"What's the import?": indefinitiveness of meaning in nineteenth-century parabolic poems - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Kerry McSweeney

We can connect no idea of definite pursuit or attainment with a series of facts so dreamlike and so disjointed; and still less extract from it a definite moral.

(273-74)

Dreamlike. There is no reason to doubt Browning's retrospective account of the poem's genesis: "Childe Roland came upon me as a kind of dream. I had to write it, then and there, and I finished it the same day, I believe. But it was simply that I had to do It. I did not know then what I meant beyond that, and I'm sure I don't know now. But I am very fond of it" (qtd. in DeVane 227). Whatever its genesis, however, "Childe Roland" is not simply the transcription of a psychic event. A dream per se is known only to the dreamer and is accessible to others only through the dreamer's retrospective account. In a literary dream, the reader is at a further remove from the putatively real dream in that verbal elaboration becomes "not only the inevitable by-product" of representating the dream "but also the conscious aim" of the writer (Porter 38).

It is not often recognized how successful Browning has been in representing a dream in poetic form. Consider his metrical choice, on which the best commentator is George Saintsbury in his History of English Prosody. A common feature of dreams is

the extraordinary gravity which accompanies their wildest and most preposterous accidents and combinations; as well as the smoothness with which the topsy-turvy transitions are effected. To render this you want a severe metre, but one admitting of no little variety. The sixain aabccb, with every line a regular decasyllable, provides this excellently; and as it is not a common form, it mixes the requisite strangeness with its sobriety.

(3:230)

The fusion of contradictory qualities and the omission of connections between perceptual events also suggest the a-causal world of dream. So does the disjunction between the pervasive atmosphere of dread and doom, disease and death, in the speaker's perception of his environment and the energy and exuberance with which it is articulated.

No definite moral. When Browning commented on the dream genesis of "Childe Roland," he also remarked that "I was conscious of no allegorical intention in writing it" (qtd. in DeVane 229). This comment does not mean, however, that the representation of his "kind of dream" in literary form does not include the seeds of meanings implanted either intentionally or through the promptings of poetic genius. Indeed, in the context of the poems of Browning's Men and Women (1855), in which "Childe Roland" was first published, it is very difficult to think of the poem as innocent of the intent to stimulate the tendency of readers to look for meanings in artworks. Think of such other poems in the volume as "A Toccata of Galuppi's," "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," and "A Serenade at the Villa" and the ways in which their speakers are concerned with the meanings of an artwork--with "What's the import?" as the exacerbated organist-speaker of "Master Hugues" asks concerning the elaborate fugue he is playing. In "Childe Roland, " the reader is at one point encouraged to consider the same question: "How thus they had surprised me,--solve it, you!" That is, you, reader, explain what is going on, interpret the poem!