Robert Browning: Husband of Elizbeth Barrett Browning, & vice versa.

The opening ¶ of our edition’s introduction to R..B. is very useful.

Browning deliberately separated himself from the cult of celebrity himself one of the great love-hero

characters in history. elements of Arthurian (esp. Shalott) beside his romantic courtship of E.B.B.,

he was perfectly content in admitting hers the superior poetic genius.

R.B.’s dramatic poems are characterised by taking the form of dialogues, but revealing the character and wider meaning allusively and “accidently”– found meaning.

his ‘speakers’ are morally-ambiguous, even dubious, people: adding to the separation between author, speaker & reader.

“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” Explictly from Shakespeare’s King Lear (madness,

depression, demonic landscape, Albion, ad infinitum.) “Childe” = knight-errancy (also “Roland” vid. M.F. La

Chanson de Roland) we are gradually working up to an explanans for the Victorian’s use

of the Arthurian. Dream-literature (R.B. declared the poem came in a dream,

complete. Pilgrim’s Progress – allegory of Faith (here, under Darwinism) Nightmare / Freud. no determination by R.B. on the ontology of evil

“Childe Roland”—Impressionism”association, sensation, mood, observer

Very difficult to argue that any plausible valid interpretation in wrong. Mine is the best one, of course….

As wide a range of possibility as a life experience of the reader or the nature of Life.

Gustave Doré: from Dante’s Inferno, canto XIII

Dante & Virgil in the 7th circle of Hell, containing those who did violence:

They come to a wood, the 2nd round circle, those who commited violence against themselves.

"Not green the foliage, but of colour dusky; not smooth the branches, but gnarled and warped; apples none were there, but withered sticks with poison."