Chapter XXXIV

There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame 200
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

NOTES:
"Childe Roland" symbolizes the conquest of despair by fealty
to the ideal. Browning emphatically disclaimed any precise
allegorical intention in this poem. He acknowledged
only an ideal purport in which the significance of the
whole, as suggesting a vision of life and the saving power
of constancy, had its due place. Certain picturesque
materials which had made their impressions on the poet's
mind contributed towards the building up of this realistic
fantasy: a tower he saw in the Carrara Mountains; a
painting which caught his eye later in Paris; the figure of
a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room--welded
together with the remembrance of the line cited from
King Lear, iii. 4, 187, which last, it should be remembered,
has a background of ballads and legend cycles
of which a man like Browning was not unaware. For
allegorical schemes of the Poem see Nettleship's "Essays
and Thoughts," and The Critic, Apr. 24, 1886; for an
antidote to these, The Critic, May 8, 1886; an orthodox
view, Poet-lore, Nov. 1890: for interpretations touching
on the ballad sources, London Browning Society Papers,
part iii. p. 21, and Poet-lore, Aug.-Sept. 1892.