When the Gypsy Queen sings her song through his memory of it, the
rhymes and rhythm take on a befitting harmoniousness and smoothness
contrasting finely with the remainder of the poem.

By means of this song, moreover, the horizon is enlarged beyond the
immediate ken of the huntsman. The race-instinct, which has so strong
a hold upon the Gypsies, is exalted into a wondrous sort of love which
carries everything before it. This loving reality is also set over
against the unloving artificiality of the first part of the poem. The
temptation is too strong for the love-starved little Duchess, and even
the huntsman and Jacinth come under her hypnotic spell.

Very different in effect is "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."
The one, rich in this lay of human emotion, couched in the simple
language of reality; the other, a symbolic picture of the struggle and
aspiration of the soul. Interpreters have tried to pin this latter
poem down to the limits of an allegory, and find a specific meaning
for every phrase and picture, but it has too much the quality of the
modern symbolistic writing to admit of any treatment so prosaic. In
this respect it resembles music. Each mind will draw from it an
interpretation suited to its own attitude and experiences. Reduced to
the simplest possible lines of interpretation, it symbolizes the
inevitable fate which drives a truth-seeking soul to see the falsity
of ideals once thought absolute, yet in the face of the ruin of those
ideals courage toward the continuance of aspiration is never for a
moment lost.

As a bit of art, it is strikingly imaginative, and suggests the
picture-quality of the tapestried horse, which Browning himself says
was the chief inspiration of the poem. It is a fine example of the