The poem is divided into six-line stanza’s rhyming ABBAAB. Both the language and the rhyme scheme reflect the ugly scenery and hellish journey it discusses.
Roland is not a reliable judge. He goes into conniptions about everything, eager to find the worst so to provoke himself into being haunted by his own imagination. He therefore hallucinates about dead comrades and imagines horrible apparitions that aren’t there. In the two stanzas, lines 61-66 and 73-76, Roland is going through a barren wasteland, where no natural things exist. The land is full of “grimace(s).” The speaker doesn’t give any clues about the reason he is going to the “Dark Tower.’ The horse also seems to be unclear about how or why he and his rider have arrived there. The speaker says it “stood out stupefied, however he came there.” Both the horse and the readers are clueless about the reasons for the journey, and perhaps the speaker is too. Even though the horse does not speak, it can still suggest that the speaker feels the same way, suggesting that Nature is the speaker’s voice. He is unsure of the “hoary cripple” who gave him directions and his first instinct is to think that the man is lying to him, but his general confusion lead him to accept the man’s directions. By the third stanza Roland speaks of the same lie as “that ominous track which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower.” The old man is clearly not lying, as his directions prove to be correct later in the poem, suggesting that Roland cannot come to terms with what is real and what is not. He is paranoid and delusional, with the cause of his psychosis being his fear of failure and the uncertainty of whether he is “fit” enough to overcome the trial that lies before him.
Under the circumstances, saying that he "knows" "that his quest and his life have come to an end" is relying on him too much. A bit of discarded machinery, which is quite possibly a mere literal agricultural tool, has him speculating crazily about its possibilities as an instrument of torture. Similarly, he thinks of the horse that “must be wicked to deserve such pain," He thinks that because he can see the suffering, there must be a reason for it, and therefore the pain is deserved.
His judgment is entirely shattered. He himself obliquely recognizes this, as he finds that he has nearly missed the very thing he was looking for, the very thing in front of him, even after the way to it has been pointed out to him. We are unsure whether the old man had been lying or not, but his eye is positively stated to be "malicious". Yet he seems only to have told the way when
