Maud is among Tennyson’s major achievements, yet although its complexity and artistic merit draw much attention and discussion by critics and scholars, it can appear confusing or even disagreeble to the casual reader. This article looks through the poem broadly and identifies areas for further examination.
Monodrama Form
Steane shows why the subtitle, A Monodrama is apt, describing : “a form half-way between play and dramatic monologue.” A structure with a medly of poetic styles provide glimpses of the protagonist’s perspective and consciousness and a dramatic feel simultaneously
This allows the alternating of tenderness and ferocity, to great effect: “the whole monodrama at its most intense moves beyond reason altogether into realms of immediate sensuous apprehension” (Buckley).
There is a sense of tragedy within Maud, which Tennyson called a “little Hamlet”, provided at the start with his father's death: “red ribb’d ledges…with a silent horror of blood”. An accidental murder, Maud’s death, and a focus on the protagonist’s psyche are at the poem's core.
Yet there is also a comic element within Maud, in the overarching structure of the main character's development. This is in the conventional comedic definition of transforming an inhibiting condition or conflict, to a liberated one in the resolution.
Unnamed Protagonist
The protagonist is greatly discussed firstly for autobiographical significance, as critics contemplate the extent to which the character is a part of Tennyson’s psyche. Buckley for one assures that psychology in Maud is personal experience: “personal melancholia…and his familiarity...with the dark neuroses of his father and his sisters.”
On the more immediate level of what is apparent within the poem itself, the character is fascinating for his negativity in many aspects, such seen in the first part:
- Cynicism: “We are villains all”
- Misanthropy: “Shall I weep if a Poland fall? Shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?”
- Spiritual Nihilism: "Who knows the ways of the world, how God will bring them about?"
- Passion: “would I flee from the cruel madness of love”
- Neuroticism: “And ah for a man to arise in me/That the man I am may cease to be!”
The character can be loved or hated, as in Locksley Hall. However, what makes him more peculiar and greater is his development and rendering, how “successive phases of passion in one person take the place of successive persons” (Tennyson). This can be especially so in two major themes, firstly of love.
Love and Maud
The first stage in his passion over Maud is when he tries to ignore her and retain his old exclusion and loneliness from society. He tries abstain, seeing her as merely “splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more”.
Despite this, he is eventually touched by her beauty and singing, igniting a spark that “Kept itself warm in the heart of my dreams,/Ready to burst in a colour’d flame, and what follows is love poetry, most famously in the section “Come into the garden, Maud”.
This is dramatically halted after he accidentally murders Maud’s brother. He flees, going through a stage of neurotic musing and rambling, where his heart eventually erodes to “a handful of dust.” Early on, there is still some memory of Maud, firstly in a white shell he sees, which symbolizes beauty and endurance, but also death and waste(Kincaid), and also her ballad on a “pure and sweet” morning with “a dewy splendour”.
Yet ultimately her presence fades out, dead, a silent figure “standing here at my head”. Love is desolate and nihilistic (a common motif in other poetry), and it is War that finally closes the poem.
Society and War
Buckley argues that war “supplies the frame of Maud”. Similar to The Charge of the Light Brigade, the Crimean War is alluded to, yet the scope, couched in ambiguity and paradox, is noticeably broader. The external war encloses the protagonist’s internal turmoil, to great aesthetic effect.
In the first part, tension is created with evil in society as “Civil war” which is vile as goes about “not openly bearing the sword”. Yet at poem’s end, hope and regeneration is paradoxically sourced within “The blood-red blossom of war”.
The idea of war as resolution, which will let “the heart of a people beat with one desire”, with God's endorsement ,and which awakens meaning within the protagonist and society, is rousing and optimistic. Yet it could also be seen as a hasty and illogical end, contributing to the critical interest of war's role within the poem.
Appreciating Maud
Maud is both striking and troubling because it has much in common with Tennyson’s other poems, but is also uncharacteristically unique and complex. A serious Tennyson reader would benefit much from a thorough study of its intricacies.
Bibliography:
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems Edited by Christopher Ricks
Tennyson Edited by Elizabeth A. Francis (Article on Maud by Jerome H. Buckley)
Tennyson’s Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns by James R. Kincaid
Literature in Perspective, Tennyson by J.B Steane
Jing Heng Fong - I'm starting university this year, and look forward to writing and gaining experience at Suite.
