Author Judith Weissman argued that the Dark Tower symbolized a soldier’s devotion to honor and glory by Roland going nuts, Weissman said Browning’s poem served to demystify military heroism. Michael Whelan's original art for 'The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower' Michael Whelanīesides being an actual, literal dark tower that supposedly keeps the multiverse from collapsing in King’s books, the Dark Tower in the poem functions as a metaphor for pretty much whatever the audience can come up with. So I started off wondering: What is this tower? What does it mean? And I decided that everybody keeps a Dark Tower in their heart that they want to find.” Nobody knows who wrote it, and nobody knows what the Dark Tower is.

“Browning never says what that tower is,” says King, “but it’s based on an even older tradition about Childe Roland that’s lost in antiquity. In a 1989 interview with Castle Rock News, King revealed that he was fascinated with the Dark Tower’s mysteries. At the end, Roland reaches the Dark Tower, and Roland blows on a slughorn, a declaration to challenge whoever - or whatever - lives inside the Dark Tower. From there, Roland endures many challenges on his way to the tower, some of them just in his head. An epic story at 34 six line stanzas in iambic pentameter, the poem tells the story of Roland - perhaps named after the heroic paladin of the medieval French poem The Song of Roland - who doubts whether or not the person who gave him directions to the Dark Tower was honest. Published in 1855, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” was included as part of a collection of poems titled Men and Women, which received “little notice” upon its release. But none of it would have started if not for a 19th-century English poem by Robert Browning, in which the eponymous, and indeed ominous “Dark Tower” has come to serve as a metaphor for many things. Mashing horror with Arthurian fantasies and spaghetti westerns, The Dark Tower books have stretched into novel installments, several tie-in books, a prequel comic series from Marvel, an online game, and a film from director Nikolaj Arcel ( A Royal Affair). In 1982, American author Stephen King released The Gunslinger, the first volume of King’s self-ascribed magnum opus series The Dark Tower.

Michael whelan the dark tower