E. WARWICK SLINN(69); "Who were the strugglers ... ?" (129). And he offers grotesque
answers: "'tis a brute must walk / Pashing their life out" (71-72); "Toads
in a poisoned tank, / Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage" (131-32).
Through this very process of articulating his responses, the speaker enun-
ciates the means by which experience is constructed and thereby given
shape. The harrowing features of the landscape emerge generally from his
own similes or speculations rather than from any external reality: the little
river appeared "As unexpected as a serpent comes" (no), and its waters
"might have been" (109) a "bath" for the "fiend's glowing hoof." If the
writing of "Childe Roland" was Browning's experiment with disciplined
creativity, then the poem itself enacts the speaker's experiment with his
own life, where the metaphor of the quest figures the fusion of personal
experience with the necessary experiment that constitutes a life seeking
meaningfulness and identity.
Acclaimed Romantic poems such as Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"
(1798) or "Intimations of Immortality" (1807) can be said to have
anticipated this attention to the relationship between past perceptions and
present understanding. But the disturbance of harmonious form through
ironic discrepancies within self-conscious speakers becomes an increasingly
Victorian phenomenon. Even when self-consciousness is not undercut by
irony, the emphasis on formal experiment as formalized experience
remains. In this regard, Barrett Browning's "The Runaway Slave at
Pilgrim's Point" (1848) provides a good example. Spoken by an escaped
female slave, the poem recounts the events that have led to the present
moment of direct address to the slave-owning sons who have run her down.
The monologue falls into three parts: an apostrophe to the Pilgrim Fathers;
a narrative about the slave's infanticide; and a cursing of the slave-owners.
The first two sections act as a prelude and grounding for the immediacy of
the third, where the poem establishes the conditions of a performative
speech act: a curse that enacts its own meaning and thus constitutes the
agency and identity of the speaker (acting on her own behalf). The poem
moves from contemplating the contradictory legacy of the Pilgrim Fathers
(who built a supposedly free nation on slavery) and the ambivalence of
blackness (black people are made to feel inhuman and yet animals and
birds treat them as people) to an assertion of her blackness when the slave
claims that the ghosts of the Pilgrim Fathers will no longer confront her:
"My face is black, but it glares with a scorn / Which they dare not meet by
day" (EBB 202-03). On one level, the poem offers a conclusion that
promotes unity and closure: a climactic self-assertion that transforms the
slave's initial doubt about her black identity. But on another level, the
speaker's reflexive recounting of events introduces the insurgent dimension