Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Maud (1855), Background and Reading Questions
Background
Tennyson’s original title for the poem was Maud; or, The Madness–an appropriate title for an intimate portrayal of the morbid and disturbed state of mind of its narrator. After reflection, he changed the title to Maud, A Monodrama.
A “monodrama” is, as the roots of the word suggest, a drama that could be performed by one person. In modern usage, however, “monodrama” is most closely associated with the dramatic monologue, a poem (supposedly) delivered by a single character at a particular (often momentous) point in time. We see the dramatic monologue during the Victorian era with Robert Browning, Amy Levy, and Tennyson, among others.
With Maud, though, we have not one long monologue, but rather a series of lyrics that vary across the poem in form, style and length. This variety allows the reader to witness the changing mental state of the soliloquist, not just by what he says, but by how he says it.
The soliloquist ranges across an emotional spectrum, from the bleak desperation of the opening lines– “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood” to the romantic lyric “Come into the garden, Maud” (I.XXII). Watch carefully as you read for how Tennyson incorporates differences in form alongside the soliloquist’s sometimes violent changes in mood.
Such ranges from emotional highs to lows are significant for this speaker, for he is crafted in the vein of a Byronic hero, probably better called a Byronic anti-hero, a persona we see originating Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Manfred. Tennyson was not the only Victorian era writer to be influenced by this type of figure; all of the Brontës included Byronic figures in their fiction: Rochester, Heathcliff, and Huntingdon. The soliloquist’s paranoia, neuroses, obsession with violence, and merciless introspection are all part and parcel of the Byronic hero’s character.
Tennyson called Maud “a little Hamlet,” the “history of a morbid poetic soul, under the influence of a recklessly speculative age.” Tennyson’s son, Hallum Tennyson, characterizes the hero as the “heir of madness, an egotist with the makings of a cynic, raised to sanity by a pure and holy love which elevates his whole nature [. . .] driven into madness by the loss of her whom he has loved [. . .] when [he] has recovered his reason, giving himself up to work for the good of mankind through the unselfishness born of his great passion [. . .] ‘The peculiarity of this poem,’ my father added, ‘is that different phases of passion in one person take the place of different characters’” (Memoir, I, 396)
Reading Questions
Part I, sections 1–4
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The speaker opens with the image of the “dreadful hollow.” How does this setting establish his psychological state?
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How does the imagery of the rose garden and Maud’s beauty blur the line between vision, obsession, and reality?
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What signs of social critique appear in these early sections (family wealth, corruption, inheritance)? How does this link to the speaker’s sense of isolation?
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In what ways is the speaker already unreliable? What warnings do we get about trusting his version of events?
Part I, section 10
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How does the ball highlight divisions of class, money, and morality?
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What is Maud’s position in this scene — is she a participant, an object of display, or something more complex?
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Compare the speaker’s critique of social life here to the tone of Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden. How do both texts link private feeling to public/imperial values?
Part I, section 17
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How does the duel dramatize the poem’s themes of honor, violence, and masculine pride?
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What is the speaker’s role in this violence — is he victim, agent, or both?
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What do we learn about how poetry can frame violence in aesthetic or even noble terms?
Part I, section 22
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How does the language of Maud’s death scene echo earlier moments of beauty and love?
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Does her death silence her, or does it paradoxically make her more central to the speaker’s “vision”?
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How does this moment prepare for the transformation of grief into political/imperial rhetoric later in the poem?
Part II, section 5
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In this descent into grief and madness, what kinds of voices, images, or hallucinations does the speaker experience?
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How does Tennyson use rhythm and repetition to create a sense of obsession or breakdown?
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How might this lyric grief be compared to Christina Rossetti’s Jhansi poem, where private and public voices of loss intersect with violence?
Part III
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- How does the speaker shift from personal mourning to public/imperial purpose?
- What metaphors does he use to describe war? Are they redemptive, romantic, terrifying, or all at once?
- How does this conclusion complicate our sense of whether Maud is a love poem, a psychological portrait, a critique of society, or an imperial vision?
- Place Maud’s final vision alongside Kipling’s and Labouchère’s poems: does Tennyson endorse or critique war and empire — or does he leave it unresolved?
- What is the effect of the various formal elements contained in the poem? How does the diversity of the form shape the verse? How does it influence your reading?
- What does it say about Maud, and Other Poems (1855) that Maud is the first poem in the volume and “Charge of the Light Brigade” is the last?
- If we read poem as solely a “psychological study,” what do we do with the social criticism, contemporary history, and moral comment in the lyric?
