E. WARWICK SLINNnor fixed. In an age of growing challenges to established knowledge,
therefore, it is hardly surprising that poetic forms emphasize the experien-
cing, thinking and feeling, human subject. Growth in the sciences, particu-
larly the physical sciences such as botany and geology, as well as in
theological questioning (notably the Higher Criticism of the Bible), created
an intensifying uncertainty in the face of fundamental change. Emergent
ideas about evolution, for example, displaced earlier concepts of mutability
where change involved cyclical repetition rather than radical transforma-
tion, so that in Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) even solid lands "melt like
mist" (AT CXXIII, 7).
In conjunction with this uncertainty, poetic forms shift in emphasis.
Rather than discovering completed wholes, we find structures that stress
movement toward an end but where the attainment of that end is shrouded
in incertitude. In other words, speakers in Victorian poems rarely find the
palpable end or closure that would ensure aesthetic order and cultural or
personal meaningfulness. There is no attainable goal for the eponymous
hero of Tennyson's dramatic monologue "Ulysses" (1842): for him the
"margin fades / For ever and for ever" when he moves (AT 20-21).
Similarly, the concluding vision of a New Jerusalem in Barrett Browning's
epic Aurora Leigh (1856) remains rhetorically articulated yet tantalizingly
remote: the "first foundations of that new, near Day" (EBBAL IX. 956) lie
"faint and far... / Beyond the circle of the conscious hills" (IX. 952-54).
In Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1858), the protagonist's
moment of conclusion is the debilitating paradox of an active passivity, a
determination of will that is a capitulation of intent: "I will go where I am
led" (AHC V. 179). 5 And for Robert Browning's speaker in "Childe Roland
to the Dark Tower Came" (1855), the moment of discovering the dark
tower, the object of his quest, is a moment of utter ambiguity where
revelation and destruction are inseparable. Like a sailor at the mercy of a
storm, he sees "the unseen shelf / He strikes on, only when the timbers
start" (RB 185-86).
In many respects, "Childe Roland" might be considered the quintessen-
tial Victorian experiment. It was a poem that Browning felt compelled to
write, despite his uncertainty about its purpose; it was written in a single
day, in fulfillment of a New Year resolution to write a poem a day; 6 and its
intensively figurative style has generally baffled anyone seeking allegorical
solutions to its perplexing narrative. Roland, the presumed protagonist, has
spent a lifetime searching for the dark tower, much in the manner of a
Childe (a knight in training), who is on a mission to secure his identity as
knight. But Roland has journeyed without success. At the beginning of the
poem, he seeks only an end to his suffering. On glimpsing the prospect of
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