Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this.
He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes.

That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before.
"If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents Were jealous else.

What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk All hope of greenness?
'tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents." This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street.

It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it.

Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean ?" The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean ?" Does the earth mean nothing?
Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing?
Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing?
If it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything means nothing..