One of the best known of Browning’s poems - ‘ “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” first published in 1855 when Browning was 43 - is also one of his most enigmatic. In her Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning Mrs Sutherland Orr summarized the poem as the story of ‘a brave knight performing a pilgrimage, in which hitherto all who attempted it have failed’ (Orr 1896: p. 273). Below the ‘surface’ of the romance narrative, however, Mrs Orr found awkward ‘discrepancies’: ‘as [Childe Roland] describes the country through which he passes, it becomes clear that halfits horrors are created by his own heated imagination. . . . We can connect no idea of definite pursuit or attainment with a series of facts so dreamlike and so disjointed: still less extract from it a definite moral’ (Orr 1896: pp. 273-4). The ‘logic’ of the narrative progression in ‘“Childe Roland”’ is indeed less that of action in the external world than of the inner movement, the fluxes and refluxes, of the mind. Representation of literal action and landscape is transmuted throughout the poem into a figuring of psychological process. Thus, for example, in the ninth stanza, as Roland tells how at a certain stage of his journey he stepped from a road onto a surrounding plain, the road scene is immediately displaced in a manner that suggests the mysteriously arbitrary dynamic of reverie or dream-sequence: no sooner was I fairly found Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, Than, pausing to throw backward a last view 2O’er the safe road, ’twas gone; grey plain all round: Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound. Again, in stanza twenty-one, a description of the action of fording a river is collapsed, without any explicit allegorical frame, into a drama of disturbing psychological implication: - It may have been a water-rat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek. For the modern reader, used to the fragmentary and alogical effects of much twentieth-century Modernist poetry, the dislocations and incertitudes of Browning’s narrative may appear less than surprising; even, perhaps, familiar. But it is not only that we may recognize in Browning’s work a highly individual anticipation of some aspects of Modernist poetic procedure. The ‘discrepancies’ in ‘ “Childe Roland” ’ — those features of the poem that seem most distinctively Browningesque — are distinctions that at once signal Browning’s place within a larger ideological context.