Experimental form in Victorian poetryan "end descried," he feels only "gladness that some end might be"
(17-18). He has heard failure prophesied so often and stated so many
times of those other knights who have preceded him, that now "just to fail
as they, seemed best" (41). Hence the poem resembles a medieval quest, a
journey of self-discovery, but one in which the ghastly wasteland imagery
sends the speaker into an intensifyingly isolated confrontation with strange
grotesque phenomena. Once he leaves the road, it disappears. The grass, he
says, grew "as scant as hair / In leprosy" (73-74). He sees a "stiff blind
horse" (76). He crosses a stream which might have been a "bath" (112) for
the "fiend's glowing hoof" (113) or contain "a dead man's cheek" (122).
And he finds inexplicable marks "trample[d]" in the soil (130). Unexpect-
edly, when about to give up again, he realizes he is at "the place!" (176) -
the tower is discovered. At the same time, he is trapped among hills, and
his peers seem arranged to view "the last" of him (200). Yet he concludes
by dauntlessly blowing his "slug-horn" (203), apparently announcing his
presence: '"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came'" (204).
The poem's formal features close around a past-tense narrative whose
effect is paradoxically one of present immediacy. While the poem gramma-
tically relates a series of past events, the result is one of continuing action,
as if the speaker were attempting to explain events as they happen: "grey
plain all round: / Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. / I might go on;
naught else remained to do" (52-54). Momentary expostulations indicate
present-tense outbursts: "For mark!" (49), "No!" (61), "Alive?" (79), "Not
it!" (91). The exclamations also accentuate the attempt to make sense of his
experience: "solve it, you!" (167). Hence, as the horrendous features
multiply, the poem dramatizes the attempt to wrest, through narrative
structure, accountability and understanding from confusion and uncer-
tainty. It represents the search for a structural and thus structuring conclu-
sion from the despair of continuing failure. The poem, therefore, is
dominated by the desire for a structural principle that would ensure the
homogeneity of completed form. In terms of content, this principle
becomes embodied in the formalized object of the tower, which thus
structures both quest and poem. But formal homogeneity is disrupted in
two respects: first, by the gross condition of the tower once it appears (it is
both "round" and "squat" [182]); and second, by the concluding location
of the tower within a phrase, cited and italicized, from outside the poem
('"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came'"). "Childe Roland," then,
refuses to supply a seamless unified object, whether as narrative event or
structured poem. Instead, this haunting work draws attention to the means
by which the speaker attempts to make sense of his world. He confronts
strange signs in the landscape: "What made those holes and rents ... ?"