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Page 146

person who resembles himself or one of his family. Yet Lear sympathizes with and forgives the storm’s fury because he never “gave [it] kingdom” nor “call’d [it] children” (3.2.16).4 Therefore, the storm ‘‘owes” Lear “no subscription” as daughters do (3.2.17). Indeed, Lear’s daughters seem even less worthy than beasts, as Lear at least feels some identification with animals. He states, for instance, that “man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s” (2.4.262), and compares “unaccommodated man” to a “poor, bare, forked animal” (3.4.98, 100). Eventually, when Lear totters toward insanity, he himself becomes, in essence, like “a beast, that wants discourse of reason” (Hamlet 1.2.150) and loses his reason to wander madly on the heath. Finally, Lear learns to sympathize with others, including Kent and the Fool. In the hovel scene, for instance, Lear invites others to go in first. “Prithee go in thyself,” he says to Kent, “seek thine own ease” (Lear 3.4.24). Lear then turns to the Fool, asserting, “In boy…You houseless poverty/Nay get in” (3.4.27–28). As the two precede him into the shelter, Lear remains alone on the heath, prayerfully proclaiming the words that signify his epiphany: “O, I have ta’en/ Too little care of” others less fortunate (3.4.33–34).

Roland goes through a similar progress toward selfless empathy, an initiation signaled in part by the title of “Childe,” bestowed on a young warrior awaiting knighthood. His journey also begins through an identification with inanimate objects, which he endows with human characteristics: the “desperate” earth (l. 147), the “blotches” of soil that look like “boils” (ll. 151, 153), which might recall Lear’s descriptions of his daughters as “boil[s], and “embossed carbuncle[s]” (2.4.218–19). Even the “willows” growing by the “wrath[ful]… black eddy” on Roland’s path seem to fling themselves, like a “suicidal throng,” downward “in a fit/Of mute despair” (ll. 117, 113–14, 117–18). Roland’s empathy at this point grows so strong that even the animals take on human qualities. The “water-rat[’s]” cry (l. 125) sounds “like a baby’s shriek” (l. 126), while the “stiff blind horse” is full of “grotesqueness” and “woe” (ll. 76, 82). By the end of the journey, Roland himself feels hunted like an animal, caught “[a]s when a trap shuts [and] you’re inside the den” (l. 174). Roland achieves a level of sympathy comparable to that of Lear when he recalls other humans, addressing them with understanding in spite of their failures and dishonor. Roland recalls “all the lost adventurers my peers,” and remembers “[h]ow such a one was strong, and such was bold” (ll. 195, 196). Like Lear, Roland sympathizes with the precarious nature of the human condition.

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