Tortured Knights: Eliot, Byron, and Browning

Even though they come from the shores of distinct eras and the minds of distinct authors, the protagonists of Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Really like Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are all knights in their personal way. One can go even additional: they are, fundamentally, all the extremely same man. Childe Harold and the Byron narrator, Childe Roland, and J. Alfred Prufrock are all tortured guys on a type of a search they are each of them haunted by thoughts of their previous. Their ambitions overlap and blend with a single another each man finds himself hopeless, facing his personal doubt, and he seeks a relief that he does not think in. And even though their methods are admittedly different, each 1 of them in the end self-destructs. Inside the context of their respective eras, every single hero ends up at a tragic dead-finish these poems capture the moments just before they attain it, caught up in small seconds that attain towards an ending. “In a minute there is time,” says Prufrock, “For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse” (47-eight). His “love song” spans the minutes he’s too scared to undo. Childe Harold wanders sadly forth and keeps no track of time and Childe Roland is left standing, remembering his past, paralyzed in “one moment [that] knelled the woe of years” (198). These guys summarize their destinies in matters of mere moments, and go on to fulfill them. If their struggles and answers appear to meld as 1, it is maybe simply because the authors who developed them every single strove in his own time to overcome the identical issues—issues of be concerned, of doubt, of fleeting achievement and lasting regret—looking back at the works come before them and then finding release in a fictional knight on an actual quest.

When Childe Harold begins his quest he is currently jaded, having spent his days overindulging in pleasures that have grown stale. The chance to live in unbounded hedonism may initially seem a blessing, but to Harold it has turn out to be a malediction. His nicely-fed appetite becomes “worse than adversity,”—perhaps since it eventually leads him to seek adversity as other individuals would enjoyment, and adversity’s possibilities turn into consequently limitless (Canto I, 33). The repetition of the “er” vowel sound, initial in worse and then in adversity, subtly hyperlinks the two words together—so that when the reader reads “adversity,” he or she hears a faint echo of “worse” still resounding. Besides becoming euphonious, this impact underscores the impact of “worse” given that it’s nearly as if we are hearing it twice—and the word’s carrying power in this stanza suggests, in its own way, the effect that this pleasure-driven “adversity” will have on Harold’s life. It is worse than traditional oppression since like “worse,” it extends its grasp to reoccur with no limit. “With pleasure drugg’d,” Harold actively seeks its opposite he “almost long’d for woe,/ And e’en for change of scene would seek the shades below” (I 54-five). The word “drugged” offers a concise image of Harold’s torpor as he floats from a single locale to the other with small lucidity or any genuine want for it. And the assertion that Harold would seek the underworld itself—like the hellish landscape faced by Roland, or the inner torment endured by Prufrock—merely for new scenery is successful for its shock worth. However Byron’s claims that Harold (who may just as well have been named Byron, by the poet’s later admission) fled his home merely from an excess of pleasure are dubious at ideal, specially contemplating that this comes just soon after a stanza describing Harold’s (or, once more, Byron’s) personal lost adore. Getting “sigh’d to several even though he lov’d but a single, /And that lov’d a single, alas! Could ne’er be his” (I, 39-40). In what is almost certainly a reference to Byron’s doomed relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, Byron right here reveals that Harold has certainly identified anything other than amusement. He has identified loss, maybe the greatest hurt of all, and it has driven him to roam the globe in search of practically nothing. Byron’s narrator alter-ego welcomes the aimlessness of the ocean at the start of III, just ahead of he plunges back in to the saga of Harold:

Once much more upon the waters! but when far more!

And the waves bound beneath me as a steed

That knows his rider. Welcome, to their roar!

Swift be their guidance, wheresoe’er it lead! (III, ten-13)

The a number of exclamation points and energetic rhythm give the lines a sense of reckless exhilaration that is maybe all-natural to somebody who is prepared to trust his fate to the ocean’s untamed waters. Byron’s narrator has just emerged from a wistful reverie about his distant daughter, Ada (Byron’s own daughter was named Augusta Ada), in which he hopes against hope that he will see her once again. Awakened really abruptly, he immediately immerses himself in the danger and uncertainty about him—almost as a kind of emboldened antidote to the private loss that he suffers. When Byron returns officially to Harold a few stanzas later, he describes the adjustments that Harold’s quest has wreaked on him:

He, who grown aged in this planet of woe,

In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life,

So that no wonder waits him. (III 37-9)

This is Harold’s fate, the one particular he chose for himself. He has “pierced” life like a warrior, but it holds no passion for him. He wanders from one particular end to yet another, caring tiny which one particular is his accurate final finish. At heart he is absolutely nothing significantly less than the Byronic hero—that emblem of Romanticism who, so wasted by life’s fierce emotion and anguish, wallows just outdoors it but in no way escapes it.

Although admittedly diverse from Harold’s background, Childe Roland’s own previous has a similarly self-destructive impact on him. In contrast to Harold, Roland (whose really name, curiously, is a near-annagramic inversion of the name “Harold”) has had less than his share of pleasure–which distinction might usually have been intentional on Browning’s element. Possibly Roland, Harold’s backwards cousin/brother, is fated to pay for the many visits to “Sin’s long labyrinth” for which Harold in no way atoned (I, 37). It is revealed by means of Roland’s inner monologue that he as soon as formed element of a brave business, and has watched it diminish one friend at a time. The memory of his fallen comrades comes back to Roland repeatedly in this his final journey, ringing in his ears like an immutable doom—most forcefully towards the finish of the poem, when Roland faces the Dark Tower at final.

Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled

Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears

Of all the lost adventurers my peers—

How such a one particular was strong, and such was bold,

And such was fortunate, however every single of old

Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. (193-eight)

It is crucial to note that we do not know exactly where this sound is in fact coming from, or if the sound is actual at all. Roland offers no indication that a bell or anything like it is really ringing although this is often achievable, it is not clearly stated. However to him the thought of not hearing the noise is unfathomable, even ludicrous: “Not hear?” he says. “When noise was everywhere!” This is his defensive anticipation of a question that hasn’t been asked, and can't be asked considering that he is entirely alone—yet he feels instinctively that a person, somewhere, is insulting him with the suggestion that he cannot hear this outstanding sound. His vehement but unsupported explanation that “noise was everywhere!” suggests that on some level he is beyond purpose. In all likelihood the noise’s origins are in Roland’s own tortured mind, where the names of his fellows resound unceasingly. He remembers only their excellent qualities—one was robust, an additional bold, and a third, bizarrely, was “fortunate” this is strange because all of these males clearly met sad ends, to the point that Roland can't turn to their memories for comfort any longer. At a point, earlier in the poem, when he tries to discover strength in thoughts of his friends, he finds himself overwhelmed with visions of tragedy and death. “Better this present than a previous like that” he says. “Back for that reason to my darkening path again!” (103-four) The fact that he later remembers some of them as “fortunate” is deeply disturbing 1 possible explanation is that, amazed by the toll of imagined bells, Roland has merely lost his wits at this point. Possibly he decides, subconsciously or not, to revise the past—delude himself, if necessary—in order to make it bearable and find the comfort he demands at this final rallying point. Therefore all the males were bold, all were powerful, and all were somehow fortunate. Yet another rationale, probably even far more unsettling, is that Roland is lucid when he thinks of 1 as fortunate—that, given the horror he now finds himself faced with, he considers him fortunate who is already dead. If this is the case then his attitude at the beginning of the poem makes lamentable sense like Harold’s narrator, who lets the ocean’s waves take him where they will, Roland has long ceased to care exactly where his journey ends. When he is directed, at the poem’s, by a “hoary cripple” (two) whom Roland suspects of dishonesty, he follows the man’s direction not out of trust but out of weary indifference:

….Yet acquiescingly

I did turn as he pointed: neither pride

Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,

So significantly as gladness that some finish may well be. (15-18)

He speaks of hope “rekindling,” evoking an image of hope as a light or flame that contrasts poignantly with the “darkening path” that he returns to later (104). Above all he wishes not for the finish, but any end—or, as he puts it, “some” end. Getting “so long suffered in this quest” (37), feeling old with “hope dwindled” (20-21), his sole want now is to discover the failure that identified his friends—but also to feel worthy of it. With a thought that strongly anticipates J. Alfred Prufrock’s cries of “Do I dare? and, Do I dare?” (38), Roland’s ultimate be concerned is: “And all the doubt was now—should I be fit?” (42)

The difference between Roland and Prufrock, as we will soon see, is that Roland meets his end in the hope that he is match Prufrock faces his nevertheless convinced that he isn’t. The truth that Roland raises his slug-horn and flings himself forward may well seem anti-Victorian in its daring and boldness but for Browning, who defined himself by flaunting codes of tact, this finish is exactly what we would count on.

J. Alfred Prufrock doesn’t need a Dark Tower to unveil his future that significantly he found a extended time ago. The only quest he undertakes is a single of memory, of regretful revising and unwishful thinking. In this case, even so, it is incredibly tough to pin down precisely what in his previous motivates him–or, at a more basic level, to even pin down what is in his previous. Time is treated very ambiguously in “The Enjoy Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the lines memory and imagination are usually deliberately blurred. We are left to infer a life told via omission forced to follow Prufrock’s thoughts, we necessarily dwell not on what he has carried out, but on what he has not. Much more than this, even, we appear at what he could do—what he may possibly have accomplished (but will in no way do.) Therefore when Prufrock asks,

Would it have been worth whilst,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming query

To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to inform you all, I shall inform you all’—(90-5)

He in this way admits that he never did this—that he never ever did roll the universe into a ball, by no means did roll it toward some overwhelming question. And when he continues with the situation that had he accomplished so it could only be

If one particular, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.’ (96-eight)

He confides to us his reasoning, the fears that held him back. At the identical time Prufrock attempts to justify his choice—as, indeed, the whole poem is a sort of justification—when he suggests that attacking life as he may have would in reality have been one thing callous, anything glib and aggressive. He equates the facing of life and adore with “bit[ing] off the matter with a smile”—suggesting with the word “bite” a sort of casual savagery, and with “smile” an unfitting levity. The question of no matter whether Prufrock ought to have lived life, to reside life far more fully—as Prince Hamlet say, and not merely “an attendant lord”—is clearly a single that torments him to the extreme (111-12). He holds for life a type of reverence that probably only the true timids realize, simply because only they are willing to sacrifice their own lives for an unshattered excellent of it. So for Prufrock, whose lust for life is stronger than anyone’s but whose fear of it grows in direct correlation, biting off the matter with a smile is simultaneously one thing he longs for and something he scoffs at. If had had been bold adequate to “force the moment to its crisis,” as he says earlier, he would doubtless appear on the thought differently (80). But since he is not bold adequate he suggests that such boldness is somehow distasteful and generally pointless. For even if he had been bold—even if he had discovered his personal revelation and spread it around—he feels a sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, would have contradicted him anyhow. Much like the imagined naysayers that Roland scorns with his “sound everywhere,” Prufrock envisages “one” who will tell him that he has been wrong—who ‘should say,/ ‘That is not it at all, /That is not what I meant, at all’” (109-110). It is easier for Prufrock to assume that any work he produced would be repulsed by somebody stronger, and the worry of this disgrace is adequate to maintain him from trying—although deep down he knows that the reality that he demands proof is proof in itself that he can not really believe it. Secretly he realizes that convincing oneself is an not possible activity, and the extremely act of trying means you can not be convinced.

In his personal way, then, Prufrock is just as self-destructive as either Harold, Byron, or Roland inside the Modernist perspective, especially Eliot’s own anti-Romantic subset of it, self-destruction has by this point come to imply anything various. Prufrock’s fate is his selection, but at the exact same time it’s the ultimate punishment. Trapped in his personal private torment, like Montefeltro in the quote from Dante’s Inferno that prefaces the poem, Prufrock confesses his regret only because he knows that it will go nowhere—because just as he tries to convince only himself, he tries so to confess only to himself. “‘Do I dare?’” he asks himself–“and, ‘Do I dare?’” (38) The answer, of course, is no the consuming torture of his scenario is that, cursed with a removed viewpoint on his own pain, Prufrock knows exactly what he’s suffered and exactly what he’s going to suffer. But he does nothing at all about it, because recognizing his paralysis is the only indulgence he will allow himself. As a result his love song, although full of hidden sadness that he can’t really repress, is designed at least to be a lot more like an anti-love song—a lost adore song. It mourns emotions that it will not permit for itself.

And so like Childe Harold, “grown aged in this planet of woe” (III 37), and like Childe Roland, whose hope “dwindled into a ghost not match to cope/ With that obstreperous joy success would bring” (21-2), Prufrock ages–becomes an old man who lives his whole life in a day, so that each and every day becomes a complete lifetime of waste.

For I have known them all currently, known them all—

Have recognized the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a additional space. (49-53)

These lines are full of repetition, repetition that trips and falls more than itself to emphasize how unfairly this life has already been lived. Prufrock has “known them all,” “known them all” [much like Roland who, defiantly facing the hillsides who frame his final finish, says that “ I saw them and I knew them all” (202)] and it all has been measured with the mundane and minute unite of a coffee spoon. The coffee spoon evokes at once the drudgery of day to day life, and with its smallness the futility of measuring it out it also connotes morning, just soon after Prufrock has actually said “mornings” in the previous line. “Dying” echoes in the fourth line like “worse” for Childe Harold, and like the fallen buddies of Childe Roland—a dismal, tolling thought that cannot be rubbed out. It is beneath the pressure of this planned future that Prufrock feels himself aging: “I develop old…I grow old…/ I shall put on the bottoms of my trousers rolled” (120-1), once again latching onto diurnal practicalities with a self-contained terror. Prufrock is like Roland, “quiet as despair” as he turns from the cripple towards the Dark Tower (43). He is like Harold, who has grown “secure in guarded coldness” (III 82), so reduce off from his fellow men that he has absolutely nothing left to feel—

…So that no wonder waits him nor under

Can really like, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife,

Cut to his heart again with the keen knife

Of silent, sharp endurance: he can inform

Why believed seeks refuge in lone caves, however rife

With airy photos, and shapes which dwell

Nevertheless unimpair’d, although old, in the soul’s haunted cell (III 40-45).

The final words in particular—“the soul’s haunted cell”—are painfully correct for Prufrock, who is unique for the truth that in contrast to Harold and Roland, he has nothing—and, consequently, everything—to regret. He is not haunted by a forbidden really like, or a lost band of men, but by simply—nothing. A single can say that he speaks of lost enjoy, but only simply because it’s so overwhelmingly, thoroughly lost that it by no means even took location. Prufrock dreams of mermaids singing, but he can not believe they are inside his grasp. “I do not consider,” he says, “that they will sing to me” (125). So although Harold rides the waves and Roland passes by way of the flames, Prufrock “lingers in the chambers of the sea” and in the end drowns (129).

Though each knight and every author struggles with a lot the identical difficulty, it is only Byron—the first—who clearly states a answer. Far more comparable to Harold than maybe anybody on earth, Harold’s troubles were his personal and, paradoxically, Byron solved each sets of issues by inventing the latter. His creation of a fictional character in Harold was his great consolation and only solution “ ‘Tis to create, and in producing live…gaining as we give/ The life we image, even as I do now. What am I?” he says. “Nothing but not so art thou, /Soul of my thought!” (III 46-51) In Harold he identified the “One” who could soothe the worries of a restless soul, the One particular who lent goal to a frustrated life:

In my youth’s summer time I did sing of A single,

The wandering outlaw of his personal dark mind…(III, 19-20)

…In that Tale I uncover

The furrows of extended believed, and dried-up tears,

Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind,

O’er which all heavily the journeying years

Plod the final sands of life,–where not a flower seems. (III, 23-7)

His use of all-natural imagery vividly contrasts the exterior of his “youth’s summer,” like the vibrant “hope rekindling” (17) that Roland gave up on, with the frightening interior of “his own dark thoughts.” Harold came to embody Byron’s inner doubts—just as Roland’s dark path and Prufrock’s dark sadness served the same function for Browning and Eliot. The sterile track produced by tears, where no flowers develop, rises just before us not just in “Childe Harold” but again in “Childe Roland,” where Roland

Consider[s] I never saw

Such starved ignoble nature absolutely nothing throve:

For flowers — as properly count on a cedar grove! (55-7)

Trapped in a landscape exactly where hope has extended died. And the One particular comes to us not uniquely with Harold, but also with Prufrock—who imagines “one” who, “settling a pillow by her head,/ Must say: ‘That is not what I meant at all’” (96-7). This 1 for Prufrock, this “wandering outlaw of his own dark mind” (III, 19-20), is as significantly a curse as a comfort—taunting his ambition before he acts on it–but in either case it displays to us the essential value, for all writers, in generating a individual outside of themselves to endow with the worry that they can not reside with. If the fantastic quest at hand is to corner despair, to live with regret and to conquer self-doubt, for these writers the answer was quite basic: if you are no knight oneself you can always produce one, to preserve on with fighting when you’ve completed writing. And even if these knights do not win their battles, their presence—for authors—marks a quest fulfilled.