Director's Notes - 160 - The Weather (Patreon)

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

After reading Stephen King's sprawling, exciting, and confounding Dark Tower series, I became fascinated with the same poem King used as his inspiration for the 7-novel saga: Robert Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Here's that poem now for you to read.

It's dark and unsettling, about a young knight tasked with seeking out a mysterious Dark Tower, a journey which has destroyed all of his friends and fellow adventurers before him. 

The poem chronicles Roland's steps across a nightmarish plain until he happens upon his goal. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice novels, Childe Roland's protagonist is simply a body for the reader to inhabit as the environment itself changes shape around them. It's a literary acid trip of sorts. 

But the language Browning implements here is so beautiful and chilling, structured in ABBAAB, iambic pentameter sextets. The logic required to fit a story into 34 of these exquisite stanzas hurts my brain, in a good way.

The point to all of this is that I like that poem, and I love the pictures Browning paints, and I often lift tiny phrases and ideas from this poem to place in my own work. Mostly as a tribute to Browning's great work and an easter egg for other fans of this poem. 

This episode features a few such examples, so I thought it would be fun to catalog those here: 

1. In Cecil's first story about the cold front, he says: "But why would a god make a thing, then mar it? What mood change is this? What care can this God have for humanity?" 

This is taken from 25th stanza of Childe Roland:                             

Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood--
Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.

2. In the emergency alert, the voice lists this as a vision in the flames: "A great black bird whose wide wings brush along the castle turret."

From stanza 26:

And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap--perchance the guide I sought.

3. There's also this vision from the NWS: "A wheelless tractor in a vast wasteland of cracked earth."

From stanza 24:

And more than that--a furlong on--why, there!
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel--that harrow fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware,
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

There are several more of these small tips of the hat to Childe Roland. I memorized the poem more than a decade ago, and it's always rattling about in my head, so I don't really do this as much out of adoration of the finest work ever writ. It's more because I need a place to put all these cool words I read. 

Before I let you go, I'll give you one more quote from Childe Roland. It's my favorite line from the whole thing. I've not really ever included it in my own work, because it's so specific (and chilling). Here you go. Enjoy your next nature hike:

Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

- Jeffrey Cranor
December 15, 2019

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