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Page 147 The most obvious intertextual relation between play and poem is Edgar’s song, which Browning appropriates for the epigraph of “Childe Roland.” By telling the reader to “See Edgar’s song in ‘Lear’,” Browning overtly seeks the cultural authority that this Shakespearean reference can grant to his poetry. After the storm scene on the heath, Edgar, still in disguise, speaks these lines as the party heads toward Gloucester’s castle:
On the most literal level, the ‘‘dark tower” in Edgar’s song probably represents Gloucester’s castle, where evil lurks after Lear’s banishment to the heath. The lines may also suggest Edgar’s fear of death, if he, as Gloucester’s “child,” returns home. In addition, the lines foreshadow the bloody blinding of Gloucester by Cornwall and Regan two scenes later. As Cornwall plucks out the “vile jelly” of Gloucester’s eyes, the blind man becomes a “dark and comfortless” tower who is expelled from his own castle, condemned to “smell/His way to Dover” (3.7.68, 88, 96–97). Certainly Edgar’s lines express the potential for numerous dangers on the path to enlightenment. The dark tower, which is at once (in Shakespeare) the father Gloucester and (in Browning) the goal of Roland’s quest, symbolizes the conflation of inanimate and human. In reaching the tower, Childe Roland reaches the state of complete empathy that both Lear and Edgar have achieved before him. The conclusion of Browning’s poem returns us to the title and the beginning of his journey. As Roland reaches the “Dark Tower,” he hears “toll[ing]/…like a bell” the “[n]ames in [his] ears/Of all the lost adventurers [his] peers” (ll. 193–95), and in this “one moment knelled the woe of years” (l. 198). As the images of his former companions are “ranged along the hill-sides,” creating a “living frame,” Roland declares, “I saw them and knew them all” (ll. 199, 202). “Dauntless[ly], Roland raises the “slug-horn” to his lips and blows “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came” to announce his presence (ll. 203–4). Roland describes the Tower as “blind as the fool’s heart” (l. 182) echoing, perhaps, the biblical passage the “fool hath said in his heart,/‘There is no God’” (Psalms 14.1– 2). Anne Williams’s characterization of Roland as “the archetypal ‘wise fool’ who is wiser than he knows” (1983:40) leads us back to |
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