The modern dark poem of quest and exile: Travel as ‘Travail’ in Childe Harold, Childe Roland and Childe Rolandine

Abstract

This paper examines the development of the twin concepts of travel and travail in three major English poems, in the context of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries’ renovated interest in medieval epic and quest literature. If in Byron’s 1812-18 epic travelogue, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Harold is the picaresque pilgrim who flees from home to travel around a ravaged Napoleonic Europe as an exile and a sarcastic commentator; in Robert Browning’s Childe Roland to The Dark Tower Came (1855), Roland is the Victorian poet himself in the guise of ‘knight quester’ traversing the vast barren expanses of failure and death until he can prove himself a ‘self-made man’. In turn, twentieth-century woman poet Stevie Smith (1902-71) transforms Byron’s and Browning’s famous male epics into an ironically eccentric reflection on the unromantic life of a suburban secretary/typist; her Childe Rolandine can be read as a female epic of London suburbia and a powerful tribute to the ‘anonymous’ woman worker, exiled under the yoke of modern social exploitation.