Study guide
Maud
Open the interactive study guide →
Overview
- Full title
- Maud; A Monodrama. Published in 1855 simply as 'Maud'; the subtitle 'A Monodrama' was added in 1875
- Published
- July 1855, as the title poem of Maud, and Other Poems (London: Edward Moxon), Tennyson's first new volume as Poet Laureate; revised and enlarged in the second edition of 1856
- Composed
- Mainly 1854–55 at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, during the Crimean War; built around the lyric 'O that 'twere possible', written in the 1830s and published in 1837
- Form
- A 'monodrama': a sequence of lyrics and dramatic monologues spoken by one man, each section a separate phase of feeling, with no narrator to explain the story
- Length
- 1,324 lines: Part I has 923 lines in 22 sections; Part II 342 lines in 5 sections; Part III 59 lines (printed in the 1859 text used here as Part II, section VI)
- Metre
- Exceptionally varied: long six-stress lines of rant and satire, short songs, ballad quatrains, irregular odes, the tolling dimeters of the madhouse; almost every section has its own measure
- Setting
- An English village by the sea, with a Hall, a moor and a 'dreadful hollow'; then the Breton coast, a London madhouse and, at the end, a troopship bound for the Crimean War
- Speaker
- An unnamed young man of twenty-five, son of a ruined speculator who died in the hollow, probably by his own hand
- Tennyson's description
- He called it 'a little Hamlet' and his favourite among his poems, and read it aloud to friends throughout his life
- Key themes
- Madness and recovery; love as salvation; inherited guilt and the feud of two families; Mammon and the 'condition of England'; peace, war and national purpose; the flower-language of passion; the dead who will not rest
Context
Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) became Poet Laureate in 1850, the year of In Memoriam and of his marriage to Emily Sellwood. Maud was the first substantial poem he published in the office, and it astonished readers who expected from the Laureate something calm, consolatory and public. Instead they found the frenzied voice of a young man who hates the world, falls in love, kills a man, goes mad and ends by welcoming war. Tennyson wrote most of it in 1854 and 1855 at Farringford, his new house on the Isle of Wight, and it appeared in July 1855 in Maud, and Other Poems, a volume that also contained 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. A second edition in 1856 added passages meant to make the story and the speaker's state of mind clearer (Ricks 1987) (Shatto 1986).
The poem grew out of one lyric. 'O that 'twere possible', a lament for a dead love haunting a man in a London street, was written in the 1830s, in the years after the death of Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam, and published in 1837 in The Tribute, an anthology edited for charity by Lord Northampton. According to the family tradition preserved in Hallam Tennyson's Memoir, Tennyson's friend Sir John Simeon suggested that the poem needed a story to explain it; Maud is, in effect, the story written backwards from that lyric, which stands as II.iv (Tennyson 1897) (Rader 1963).
Ralph Wilson Rader showed how much of Tennyson's own life went into the poem: his love in the 1830s for Rosa Baring, heiress of a newly rich family at Harrington Hall near his Lincolnshire home; the bitterness of the Tennyson family feud with his uncle Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt, who inherited the family wealth; his father's melancholy and drinking; and the loss of most of Tennyson's own money in the 1840s in Dr Matthew Allen's scheme for machine-carved wood. The speaker is not Tennyson, but his grievances are built from Tennyson's memories (Rader 1963) (Martin 1980).
The poem also belongs to the anxious years of the early 1850s. Britain went to war with Russia, alongside France and Turkey, in March 1854. Many Victorians had come to fear that commerce, competition and the free market were corrupting the nation: Carlyle had attacked the 'cash nexus', and the press reported the adulteration of bread and the poisoning of children for burial-club money. The speaker's rant against the 'Peace' of trade in I.i draws on these reports, and his final embrace of the war answers them. At the same time the poem's violent emotional style resembled the work of the so-called Spasmodic poets, Philip James Bailey, Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell, whom W. E. Aytoun had just mocked in his parody Firmilian (1854) (Weinstein 1968) (Sinfield 1986).
Reviewers in 1855 were mostly hostile. They objected to the morbid hero, the obscure story, the metrical irregularity and above all to the war ending, which seemed to many a Laureate's call to arms; one reviewer joked that one vowel too many stood in the title, and that either would make sense of it. Tennyson defended the poem all his life, insisted that it was a dramatic study of 'a morbid poetic soul', and read it aloud at length to anyone who would listen, from the Brownings and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1855 to his guests in old age. In time the critical tide turned, and the poem is now widely seen as one of the most daring experiments in Victorian verse (Shannon 1953) (Jump 1967) (Tennyson 1897).
Plot overview
The speaker, a young man living alone in a decaying house, begins by remembering the night his father was found dead in a hollow near the wood, after the failure of a 'vast speculation'. He suspects that the old man who now owns the Hall grew rich from the same scheme, and he rages at a society whose 'Peace' is a disguised civil war of cheating and greed. The family of the Hall is returning from abroad, with its daughter Maud, whom the speaker knew as a child. At first he finds her cold and 'faultily faultless'; then he hears her singing a martial ballad, she smiles at him, and he falls helplessly in love.
His love has rivals and enemies: Maud's arrogant brother, and a young lord whose grandfather made a fortune from a coal-mine and who is favoured as her suitor. Yet Maud returns his love. In a garden under a cedar he exults in his happiness, and he learns from her that their fathers had once betrothed them at her birth. On the night of a great political dinner and dance at the Hall, to which he is not invited, he waits for her in the rose-garden at dawn and calls her out to him: 'Come into the garden, Maud'.
Part II opens after the catastrophe. The brother and the lord found the lovers together; the brother struck the speaker, a duel followed in the hollow, and the brother fell, whispering that the fault was his and urging the speaker to fly. The speaker escapes to the coast of Brittany, where he broods on a sea-shell and is haunted by a phantom of Maud. Back in London he learns that Maud is dead; in 'O that 'twere possible' the shadow follows him through the streets, and in II.v he believes himself buried alive in a shallow grave beneath the road, among the chattering dead: he is in a madhouse.
In the final part he recovers. In spring he dreams that Maud appears from among the blessed and speaks of 'a hope for the world in the coming wars'. The outbreak of war with Russia seems to him to end the false peace of commerce and to give the nation, and himself, a cause. He sails on a troopship among 'a loyal people shouting a battle cry', sees the phantom fly away, and closes by declaring himself 'one with my kind'. Whether this ending is a cure, a new madness or both is the great question of the poem.
Part by part
Part 1: The Dreadful Hollow (I.i–iv)
I.1–161
Summary
In long, heaving six-beat lines the speaker remembers the hollow where his father's body was found, 'Mangled, and flatten'd, and crush'd', after a 'vast speculation had fail'd'. Did he fall or 'fling himself down'? The son remembers the shriek of his mother in the night. He blames the old man who is now lord of the Hall, who 'Dropt off gorged' from the scheme that ruined them.
From this private wound he turns to the whole nation. People praise the blessings of Peace, but England's peace is a hidden civil war: shopkeepers adulterate bread with 'chalk and alum and plaster', chemists sell poisons, a 'Mammonite mother' kills her baby for the burial fee. Better, he cries, a real war. Then he catches himself: is he raging 'as my father raged'? He hears that the Hall is being made ready for the return of its owners, and remembers Maud as a child.
In I.ii he sees Maud pass in her carriage and judges her 'Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null'; in I.iii her face haunts him all night, and he walks in his dark garden by the roaring sea. In I.iv, in the spring, he looks down on the gossiping village and the Hall, reflects that nature is 'one with rapine', mocks scientist and poet alike, and resolves to live a passionless philosopher's life and to flee 'the cruel madness of love'.
Analysis
The opening is one of the most violent in English poetry. The landscape itself is wounded: the hollow has 'lips', the ledges are 'red-ribb'd' and drip blood, and Echo answers every question with 'Death'. The speaker projects his trauma into the scene, and the poem's first word, 'hate', sets the key. The long anapaestic lines, crammed with alliteration and exclamation, enact a mind that cannot stop talking. Tennyson asked readers to hear this as the voice of a character, not his own; the difficulty, then and now, is that the satire on commerce is powerfully and seriously written (Culler 1977) (Tucker 1988).
The social satire of I.i joins the speaker's private grievance to the 'condition of England' debate of the 1840s and 1850s. The images of adulterated bread, poisoned medicine and child murder for burial money came from contemporary reports. But the logic of the rant is the speaker's own: from the crime of one speculator he moves to the guilt of a whole society and then to the wish for war, a progression the final part will fulfil. Already the question is posed whether his diagnosis of the age is insight or symptom (Sinfield 1986) (Armstrong 1993).
I.iv adds a darker philosophy. The 'whole little wood' is 'a world of plunder and prey', man is a late and perhaps temporary product of 'a million of ages', and the Maker's purpose is hidden like Isis behind her veil. These lines echo the evolutionary anxieties of In Memoriam and of geology and natural history before Darwin. The speaker's chosen remedy, stoic detachment and the avoidance of love, is precisely what the next sections overturn.
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers 'Death.'
The opening quatrain: hate, blood and death fixed in a landscape that will be the scene of the duel in Part II.
While chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread, And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.
The adulteration of food, a real scandal of the 1850s, becomes the sign of a society at war with itself.
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more
The speaker's first verdict on Maud: perfect and lifeless, like a statue. The paradoxes show him resisting a beauty he already feels.
And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.
Nature 'red in tooth and claw', as In Memoriam had put it, here reduced to the scale of a single wood.
Part 2: A Voice by the Cedar Tree (I.v–xii)
I.162–443
Summary
In I.v the speaker hears Maud singing a 'martial song like a trumpet's call', a ballad of men marching to death for their native land. Her voice moves him almost to fall at her feet, and he tells it to be silent. In I.vi, after a stormy night, he remembers that she touched his hand with a sweet smile; he suspects a coquette's trick, or a plot by her brother, the 'oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull', to win his vote at the election. He describes his own lonely house, where he hears the dead moan and his own name cried in corners.
I.vii is a fragment of half-memory: two men drinking and saying, 'if it prove a girl, the boy / Will have plenty'. In I.viii Maud blushes when their eyes meet in church. In I.ix and I.x he sees her riding with two companions, one of them a 'new-made lord' whose grandfather made his money in a coal-mine; he mocks this rival, and a Quaker preacher of peace, and longs for 'one still strong man in a blatant land', and for 'a man to arise in me'.
I.xi is a prayer that he may find love before he goes mad; I.xii a light ballad in which the rooks of the Hall-garden seem to cry 'Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud', while he walks with her in the wood gathering lilies, kisses her hand, and sends the lord's horse back across the moor.
Analysis
The voice comes before the woman. In I.v the speaker loves what Maud sings, a song of 'Death, and of Honour that cannot die', before he admits loving her; the martial ballad plants the theme of war at the very beginning of the love story, and Maud's dream-speech in Part III will return to it. The short, ringing lines of I.v are the first sharp change of metre, and the poem's music now follows the speaker's moods from section to section (Culler 1977).
Suspicion is the habit of his mind. Each sign of Maud's kindness is followed by a theory of deceit: she is Cleopatra weaving a net, her brother is using her to buy votes, her smile is pity. The paranoid structure of these sections is part of Tennyson's portrait of morbidity, but it also reflects a real world of electioneering, purchased commissions and new money. The coal-owner's grandson, 'Master of half a servile shire', stands for a new aristocracy of industrial wealth (Bristow 1990).
The cry for 'one still strong man' in I.x echoes Carlyle's worship of heroes, and the next line turns it inward: the speaker needs a man to arise in himself. Political and psychological rescue are already fused, which is why the war of Part III can seem to answer both at once. I.vii, with its fragment of overheard talk, is the first hint of the old betrothal that I.xix will reveal.
Not her, who is neither courtly nor kind, Not her, not her, but a voice.
He tries to separate the singer from the song; the repetition betrays how far he has already fallen.
That oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull Smelling of musk and of insolence,
Maud's brother seen through hatred: luxury, Oriental tyranny and arrogance in one caricature.
One still strong man in a blatant land, Whatever they call him, what care I, Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat--one Who can rule and dare not lie.
A Carlylean longing for a hero, indifferent to the form of government; often quoted as evidence of the age's political mood.
And ah for a man to arise in me, That the man I am may cease to be!
The public wish turned inward: the speaker's real need is a new self.
Part 3: The Brother, the Hall and the Rival (I.xiii–xvii)
I.444–598
Summary
In I.xiii the speaker passes Maud's brother on his land; the brother, tall, handsome and jewelled, taps his boot with a riding whip and 'Gorgonised' him 'With a stony British stare'. The speaker wonders why the father, 'A gray old wolf and a lean', never comes to the Hall, and decides that Maud takes all her goodness from her dead mother while the brother has inherited 'the whole inherited sin'.
In I.xiv he climbs at dawn to Maud's garden gate, where a carved lion is clasped by a passion-flower, and imagines her gliding down to him; but the white curtains drawn round the house make him think of 'the sleep of death'. I.xv is a short song: if someone loves him, he ought to love himself more.
In I.xvi, the brother having gone to London, he resolves to declare his love, though he fears Maud may be promised to the 'fool lord'; she alone can save him 'Perhaps from madness, perhaps from crime'. I.xvii is a joyous song of acceptance: 'Go not, happy day', with the news of her 'happy Yes' blushing round the world.
Analysis
The brother is the poem's antagonist and its scapegoat. The speaker cannot see him except as a type, the brutal heir of new wealth, and he explicitly heaps on him the guilt of the whole family. Yet the portrait has a comic edge: the 'stony British stare' and the Gorgon image of being turned to stone are exaggerations that tell us as much about the observer as about the observed. Part II will force the speaker to recognise the brother's humanity when the dying man takes the blame (Tucker 1988).
The garden gate, with its lion and passion-flower, is the central emblem of the love story. The lion was the crest of the Hall's family and suggests pride and power; the passion-flower is love, and, by its name, Christ's Passion, so that suffering is twined into desire. The same gate and flower reappear in I.xxii. The 'death-white curtain' that the speaker reads as a sign of death shows how every image of love in the poem is shadowed by its opposite (Joseph 1969).
I.xvii is the most purely happy section of the poem, a song in short trochaic lines that spreads the lovers' news across the world. Its innocence is part of its pathos: the reader already knows from I.xvi that the speaker regards love as his last defence against madness and crime.
Gorgonised me from head to foot With a stony British stare.
A coined verb: the brother's look turns the speaker to stone, a comic hyperbole full of class resentment.
I know it the one bright thing to save My yet young life in the wilds of Time, Perhaps from madness, perhaps from crime,
Love as salvation, stated with an awareness of what will happen if it fails.
Go not, happy day, From the shining fields, Go not, happy day. Till the maiden yields.
The song of the accepted lover, with the simplicity of a folk lyric.
Part 4: Come into the Garden (I.xviii–xxii)
I.599–923
Summary
I.xviii is the speaker's hymn of happiness. Having led Maud home, he lies under the cedar in his garden, imagines it longing for Lebanon and for Eden, and finds that the stars, once 'pitiless, passionless eyes' of an indifferent universe, now seem to beat in time with his heart. Only 'some dark undercurrent woe' troubles him.
In I.xix he learns from Maud that her mother, on her deathbed, revealed that the two fathers had betrothed the children at Maud's birth; the speaker resolves to bury his hatred, though he cannot trust the returning brother. In I.xx he describes Maud's annoyance with her brother, 'the Sultan', and the grand political dinner and dance at which the lord will court her. In I.xxi a rose floating down the rivulet from the Hall seems a message from her.
I.xxii, the famous song 'Come into the garden, Maud', is spoken at dawn at the garden gate, as the dance ends and the carriages roll away. The speaker calls her out, imagines the roses and lilies waiting for her, and ends by declaring that even if he were dead a century his dust would hear her step and 'blossom in purple and red'.
Analysis
I.xviii is the emotional summit of Part I and a reversal of I.iv. The cosmic despair of the earlier section is not refuted but set aside; the 'sad astrology' of the stars no longer frightens him. Yet even here the speaker says that he will 'accept my madness', and speaks of dying for Maud. Love and death are interwoven in his own words, and Maud's imagined reply makes the point explicit (Culler 1977).
The betrothal revealed in I.xix gives the love story a plot of inherited obligation and broken bonds, like the feuding houses of Romeo and Juliet. This section was largely an addition of the second edition of 1856, one of several changes made to answer complaints that the story was obscure (Ricks 1987) (Shatto 1986).
'Come into the garden, Maud' became one of the most popular songs of the Victorian drawing room in Michael Balfe's setting, and it is easy to hear it as a pure love song. In context it is stranger. The speaker has spent the night outside the house, excluded from the dance; the flowers speak to him in his own voice; and the final stanza, with its dust that hears and beats, is a fantasy of love beyond death that the next part will cruelly fulfil. The red and purple flowers that blossom from his heart anticipate the blood shed at dawn (Tucker 1988) (Joseph 1969).
Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes, Cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand
The stars of an indifferent universe, recalled in order to be dismissed by the happy lover.
Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl The countercharm of space and hollow sky, And do accept my madness
Love as a charm against cosmic emptiness, and an open admission that it is a kind of madness.
Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown,
The opening of the poem's most famous lyric, sung at dawn, when the night of the dance is over.
My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.
The climax of Part I: love imagined beyond the grave. Part II will turn the fantasy into the speaker's living burial.
Part 5: The Duel and the Flight (II.i–ii)
II.1–131
Summary
Part II begins with the words of the dying brother, 'The fault was mine'. The speaker, stunned on a hill, pieces together what happened: the brother came with the lord to the garden gate, insulted Maud and struck the speaker, and within an hour they fought in the 'red-ribb'd hollow'. The brother fell, whispering that the fault was his and urging him to fly; then the speaker saw 'The ghastly Wraith' of Maud and heard her cry for her brother's blood.
II.ii is set on the coast of Brittany. The speaker contemplates a tiny empty sea-shell, frail yet strong enough to survive storms that break the timbers of ships. He is haunted by a phantom that looks like Maud and that he knows to be 'a juggle born of the brain'. He remembers a strange detail of the duel, a ring on the dying man's finger made of his mother's hair, and he prays that all good powers may comfort Maud.
Analysis
The catastrophe happens between the parts, in silence. The reader learns of it only through the speaker's broken recollection, and this is the clearest example of what Tennyson meant by monodrama: the action is known only as it registers on one mind. The duel in the very hollow where the father died closes a circle of violence, and the speaker's condemnation of the 'Christless code' of honour is also self-condemnation (Culler 1977) (Hughes 1987).
The shell of II.ii is one of the most admired passages in the poem. In a state of shock the mind fastens on small things, as the speaker himself observes, and the shell becomes an emblem of what he lacks: a small life, 'Frail, but of force to withstand' the storms. Some critics read it as an image of the self that survives catastrophe, others as a picture of emptiness, since the creature that made it is gone. The precise naturalist's description shows Tennyson's interest in science turned to psychological use (Tucker 1988).
The pun 'Breton, not Briton' marks the speaker's exile from his own nation, which will matter in Part III, where he recovers by becoming 'one with my kind'. The memory of the ring of hair humanises the man he has killed: the arrogant brother, too, had a mother he mourned.
And thunder'd up into Heaven the Christless code, That must have life for a blow.
The code of the duel condemned: honour that demands a life for a blow is unchristian.
'The fault was mine,' he whisper'd, 'fly!'
The dying brother takes the blame and saves his killer: a generosity the speaker had never imagined in him.
See what a lovely shell, Small and pure as a pearl, Lying close to my foot, Frail, but a work divine,
The opening of the shell passage: the mind in shock fixes on a minute object of beauty.
Breton, not Briton; here
A pun that marks exile: he is on the coast of Brittany, cut off from his country and his kind.
Part 6: The Shadow and the Madhouse (II.iii–v)
II.132–342
Summary
In the short II.iii, added in 1856, the speaker learns that Maud is dead and tells his 'poor heart of stone' to have courage. II.iv is 'O that 'twere possible', the lyric from which the poem grew: in London, among the roaring wheels and yellow fog, he dreams of meeting Maud in the meadow, wakes to find the 'abiding phantom cold' by his bed, and follows the shadow through the crowded streets, longing to weep his soul out to her.
II.v takes place in a madhouse. The speaker believes he is dead and buried 'Only a yard beneath the street', with horses' hoofs beating into his brain, among other dead men who babble endlessly. He rails at the churchmen, sees statesmen and doctors betraying secrets, curses the 'gray old wolf' and the rat, glimpses Maud silent at his head, remembers the garden that was 'not roses, but blood', and ends begging someone to bury him 'Deeper, ever so little deeper'.
Analysis
'O that 'twere possible' was written as a self-contained elegy, and its insertion here changes its meaning. In 1837 it was a lament for a lost love; in Maud it becomes a stage in a breakdown, its phantom the symptom of guilt. The poem's music is softer than anything around it, and its picture of the city, the 'dull red ball' of the sun in smoke, the crowds and the market, gives the speaker's grief a modern urban setting (Rader 1963) (Ricks 1987).
II.v is the boldest piece of writing in the poem and the passage that most shocked its first readers. Tennyson attempts the voice of madness from within: the lines lengthen and shorten unpredictably, rhymes clang, ideas jump by association. Yet the madman's rant repeats in distorted form everything the sane speaker had said in I.i, about corrupt churchmen, poisoners, gossip and the 'old man' of the pit. The effect is to suggest that the speaker's social satire was always partly the product of his disorder, or else that madness is a truthful mirror of a mad society (Armstrong 1993) (Tucker 1988).
Victorian doctors praised the accuracy of Tennyson's account of delusion, and the poem has been read alongside the new 'moral treatment' of asylums. Maud, 'ever the one thing silent here', appears as an image without speech, a figure from 'another stiller world of the dead'. The section's last line, the wish to be buried deeper, is both a plea for death and a plea for peace from the noise of the world.
O that 'twere possible After long grief and pain To find the arms of my true love Round me once again!
The germ of the whole poem, published in 1837 and placed here as the speaker's lament in London.
Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be.
The longing to know the state of the dead, a question that also runs through In Memoriam.
Dead, long dead, Long dead! And my heart is a handful of dust, And the wheels go over my head,
The madhouse section opens with the speaker's delusion that he is buried beneath the street; the 'dust' of I.xxii returns.
She comes from another stiller world of the dead, Stiller, not fairer than mine.
Maud as a silent phantom, in contrast with the babbling dead around him.
Part 7: The Blood-Red Blossom of War (III)
III.1–59
Summary
The final part (printed in the 1859 text used here as the sixth section of Part II) returns to the long lines of the opening. After long months 'Thro' cells of madness', the speaker's mood changes in spring, when Orion sets in the west. He dreams that Maud speaks to him from among the blessed of 'a hope for the world in the coming wars', pointing to the red planet Mars.
He welcomes the war with Russia as an end to the peace of commerce, in which 'Britain's one sole God' was the millionaire. He stands on 'a giant deck' among cheering soldiers and sees 'the dreary phantom arise and fly'. Many will die, he admits, but the 'blood-red blossom of war' flames by the Black Sea and the Baltic, and he ends: 'I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, / I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign'd.'
Analysis
The ending is the most disputed passage in Tennyson. Read straight, it is a patriotic celebration of the Crimean War as a moral cleansing of the nation, written by the Poet Laureate in the middle of the war. Read as part of a monodrama, it is the final phase of a sick mind, which replaces one obsession with another and translates Maud's death into a vision that sends him off to kill. Many critics now think the poem allows both readings and depends on their tension (Rader 1963) (Bristow 1990).
The section answers the opening precisely. The 'Peace' that was a curse in I.i is 'over and done'; the wish for 'loud war by land and by sea' has been granted; the long metre of the first rant returns, but its rhymes now ring with affirmation rather than horror. Images from the love story are transformed: the red roses of the garden become the 'blood-red blossom of war', and the shining daffodil and the setting Orion of I.iii return as signs of spring. This circularity can be read as resolution or as relapse (Culler 1977).
The last lines join three acts of belonging: to the nation, to humanity and to God's purpose. For a speaker whose disease was isolation, this is a cure. Yet the closing phrase, 'the doom assign'd', keeps a note of fatalism, and Tennyson's own comment that the speaker had been 'raised to a pure and holy love' which elevated his whole nature leaves open how far the war itself is endorsed. Gladstone's attack in 1859, and his later retraction, show how unsettled the question was even among Tennyson's admirers (Gladstone 1879) (Tennyson 1897).
My life has crept so long on a broken wing Thro' cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear,
The opening of the final part: madness recalled from the far side of recovery.
Nor Britain's one sole God be the millionnaire:
The war is welcomed as the end of the worship of Mammon satirised in I.i.
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.
The garden's red rose transformed into the flower of war, with the menacing guns of the fortress beside it.
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind, I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign'd.
The final lines: belonging to nation, humanity and providence, with the fatal word 'doom' at the end.
Characters
The speaker and his family
- The speaker
- An unnamed young man of twenty-five, poor, proud, well read and solitary, who lives with two servants in a house near the Hall. His father's ruin and death have left him embittered and unstable; he swings between rage, suspicion, tenderness and ecstasy. He falls in love with Maud, kills her brother in a duel, goes mad and recovers in the enthusiasm of war. Tennyson described him as a morbid, poetic nature shaped by an age of speculation and by inherited madness. Because everything in the poem is seen through him, the reader must constantly judge how far to trust him.
- The speaker's father
- A man ruined by the failure of a 'vast speculation', found dead in the hollow, perhaps a suicide. The son believes he was cheated by Maud's father. His death haunts the poem, and the son fears he has inherited his father's raging madness.
- The speaker's mother
- Gentle and good, she died some years before the poem begins, worn out by lawyers and debt. The son nursed her alone. Her 'shrill-edged shriek' on the night of the father's death is one of his most terrible memories.
Maud's family
- Maud
- Daughter of the owner of the Hall, not yet seventeen, tall, proud and, as the speaker comes to believe, kind and pious. She sings martial ballads, tends her rose-garden, quietly returns the speaker's love and hopes to reconcile the two families. She never speaks in her own voice except in words the speaker reports or imagines. After the duel she dies offstage; her phantom haunts him, and in a dream she sends him to war.
- Maud's brother
- Handsome, arrogant, jewelled and perfumed, called by the speaker 'the Sultan' and an 'Assyrian Bull'. He scorns the speaker, forbids Maud to see him, and promotes the lord's suit. He strikes the speaker at the garden gate and is killed in the duel; dying, he takes the fault on himself and tells the speaker to fly. Maud says he is 'rough but kind', and the ring of his mother's hair shows his hidden affection.
- Maud's father
- The 'old man, now lord of the broad estate and the Hall', 'A gray old wolf and a lean', who grew rich from the scheme that ruined the speaker's father. He spends his time in London and rarely visits the Hall. Long before, he had joined the speaker's father in betrothing their children.
- Maud's mother
- Dead before the action begins; her marble image is in the church. The speaker thinks Maud inherits her goodness from her. On her deathbed abroad she revealed the old betrothal and desired that the two families be reconciled.
Others
- The young lord
- The 'new-made lord', 'babe-faced' and with 'A rabbit mouth that is ever agape', whose grandfather made a fortune in a coal-mine where 'Grimy nakedness' dragged the trucks. He holds a bought commission and is the brother's choice of husband for Maud. He witnesses the quarrel and the duel.
- The peace preacher
- A 'broad-brim'd hawker of holy things', a Quaker cotton merchant who comes to the county town to preach against the army. He is generally taken as a caricature of the peace campaigners of the Manchester School, such as John Bright, who opposed the Crimean War.
- The dead of the madhouse
- The fellow inmates whom the speaker in II.v takes for the babbling dead: a man sobbing, a 'lord of all things' praying to himself, a statesman and a physician betraying secrets. They are partly a satire of the world outside, partly figures of the speaker's own disorder.
Themes
Madness and recovery
Madness is present from the first lines, as a fear of inheriting the father's 'raging', and the speaker repeatedly names it: he prays to find love before he goes mad, and he accepts his love as madness. Part II shows the breakdown itself, from hallucination to the full delusion of II.v. Part III presents a recovery, but one that comes through a dream and a war. Tennyson's poem is one of the first in English to attempt a sustained study of mental illness from within (Culler 1977).
Whether the recovery is real is the poem's central question. The speaker says he has awaked 'as it seems, to the better mind', and that qualifying phrase leaves room for doubt. The poem may be read as a story of cure, of relapse into a new obsession, or of a society whose sanity and madness are hard to tell apart.
Love as salvation
For the speaker, Maud is 'the one bright thing to save' him from madness, crime and a selfish grave. Love transforms his view of the universe, so that the stars that seemed pitiless now beat with his heart. The poem gives some of the most rapturous love poetry of the century.
But love is always shadowed by death. The speaker imagines dying for Maud, hears his dust beating under her feet, and is answered by the duel. The flower-imagery of passion, the roses and passion-flower, is also an imagery of blood. Love saves him from one kind of isolation only to plunge him into another.
Mammon and the condition of England
Maud is a social poem as much as a love poem. Its villains are speculators, new money, coal fortunes, bought commissions and a commerce that adulterates food and poisons children. The speaker's satire belongs to the tradition of Carlyle's Past and Present and the 'condition of England' novels of the 1840s (Sinfield 1986) (Armstrong 1993).
The poem does not let us simply agree with him. His social analysis is rooted in personal grievance, and in II.v it returns in the mouth of a madman. Yet the abuses he names were real, and the poem's final turn to war is presented as a remedy for them.
War and peace
The poem moves from the speaker's wish for 'loud war by land and by sea' to the fulfilment of that wish. Along the way it gives other views: Maud's song of soldiers dying for their native land, the speaker's mockery of the Quaker peace preacher, his horror at the private violence of the duel and his distinction between 'lawful and lawless war'.
The Crimean War was popular when it began and soon became a scandal of mismanagement and disease. The poem, written in the war's first year, celebrates its outbreak; whether it endorses the celebration has divided readers since 1855 (Shannon 1953).
Inheritance and the feud
The speaker and Maud are bound by their fathers' acts: the speculation that ruined one family and enriched the other, and the betrothal sealed over wine at Maud's birth. The brother is the 'scapegoat of the race', and the 'household Fury sprinkled with blood' tears the two houses apart. The poem shows how the sins of fathers become the fate of children, a theme Rader traced to Tennyson's own family history (Rader 1963).
Motifs
Flowers
Roses, lilies, the passion-flower, daffodils and violets run through the poem. Maud is 'Queen lily and rose in one'; the rose floats down the rivulet as a message; the garden flowers speak in I.xxii. In the madhouse the speaker fears the flowers were 'not roses, but blood', and the poem ends with 'the blood-red blossom of war'. The motif traces the transformation of love into violence (Joseph 1969).
The voice and the cry
The speaker falls in love with a voice before he loves the woman; he hears his own name cried in empty rooms, a 'passionate cry' after the duel, and the babble of the dead in the madhouse. Sound, more than sight, is the medium of his feeling, and the poem's metres reproduce it.
Stone and heart
The speaker describes his 'heart half-turn'd to stone', is 'Gorgonised' by the brother's stare, and addresses his 'poor heart of stone' in II.iii. Love is the force that makes the stone feel, and grief turns it back to stone.
The phantom
From II.i the speaker is followed by a shadow or wraith of Maud, which he knows to be 'a juggle born of the brain'. It leads him through London, stands by his bed and is silent at his head in the madhouse. Only in Part III does it 'arise and fly' into the North.
Symbols
The hollow
The 'dreadful hollow behind the little wood', where the father died and where the duel is fought, is the poem's place of death and guilt. Its 'red-ribb'd' ledges and the echo that answers 'Death' make it a landscape of the speaker's trauma.
The Hall and its garden
The Hall stands for wealth, power and the new money that displaced the speaker's family. Its rose-garden, where Maud walks, is a paradise from which he is shut out except at dawn, when he waits at the gate with its carved lion and passion-flower. The garden recalls Eden and the garden of the Song of Songs.
The shell
The empty shell on the Breton shore, small and frail yet able to withstand the sea, is a symbol of endurance and, at the same time, of a life that has left its house. It reflects the speaker's own emptied, surviving self.
Mars and the stars
The stars are first 'pitiless, passionless eyes', then companions of the lover, and in Part III the red planet Mars, glowing 'like a ruddy shield on the Lion's breast', becomes the sign of war to which Maud's phantom points.
Critical debates
The monodrama form and the speaker's madness
Tennyson insisted that Maud was a dramatic poem in which 'different phases of passion in one person' take the place of different characters, and that the speaker's views are not his own. His remarks, preserved in Hallam Tennyson's Memoir, describe the hero as a morbid soul under the influence of a 'recklessly speculative age' and of hereditary madness, who is redeemed by love and finally by a cause. The subtitle 'A Monodrama', added in 1875, made the dramatic claim explicit (Tennyson 1897).
Critics have tested the claim in different ways. A. Dwight Culler connected the form to the musical monodramas of the late eighteenth century, in which one performer passes through a series of passions; Linda Hughes placed Maud among Tennyson's dramatic monologues; Herbert Tucker read it as a study of a self made and unmade by its culture. The textual history matters too: the additions of 1856 were designed to clarify the plot and the speaker's motives, and Susan Shatto's edition allows readers to see how the poem changed (Culler 1977) (Hughes 1987) (Tucker 1988) (Shatto 1986).
The war ending: endorsement or irony?
The first reviewers almost all took the ending as Tennyson's own celebration of the Crimean War, and many attacked it; Goldwin Smith, in the Saturday Review, objected to the war passages, and Gladstone in the Quarterly Review of 1859 regretted the poem's praise of war as a cure for social ills (Shannon 1953) (Gladstone 1879).
Defenders followed Tennyson in treating the ending as dramatic. Ralph Wilson Rader, reconstructing the poem's biographical origins, argued that the speaker's recovery is meant seriously but that its terms belong to him. Others find the ending deliberately unstable: the long metre of the first rant returns, the war is a continuation of the speaker's wish for violence, and the 'doom assign'd' is ominous. Joseph Bristow reads the war ending in terms of nation, class and masculinity (Rader 1963) (Killham 1960) (Bristow 1990).
Class and the condition of England
Maud contains a fierce critique of commercial society: speculation, adulteration, new money and the worship of the millionaire. Alan Sinfield and Isobel Armstrong have read the poem as a deeply political work, in which the speaker's crisis is a crisis of the gentry displaced by industrial wealth, and in which his madness expresses contradictions of the age (Sinfield 1986) (Armstrong 1993).
The question is how the poem judges the speaker's analysis. His contempt for the coal-owner's grandson and for the Quaker preacher is snobbish as well as moral, and his solution, war and a 'strong man', is authoritarian. Readers have seen the poem as radical, conservative, or as a dramatisation of a class consciousness Tennyson partly shared and partly criticised.
Maud and the Spasmodic school
In the early 1850s the 'Spasmodic' poets, Philip James Bailey, Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell, wrote long, feverish poems of introspective heroes, and W. E. Aytoun ridiculed them in Firmilian (1854). Maud's violent emotion, its morbid hero and its broken form led some reviewers to class it with them. Mark Weinstein's study of the controversy sets out the critical climate in which Maud appeared (Weinstein 1968).
Later critics have argued that Tennyson absorbed and disciplined the Spasmodic mode, using its excesses as material for a dramatic portrait of a diseased mind rather than as a style for the poet's own voice. Herbert Tucker reads Maud as Tennyson's confrontation with the late-Romantic inheritance of self-absorbed lyricism (Tucker 1988).
Gender and Maud as silent object
Maud has the title, but she never speaks directly except in speech reported or imagined by the speaker. She is seen as a face, a voice, a pair of feet, a flower; she dies offstage, and in the madhouse she is 'ever the one thing silent here'. Feminist readers have treated the poem as a study of the male gaze and of a masculinity that defines itself by possessing and idealising a woman (Shires 1987).
Others note that Maud acts more than she is allowed to say: she sings the battle-song that shapes the speaker's ideals, seeks reconciliation between the families and chooses the speaker against her brother's will. Her final appearance, sending him to war, makes her the instrument of his recovery, which some find troubling and others see as the logic of his fantasy (Bristow 1990).
Reception and the Victorian poetics of form
Edgar Shannon's study of the reception showed that the 1855 reviews, though often hostile, were more varied than legend suggests, and that Tennyson revised in response to them. Gladstone's attack in 1859 was followed in 1878 by a note, reprinted in his Gleanings of Past Years, in which he admitted that he had not done justice to the poem's dramatic character (Shannon 1953) (Gladstone 1879) (Jump 1967).
Modern critics have made the poem's form central. Isobel Armstrong's account of Victorian 'double poems' treats Maud as a text that both expresses and exposes its speaker's ideology, and Christopher Ricks praised the poem's power to make metre the vehicle of psychological states. The varied measures, once seen as a fault, are now seen as the poem's chief achievement (Armstrong 1993) (Ricks 1972).
The biographical genesis
Rader argued that Maud is rooted in Tennyson's experience of the 1830s: Rosa Baring, the feud with the d'Eyncourt branch of the family, his father's illness and the financial disaster of the 1840s. Robert Bernard Martin's biography develops the picture of Tennyson's own fears of hereditary 'black blood' (Rader 1963) (Martin 1980).
Critics wary of biography accept the sources but stress what Tennyson made of them: a dramatic character whose bitterness is examined, not shared. The question matters for the war ending, since a speaker built from Tennyson's own grievances may also voice his convictions (Buckley 1960).
Key passages
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood, Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers 'Death.'
The poem opens with hate and blood. The landscape of the father's death is described as a wound, with 'lips' and 'red-ribb'd ledges', and the echo answers every question with 'Death'. The long, alliterative lines establish the speaker's obsessive voice and introduce the hollow where the duel will later be fought.
When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee, And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones, Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and by sea,
The climax of the satire on commercial society. Real reports of child murder for burial-club money are combined with an image of Mammon as the conqueror Timur. The speaker's preference for open war over this hidden war of greed anticipates the end of the poem.
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,
His first description of Maud, built from oxymorons. Her beauty is perfect but cold and empty, like a statue. The line is a defence against feeling, and the rest of Part I shows it crumbling.
And ah for a man to arise in me, That the man I am may cease to be!
After longing for 'one still strong man' to rule the nation, the speaker turns the wish inward. The couplet joins the political and psychological themes of the poem: the search for national leadership and the search for a new self.
And do accept my madness, and would die To save from some slight shame one simple girl.
In the moment of greatest happiness the speaker admits that his love is a kind of madness and imagines dying for Maud. Love and death are already joined, and the 'slight shame' prefigures the brother's insult that leads to the duel.
Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone;
The famous invitation, sung at dawn at the gate of the rose-garden. Its lilting music made it a Victorian parlour song, but the words 'at the gate alone' remind us that the speaker is an outsider waiting through the night, and the song leads directly to catastrophe.
'The fault was mine,' he whisper'd, 'fly!'
The dying words of the man the speaker has killed. The arrogant brother proves capable of generosity, taking the blame and saving his enemy. The words haunt the speaker and open Part II.
O that 'twere possible After long grief and pain To find the arms of my true love Round me once again!
The lyric of 1837 from which the poem grew. Set in London, it expresses the speaker's longing for the dead Maud and introduces the phantom that follows him. Its simple diction and music contrast with the violence around it.
Dead, long dead, Long dead! And my heart is a handful of dust, And the wheels go over my head,
The opening of the madhouse section. The speaker believes himself buried under a busy street. The 'dust' recalls the end of I.xxii, where his dust would beat under Maud's feet; the romantic fantasy has become a delusion of living burial.
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.
The war is imagined as a flower, completing the poem's movement from the roses of the garden to the 'blood-red' violence of battle. Whether this is a vision of national renewal or a sign of continuing madness is the central debate about the ending.
Questions for study
What did Tennyson mean by calling Maud 'a monodrama', and how does the form shape what we know of the story?
Think about events, such as the duel and Maud's death, that happen offstage and are known only through the speaker's reactions.
How far should we trust the speaker's satire of commercial society in I.i?
Compare the rant of I.i with the madman's rant in II.v, and think about the real scandals of the 1850s.
Why does the speaker fall in love with Maud's voice before he admits loving her?
Look at the song she sings in I.v and at what she says in his dream in Part III.
How does Maud's brother appear to the speaker, and how does the poem complicate that picture?
Consider the 'Assyrian Bull', Maud's 'rough but kind', the dying words in II.i and the ring of hair in II.ii.
Is 'Come into the garden, Maud' a love song, a song of exclusion or a prophecy of death?
Notice when and where it is sung, the voices of the flowers and the last stanza's image of dust.
What is the significance of the shell in II.ii?
The shell is frail but survives the storm, and empty of the life that made it.
How does the poem represent madness in II.v, and why did this section shock its first readers?
Look at the irregular metre, the delusion of burial and the echoes of the speaker's earlier opinions.
Does Part III show the speaker cured, or mad in a new way?
Consider 'as it seems', the dream of Maud, the return of the opening metre and the phrase 'the doom assign'd'.
Why is Maud herself almost silent in the poem that bears her name?
Think about the speaker's way of seeing her as a face, a voice and a flower, and about her role in the ending.
How does the variety of metres in Maud serve the poem's psychological purpose?
Compare the long lines of I.i and III with the short songs of I.xii and I.xvii and the broken lines of II.v.
Further reading
- Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.
- Bristow, Joseph. 'Nation, Class, and Gender: Tennyson's Maud and War.' Genders 9 (1990): 93–111.
- Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
- Culler, A. Dwight. The Poetry of Tennyson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
- Gladstone, W. E. 'Tennyson's Poems.' Quarterly Review 106 (October 1859): 454–485. Reprinted with a note of 1878 in his Gleanings of Past Years, vol. 2. London: John Murray, 1879.
- Hughes, Linda K. The Manyfacèd Glass: Tennyson's Dramatic Monologues. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987.
- Joseph, Gerhard. Tennysonian Love: The Strange Diagonal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969.
- Jump, John D., ed. Tennyson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
- Killham, John, ed. Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960.
- Martin, Robert Bernard. Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart. Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Faber and Faber, 1980.
- Rader, Ralph Wilson. Tennyson's Maud: The Biographical Genesis. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963.
- Ricks, Christopher, ed. The Poems of Tennyson. London: Longmans, 1969. 2nd ed., 3 vols. Harlow: Longman, 1987.
- Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson. London: Macmillan, 1972.
- Shannon, Edgar F., Jr. 'The Critical Reception of Tennyson's Maud.' PMLA 68 (1953): 397–417.
- Shatto, Susan, ed. Tennyson's Maud: A Definitive Edition. London: Athlone Press; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.
- Shires, Linda M. 'Maud, Masculinity and Poetic Identity.' Criticism 29 (1987): 269–290.
- Sinfield, Alan. Alfred Tennyson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
- Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1897.
- Tucker, Herbert F. Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
- Weinstein, Mark A. William Edmondstoune Aytoun and the Spasmodic Controversy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.