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 7 th circle of Hell, containing those who did violence:  They come to a wood, the 2 nd 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."