John Ashbery's revision of the post-romantic quest: meaning, evasion, and allusion in "Grand Galop."

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Frank J. Lepkowski

The impasse in which the poet now finds himself is that of wanting to sing but being closed out by the crippling weight of tradition, the unpropitiousness of his cultural moment, and his own inability to believe completely in what he is doing. This state of confinement again produces a motion toward breaking out. Where previously he has alluded to Shakespeare in similar situations, here he invokes the quest, which takes the form of an extended, ironic rendition of Robert Browning's great poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." As it happens, Ashbery has alluded to this poem once before, in "The System":

And now it is the face you show to the world, the face of expectancy, strange as it seems. Perhaps Childe Roland wore such a look as he drew nearer to the Dark Tower, every energy concentrated toward the encounter with the King of Elfland, reasonably certain of the victorious outcome, yet not so much as to erase the premature lines of care from his pale and tear-stained face. Maybe it is just that you don't want to outrage anyone, especially now that the moment of your own encounter seems to be getting closer (Three Poems 92).

Although Harold Bloom has remarked that Ashbery's use of Childe Roland is "transformation or wish-fulfillment, as we can be reasonably certain that Browning's quester neither wants nor expects a |victorious outcome'" (207), the self now impersonating the quester has just beforehand been reduced to the most pathetically limited identity imaginable. The "you" in this passage is "my soul" whose aspirations Ashbery has pictured as those of a lost dog who

timidly approaches first one passerby and then another, uncertain of what to ask for, taking a few embarrassed steps in one direction and then suddenly veering to another . . . lost, puzzled, ashamed, ready to slink back into his inner confusion at the first brush with the outside world. (Three Poems 91)

No wonder the quester doesn't want to outrage anyone; as the adage goes, "He who has a mind to beat his dog will easily find a stick." Whatever victorious outcome he is imagining on the next page has to be somewhat qualified by his predicament on the previous page.

In "Grand Galop" Ashbery's appropriation of the original is more faithful even though the allusion is not named. The first thirteen lines of the final section recapitulate in essence the plot and setting of Browning's poem. A driven searcher passes through a shifting land of perverse and diminished forms on his way to a heroic confrontation which turns out to be diminished as well. In the approach to the tower, Ashbery with his injunction to "Ask a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him" (20) hyperbolizes Childe Roland's encounter with the "hoary cripple, with malicious eye" (Browning 276) from whom he must take directions. In Ashbery's version it is the quester and not the guide who is crippled. Ashbery's vanishing road and shifting horizon parallel what happens to Roland after he sets off to follow the old cripple's directions: pausing to throw backward a last view / To the safe road, 'twas gone! grey plain all round! / Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound" (278). The same horizon suddenly changes on Roland as "Mere ugly heights and heaps now stol'n in view. / How thus they had surprised me, - solve it, you!" (281).