Maud by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

First published: 1855

Type of work: Poetry

Type of plot: Melodrama

Time of plot: Early nineteenth century

Locale: England

Principal characters

• The protagonist, a young man
• Maud, the young woman he loves

The Poem:

Thinking in recollection, the protagonist reminisces about many things, including his despair in the red-ribbed hollow where his father had died, his rapture in Maud’s high Hall-garden, his ostracism from the grand political dinner and dance because of the opposition of Maud’s brother, his killing Maud’s brother in a duel, his exile on the Breton Coast, his madness in the London asylum, and finally, his pursuit of the blood-red blossom of war aboard a British troop ship on its way to the Black Sea.

The protagonist, an angry twenty-five-year-old, angrily laments the death of his father and the failure of his intimate relationship with the sixteen-year-old Maud, whose own father’s treachery in a business transaction caused the demise of the protagonist’s father. The grief-stricken young man reacts to his father’s death with a savage denunciation of the self-serving greed of the age—which he regards as wreaking havoc on the lives of the poor and which had caused his own family’s downfall. Confident that his morbid mood mirrors the moral rot of society, the protagonist is convinced that fighting in a just war is preferable to the implicit acquisition of peace.

The hero emerges from his depression through a growing involvement with Maud, the neighboring squire’s daughter, who has returned home with her brother to the family’s country estate after having been abroad. By chance, the protagonist sees Maud in a passing carriage and later meets and falls deeply in love with the girl, whom he remembers from childhood. Having won her love, the hero kills her interfering brother in a duel and is forced to retreat into exile.

The protagonist lives his exile in Brittany, where he learns that Maud has died. Later, he suffers successive phases of insanity and remorse, is confined to a London madhouse, and is haunted by hallucinations of Maud. The speaker’s nightmare finally yields to a dream in which Maud is no longer a threatening ghost but rather an angel coming to him with a message of hope. “Sane but shattered,” he expiates his crime by joining a noble cause, England’s involvement in the Crimean War.

Bibliography

Barton, Anna. Tennyson’s Name: Identity and Responsibility in the Poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008. Traces the development of Tennyson’s poetry, focusing on his reaction to the increasing importance of “brand names” in Victorian culture. Argues that Tennyson had a strong sense of his professional identity and the ethics of literature, which led him to establish a “responsible” poetry.

Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Buckley’s critical biography, a standard reference, contains an excellent commentary on Tennyson’s emotional and intellectual development. Includes a brief but perceptive discussion of Maud.

Drew, Philip. “Tennyson and the Dramatic Monologue: A Study of Maud.” In Tennyson, edited by D. J. Palmer. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973. A collection of essays about the poems of Tennyson in their intellectual, social, and artistic contexts. Contains an excellent article on Maud in addition to a reader’s guide to Tennyson, a chronological table, and a bibliography.

Glanville, Priscilla J. Tennyson’s “Maud” and Its Critical, Cultural, and Literary Contexts. Lewiston, N.Y. Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Examines the major artistic and cultural influences on the poem, most notably William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as Pre-Raphaelitism and previous closet dramas.

Hood, James W. Divining Desire: Tennyson and the Poetics of Transcendence. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. An analysis of Tennyson’s poetry, focusing on his attempt to depict desire in a divine fashion. Argues that “Tennyson’s poems, his characters, and his speakers employ erotic devotion and artistic creation as the means by which to approximate the transcendence that constitutes their ultimate goal.” Chapter 5 is devoted to an examination of Maud.

Lovelace, J. Timothy. The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2003. A close reading of Maud and Idylls of the King, demonstrating how these works were influenced by the Iliad and Aeneid. Describes how Tennyson uses image patterns and other elements of these classical works to adapt the heroic epic for his own time.

Mazzeno, Laurence W. Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Legacy. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2004. Traces the critical reception of Tennyson’s work, from the opinions of his contemporaries to those from the end of the twentieth century. Charts how his work has been both reviled and revived since his death, discusses his reputation among the poststructuralists, and provides a twenty-first century prospectus.

O’Neill, James Norman. “Anthem for a Doomed Youth: An Interdisciplinary Study of Tennyson’s Maud and the Crimean War.” Tennyson Research Bulletin 5, no. 4 (November, 1990). A thorough treatment of the continuing debate over Tennyson’s advocacy of the Crimean War in part 3 of Maud. Contains a close reading of the poem’s conclusion and includes historical information about the start of the war, the sudden change of public opinion, and the military blunders that occurred.

Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson. New York: Macmillan, 1972. A standard reference, this study contains close textual analyses of Tennyson’s best-known poems. A major Tennyson scholar and the editor of The Poems of Tennyson, Ricks provides lucid explanations of Tennyson’s central themes and preoccupations.