LAST night a January wind was ripping at the shingles over our house and whistling a wolf
song under the eaves.
I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning poem, Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came.
And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not
understand.
A man is crossing a big prairie, says the poem, and nothing happensand he goes on and
onand its all lonesome and empty and nobody home.
And he goes on and onand nothing happensand he comes on a horses skull, dry bones of a
dead horseand you know more than ever its all lonesome and empty and nobody home.
And the man raises a horn to his lips and blowshe fixes a proud neck and forehead toward
the empty sky and the empty landand blows one last wonder-cry.
And as the shuttling automatic memory of man clicks off its results willy-nilly and
inevitable as the snick of a mouse-trap or the trajectory of a 42-centimeter projectile,
I flash to the form of a man to his hips in snow drifts of Manitoba and Minnesotain the
sled derby run from Winnipeg to Minneapolis.
He is beaten in the race the first day out of Winnipegthe lead dog is eaten by four team
matesand the man goes on and onrunning while the other racers riderunning while the
other racers sleep
Lost in a blizzard twenty-four hours, repeating a circle of travel hour after hourfighting
the dogs who dig holes in the snow and whimper for sleeppushing onrunning and walking
five hundred miles to the end of the racealmost a winnerone toe frozen, feet blistered
and frost-bitten.
And I know why a thousand young men of the Northwest meet him in the finishing miles and
yell cheersI know why judges of the race call him a winner and give him a special prize
even though he is a loser.
I know he kept under his shirt and around his thudding heart amid the blizzards of five
hundred miles that one last wonder-cry of Childe Rolandand I told the six-year-old girl
all about it.
And while the January wind was ripping at the shingles and whistling a wolf song under the
eaves, her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not
understand.
Manitoba Childe Roland
written byCarl Sandburg
© Carl Sandburg