Tag Archives: The Dark Tower

“Thirty-Four Observations on ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’” – Timothy Donnelly – Annual Luncheon Wednesday, May 15 2019

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PDF: Browning Society May Newsletter 2019

The New York Browning Society, Inc. Newsletter
Founded in 1907
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York NY 10003

Annual Luncheon Wednesday, May 15

Time 12:00– 1:00PM
Timothy Donnelly, “Thirty-Four
Observations on ‘Childe Roland to the
Dark Tower Came’”

by Laura Clarke

May was an important month for Browning, since it was during this month in 1837 that his first play Strafford was performed at Covent Garden Theatre. This performance would mark the beginning of Browning’s difficult and disappointing experience with the Victorian theater. Indeed, Browning is famous for being a failed playwright, and his plays were criticized for being too intellectual and philosophical, especially at a time when sensational melodramas were
more popular on the stage.

Browning’s Strafford was an ambitious play. It was not simply a historical tragedy but rather an exploration of Carlyle’s concept of symbols—the material forms in the world that embody spiritual ideas. For Carlyle, these symbols must continually evolve so that they do not become fixed in tradition and stymie the spiritual vitality that ever embodies itself anew. The historical
context for Strafford is seventeenth-century England leading up to the Civil War. Strafford believes in the undisputed power of the king, whereas Pym champions the increasing power of the people as it is embodied in parliament. This for Browning represents the progress of symbols in history and the manifestation of spirit in new political forms.

Strafford is clearly influenced by Carlyle’s Lectures on Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, especially Carlyle’s argument that Puritanism, as it was embodied in the actions of John Pym and Henry Vane, was a symbolic transition from political forms that had become merely tradition, outworn semblances, to a new organic embodiment of spiritual truth. Carlyle contends that English Puritanism was a continuation of the progress of the Protestant
Reformation and that it looked forward to the French Revolution; together these were three
successive stages in the return from “Falsehood and Semblance” to “Truth and Reality.”

Browning’s play presents Pym as one of Carlyle’s heroes, the individual who bodies forth the new spirit of the age, but his focus of the play is more on Strafford and the tragedy of a soul which is tethered to a defunct symbol that no longer embodies the truth of the age. Browning depicts Strafford’s dedication to the king as an inversion of teleological development, and the Biblical imagery that suffuses the play points to the fact that Strafford continues to worship what in the modern age can only be a false idol.

Strafford recognizes that he is being subsumed by the force of history. Thus when Strafford is betrayed by the king and sentenced to death, he expresses a willingness to die. Yet at the very moment of his death Strafford has a sudden vision of the pain and destruction that will bring
about the new symbols that embody the ideas of spirit. Foreseeing the horrors of the Civil War, he cries: “I, that am to die, / What must I see! ’tis here—all here! My God, / Let me but gasp out, in one word of fire, / How Thou wilt plague him, satiating Hell! / What? England that you help,
become through you / A green and putrefying charnel.” This is for Browning the tragic aspect of the dialectical progress of history: progress is only rendered through conflict, and in its self-destruction and self-renewal, spirit sacrifices individuals to the greater purpose of history.

We see this in Pym’s response to his old friend’s prophetic vison. He declares coldly, “England,— I am thine own! Dost thou exact / That service? I obey thee to the end.” It is Pym’s conviction that the will of England is made manifest in his being and therefore he is compelled to subordinate personal connections. This highlights in the drama the tragic space between the
individual and the collective good. Clearly Pym is one of Browning’s great heroes, as we see in “Charles Avison,” but his position as a hero renders him far less human than Strafford, and when Stafford cries in the last line of the play: “O God, I shall die first—I shall die first” (l. 360), we feel the tragedy of one whose life is sacrificed for the future. May must have been a disappointing month for Browning; Strafford only ran for four nights and many critics declared it to be a disastrous debut. Sadly, Browning never found a receptive audience for his intellectual
dramas, but his experience writing these dramas inevitably shaped the dramatic poetry
for which he is remembered today.

We hope you will be able to join us for the annual luncheon and for Timothy Donnelly’s
exciting talk to close out the season.

Timothy Donnelly Presented “Thirty-Four Observations on ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’” for the New York Browning Society at The National Arts Club Wednesday, May 15, 2019 at our Annual May Luncheon.

“To the Dark Tower: Childe Roland, C.S. Lewis, and The Gunslinger” – James Kepple, Society President – Wednesday, November 14, 2018

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PDF: Browning Society November Newsletter 2018

The New York Browning Society, Inc. Newsletter
Founded in 1907
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
New York NY 10003

Monthly Meeting, 1:00 PM
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
“To the Dark Tower: Childe Roland,
C.S. Lewis, and The Gunslinger”
– James Kepple, Society President

by Laura Clarke

James Kepple will talk this month about Browning’s enigmatic poem “Childe Roland
to the Dark Tower Came,” a dark vision of the knight’s quest that came to Browning in
an eerie dream. The meaning of this elusive poem has perplexed many readers, and while
I will leave its subtleties for our President to explore, I want to consider in this month’s
newsletter what significance the Middle Ages had for Browning. Why did he set the
psychological dreamscape of Childe Roland in the Middle Ages? How does the medieval
inform the modern for Browning? As we will see, Browning saw something in the
Middle Ages that he believed explained the essence of the modern condition.

It is well known that the Victorians were fascinated with the idea of the Middle Ages,
as seen in Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, the paintings of the PreRaphaelites, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and the Gothic Revival, to mention a few examples. Yet, unlike his contemporaries, Browning did not privilege medieval subject matter, undoubtedly agreeing withthis proclamation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh:

Nay, if there’s room for poets in the world
A little overgrown, (I think there is)
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s,–this live,
throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates,
aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,

Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles. Browning preferred to grapple with modern
questions, and even in his works that are about medieval subjects, such as Sordello
and The Return of the Druses, he tends to explore the inner lives of complex individual figures, placing them in the context of historical phenomena, rather than offering imaginative enderings of mythic and legendary tales. But while Browning did not turn as often to the medieval topics that preoccupied his contemporaries, the idea of the Middle Ages was in fact crucial for his concept of the modern age. To understand the connection that Browning made between the medieval and the modern, we must turn to his theory of history, which was a theory of history
popularized in England by the many English translations of lectures given in Germany by
the brothers literary and critics, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel.

In their influential lectures on literature and history, the Schlegel brothers argued that
history was demarcated between Paganism and Christianity. The crucial distinction that
the Schlegel brothers made between the classical and the Christian paradigms was grounded in their concept of subjectivity; they believed that the classical human invested soul in the material world so that soul was seen as external to the self, whereas Christianity turned humanity inward to contemplate the transcendence of the soul. They saw the flowering of courtly love as the first embodiment of the modern spirit: women were held as a symbol of divine love, and the medieval code of chivalry dictated external action on the basis of the intuitions of the soul. The Schlegel brothers saw their own age as a continuation of this inward turn. They believed that the external world was a symbol of an inward spiritual reality, just as humanity was the
imperfect embodiment of the divine idea.

Browning turns to this idea in his poem “Old Pictures in Florence.” In the speaker’s defense of early Christian painters, he makes a comparison between the classical and the modern worlds that is derived from the Schlegel brothers. The speaker concedes that while classical art perfected the beauty of form, as seen in their sculptures, in focusing on the soul, the modern artist can never perfectly embody the inward life. Yet the speaker, in speaking for humanity at
large, realizes that classical art is only perfect in the context of the finite, whereas the modern is only imperfect in the context of the infinite. This leads the speaker to voice an important facet of Browning’s poetic theory:

On which I conclude, that the early painters,
To cries of “Greek Art and what more wish
you?”–
Replied, “To become now self-acquainters,
“And paint man man, whatever the issue!
“Make new hopes shine through the flesh they
fray,
“New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:
“To bring the invisible full into play!
“Let the visible go to the dogs–what matters?”

Browning, like the Schlegel brothers, viewed his own contemporary moment as the continuation of the Middle Ages, seeing all speech and action as the attempt to
realize the inward life. This for Browning was the very opposite of utilitarianism,
which considered the worth of action in the world based upon the calculation of external
causes and effects. Browning, therefore, sought to trace actions back to the internal
motivations that we might not normally perceive. He delights in tracing the twists
and turns of the soul as individuals make choices and take action at critical moments
in their lives. As Browning explained in the preface to his drama Strafford, his aim was
to reveal “action in character, rather than character in action.”

Browning did not always feel the need to turn to medieval subjects to explore the
complex vicissitudes of character, seeing the modern condition as a continuation of the
turn inward to soul that began in the Middle Ages. Childe Roland is unique in that he
compresses the medieval and the modern in a vision that has haunted writers ever since.
James Kepple’s talk, “To the Dark Tower: Childe Roland, C.S. Lewis, and The Gunslinger” will examine the impact of Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” From its influences to its influence, “Childe Roland” is truly a poem that resonates in abundance. Its roots are
formed from a Scottish Ballad and Shakespeare’s King Lear, out of which Browning crafts a treacherous road, leaving a map that leads three adventurers towards the ultimate destination. From the historic past, to the unknown future, the Dark Tower has guided and led our hero Childe Roland, and authors C.S. Lewis and Stephen King, down various paths grounded in Browning’s Epic Poem. Let’s trace their routes together, onward, to the Dark Tower.

I will be in touch soon with updates about our new website, and plan ahead for our
festive winter, as our yearly Browning Celebration is coming soon, on Wednesday
December 12th! All members are invited to share their favorite Browning poems and
holiday cheer!  Also coming soon is a very special performance of “Dear Miss Barrett,” a
musical on the Brownings, written by Michael Kurek. Please note that this performance will be held on a new date,THURSDAY JAN 17th at 1pm.

To the Dark Tower: Childe Roland, C.S. Lewis, and The Gunslinger James Kepple, Society President – The New York Browning Society The National Arts Club 15 Gramercy Park South Wednesday, November 14, 2018
(WARNING AUDIO QUALITY IS LESS THAN DESIRABLE)