Seamus Perry

speaker

386 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 31 Aug

Seamus Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Close Readings · Narrative Poems: ‘Childe Roland’ and ‘The Pied Piper’ by Robert Browning · 31 Aug 2026 podcast

And many readers have found the poem deeply puzzling, as I must confess I do.

Uh and Browning himself seems to have regarded it with some bewilderment.

A child Rowland came upon me as a kind of dream, he later recalled.

I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day.

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'm very fond of it.

It was first published in Browning's great collection of eighteen fifty five, one of the one of the really great collections of Victorian poetry, Men and Women, which is a book of dramatic monologues, which of course is what Charles Rowland to the Dark Tower came.

Um is.

So, Mark, to begin, we have an instruction, don't we?

After the title, Browning puts in brackets see Edgar's song in Lear.

So what uh it's an instruction to the reader, isn't it?

What do you think he wants us to to gather from that that intertextual, as we might say now, uh link?

Yes.

So, as I said, m men and women, the volume in which it appears is is a book of dramatic m monologues, and and all those aspects of the poem that you're talking about are actually features of r Charles Rowland's consciousness, aren't they?

That's that's in a way what the what the main um poetic interest of of the poem is.

Child Rowland j a child with an E on the end is a youth of noble birth, and the child that Browning must have had particularly in mind was Child Harold, who's the subject of uh Byron's earlier n poem from earlier in the nineteenth century called Child Harold's Pilgrimage.

And that's quite an important kind of precursor text, isn't it?

Because although Byron's title announces that uh a child Harold is on a pilgrimage, actually the poem itself shows he's not going anywhere.

He's up just wandering around and bumping into whatever he bumps into.

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