dark Tower.” At the beginning of the poem, the quester watches as a “hoary cripple, with malicious eye” (Browning 1997:p. 194, 1. 2)3 points him in the direction of what may or may not be the “ominous tract” leading to the Dark Tower (l. 14). At the conclusion of the poem, Roland “[b]urningly” realizes, “all at once,” that he has reached his goal (1. 175). In front of him lies the “Tower itself/The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart” (ll. 181–82). At this point, Roland recalls the names “of all the lost adventurers,” his “peers” who have struggled to reach the same place (l. 195). As their images surround him, Roland puts his trumpet to his lips and blows “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came” (l. 204).

The most important point of intersection between “Childe Roland” and King Lear is the landscape’s function as the locale for a rite of passage. Both protagonists learn to go beyond themselves “by acts of sympathetic imagination” to a sense of “the intrinsic nature of inanimate objects” (Shaw 1968:129). On this route, Lear’s empathy shifts from the inert landscape to various animals, and then, finally, to other human beings. The King sees in the storm another

< previous page page_145 next page >