The angel, Appollyon

XXVII.

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,
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.
-Robert Browning

I saw this stanza from Robert Browning's Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came and immediately thought of the bird in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. This didn't strike me as too odd. In literature birds are seen as guides, usually to other worlds. Here the character Roland is taken from a dismal land he calls brut to the end of the quest, the dark tower. He sees no end to his journey until he looks at the bird and then, all of the sudden, the tower is right in front of him. The bird acts as Roland's guide to the tower, a tower he has searched for his whole life. I would like to think that the bird was necessary because the tower lives in a world of its own, a world in which human beings can't get to. It is also noted that the bird is black. We can assume, as the reader, that he is describing a raven (perhaps). This assumption takes us to another metaphor. Ravens usually represent death.

Browning mentions in the fourth line the angel Apollyon. Apollyon in the Bible is named to be a destroyer. Browning compares all things leading to the tower as destroyers or destroyed themselves. These descriptors all lead up to what the tower actually represents, death. Because the tower itself is dead and destroyed, why would anything flock to it that isn't also holding the same fate? It's interesting to ask this question, it shows you that Roland himself is destroyed. He, like the bird, is "Apollyon's bosom-friend." This thought leads us to understand why Roland has now found the tower, right in front of him, after all these years. It could be that his destruction allowed him to enter the world of the tower.

The name Apollyon, can also be translated in Hebrew as Abaddon, which means the angel of the bottomless pit. If you replace the line in the poem to the Hebrew definition, it reads slightly different. Seeing the tower as a bottomless pit shows it as Hell. Roland travels his whole life just to end up in Hell.

While going over my notes, I also saw that Abaddon sounds a bit like the word abandon...Roland, abandoned? Just a thought.