Tennyson’s ‘Maud’

Seamus: Welcome to the third series of our Close Readings podcasts, a series of conversations about modern writing in English, drawing on the rich backlist of articles and reviews, and other pieces of all kinds that have appeared over the years in the London Review of Books. I'm talking to Mark Ford, poet, critic and professor of English at University College London. I'm Seamus Perry, and I teach English at the University of Oxford. This third series of Close Readings is entitled The Long and the Short, and it's about long poems and short stories. And our first topic is a long poem, one of the very great long poems of the 19th century, a poem by Alfred Tennyson called ‘Maud’, which was published in 1855. So, Mark, tell us a little bit about the origins of ‘Maud’.

Mark: ‘Maud’ was the first long poem that Tennyson composed and published after his ‘In Memoriam’, which was the poem that made him spectacularly famous, actually not only in England but all around the world. And ‘In Memoriam’ was a series of over 130 lyrics mourning the loss of his friend Arthur Hallam. It was so popular that he read it to Queen Victoria, and famously it was a poem that comforted people who had been bereaved, and it elevated Tennyson from a poet who had been well reviewed to a national treasure, and that year he became the Poet Laureate. He also married Emily Sellwood, whom he'd been semi-courting, I suppose, for 14 years, though for a decade he hadn't courted her at all, so she'd been hanging on. He'd been living a rather vagrant life, a semi-bohemian life you could say, stalking around London in his cloak and fedora, sleeping on friends' couches and composing poetry often in his head as he walked around. And suddenly he became this professional person of letters, suddenly everybody wanted a piece of Tennyson. It was like a rockstar suddenly going platinum. And he was able to buy a house in the Isle of Wight, Farringford. He moved in it, rented it, but he then eventually bought it. And ‘Maud’ is a terrifically strange, weird, disturbing, powerful poem, which is perhaps not what the Victorian public wanted, and it received notoriously bad reviews about which Tennyson was very touchy. He was one of the touchiest poets of all time! There's a great story you probably know about Benjamin Jowett saying, ‘I wouldn't publish that if I were you, Tennyson,’ after Tennyson read him a poem, and Tennyson responding, ‘Well, if it comes to that, the sherry you served at lunch was beastly!’. But any criticism upset him, and ‘Maud’ received a lot of criticism. And yet it was the poem which Tennyson staked his life on, you could say, and he would repeat it at the drop of a hat. He was so obsessed with this poem, which is itself about obsession, that he would recite it not once, sometimes, not twice, sometimes three times in a row. Famously, Jane Carlyle, he recited it to her and she said, ‘Well, that's not a bad poem,’ or ‘That's decent stuff,‘ and that wasn't good enough, so Tennyson recited it again, and then again her response wasn't enthusiastic enough, so he did it again. That's about six hours of your life gone listening to ‘Maud’! So it was a poem that had enormous value for Tennyson, and I want to explore that in this hour, why it mattered so much to him, but also what it tells us about the Victorian age, about Victorian ideas about poetry and in what ways it works, in what ways it's unsettling and somehow so difficult to process.

Seamus: So that tremendous sensitivity to criticism is a characteristic of Tennyson throughout his life. I'm sure you're right that he's particularly sensitive to criticisms of this poem that does seem to have had a special place in his heart. And I wonder if one reason that might not be the case is that there is a connection with ‘In Memoriam’, the other poem that you mentioned a moment ago. ‘In Memoriam’, the great elegy to Arthur Hallam, this brilliant, beautiful, dazzlingly accomplished young man who everyone expected to go on to be a great hero of the intellectual life and a hero of the empire at the same time, and so on, and all the rest of it. So that's the figure at the heart of ‘In Memoriam’, but also in a funny kind of very occluded way he's also a figure that lies at the very origins of ‘Maud’, doesn't he. Because the earliest little fragment of the poem ‘Maud’ that we can date is a section that comes towards the end of Part Two, which reads, ‘Oh that ’twere possible after long grief and pain to find the arms of my true love round me once again.’ And this is a very melancholy, sad, touching little lyric that Tennyson seems to have written in the immediate aftermath of Hallam's death. So Hallam's lurking somewhere in ‘Maud’, isn't he, in a much more disguised way than he was present in ‘In Memoriam’.

Mark: I think so. And there's a lot of autobiographical material encoded in ‘Maud’, which Tennyson subtitled in the later edition a ‘monodrama’. He originally called it ‘The Madness’, but later he called it a ‘monodrama’. And the idea is that it's a series of dramatic monologues spoken by the main narrator. No one else speaks, and it reflects a number of things that happened to him. Obviously there was the great cataclysmic loss of Arthur Hallam and the sense of elegy which that gave rise to, and there was an elegiac aspect to ‘Maud’ in which two people die. So again, it is a poem which is brooding on loss and it derives some of its plangency from loss. But as in ‘In Memoriam’ he gets lots of other stuff in there. The opening is this Carlylean diatribe against mid-Victorian materialism, which is absolutely brutal in its analysis and not what people thought poetry should do. It was fine for Dickens or Carlyle to sound off about industrialism or about commercialism, about mammon, as Tennyson calls it, but lyric poetry as Tennyson had defined it and marketed it, and made it the national notion that lyric poetry was the kind of thing one gets in ‘Mariana in the Moated Grange’ or ‘Tithonus’ – ‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall’...

Seamus: Yes. Or ‘The Lady of Shalott’, or something.    

Mark: ...This lyricism was the ideal. So part of the animus of the reviews, that it wasn't for a poet to start denouncing the fact that food had been adulterated with alum and plaster –

And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian’s head,
Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled wife,
And chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread
And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.

That wasn't what poets, as Tennyson had conceived poets, were supposed to do. But in some ways it's quite a bold thing to do, except he's putting it all in inverted commas by putting it into the mouth of somebody he wants us to recognise as ‘mad’ to some extent.

Seamus: Yes. Our realisation of his mental instability, I suppose, is only just beginning to stir at this early point in the poem. But yes, in retrospect we can look back and, and as you say, all this very intense and rather vehement social criticism we can perhaps, if you wish to, keep within the cordon sanitaire of his mental condition. But at the same time, the first time you read it you're not absolutely clear that the speaker is meant to be unhinged, and you take it as being absolute bitter commentary on what were, we ought to stress to our listeners, genuine contemporary scandals of people putting horrible stuff in bread to make it cheaper to produce and more profitable to sell.

Mark: Or kill children for burial fees, they're killing their own children for burial fees. So I suppose what you have to ask is what's the attraction to Tennyson of a persona like this who allows him to be so outspoken, and what's the attraction of the narrative as well? I think we should possibly communicate to some extent the narrative, which in a way you have to piece together by reading between the lines a bit what happens. But Tennyson liked to compare it with Hamlet, didn't he. So he thought of it as a kind of Hamlet-like crazed but perhaps not necessarily brilliant narrator, but a narrator who works for allowing Tennysonian lyricism as well as social criticism to be voiced, but it also is a way for him to process various things that happened to him in the 1840s and 1830s. One was his unsuccessful courtship, if he ever got that far, of Rosa Baring, who was the daughter of a very rich aristocratic family. And Tennyson was never as poor as he made out, but he came from a family that was utterly bats, wasn't it. The craziness in the family – there were eleven siblings, and a proportion of them went mad. Someone like Edward was put in an asylum in the 1830s, I think, and stayed there till he died in 1890. Septimus was in High Beach where John Clare was, and High Beach was run by Matthew Allen, and in some ways his was a rather liberated concept of madness, and John Clare liked him initially anyway. But he also managed to persuade Tennyson to invest all his money that he'd inherited and that of some of his siblings and his mother in this crazy scheme to make wood carvings using steam-driven machines. He called them pyroglyphs, this terrific notion. So Tennyson thinks, yes, that's a good idea, I'll put my money in that. And of course it fails. And the failed speculation which ruins ‘Maud’s narrator’s family, which makes his father commit suicide – and the poem opens with a description of the suicide of the narrator's father – was modelled on this failed speculation, Tennyson's loss of money in this hair-brained scheme to make these wooden carvings with machines supposedly to make ordinary people's houses more beautiful.

Seamus: Yes, to furnish the parlours of the nation, absolutely. Allen's quite an interesting figure, isn't he, because he writes about psychiatry and psychiatric conditions as well as being a practicing psychiatric doctor. And we know that Tennyson read the book and we should flag that, I guess, because one of the interests in this poem isn't madness as a catchall category, but also almost a clinical interest in the symptoms of mental derangement, which does draw absolutely, as you say, on this conviction that all the Tennysons had, that they shared what was often called in the family ‘black blood’, that there was a disposition within the Tennysonian brood to a mental weakness or an overwhelming melancholia or depression. So there's an almost proto-confessional thing going on in the poem, isn't there, about trying to examine your own mental health problems, to use a modern phrase, with a dramatic distance.

Mark: Yes. And Tennyson said on a number of occasions that he thought the reader should understand that the taint of inherited madness was what was throwing his narrator off. And that's what Tennyson himself was in terror of, that his father was an epileptic, a drug addict as well as an alcoholic, and Tennyson was terrified that he would  inherit these characteristics. So it's a form of... not eugenics exactly, but a fear of inheriting bad blood, and that is what makes the narrator so  morbid and gloomy and self-conscious. But what's amazing about the poem, as with all Tennyson's poems, is the way that that works through the descriptions of the scenery. And J.S. Mill, in a very brilliant early discussion of ‘Mariana’ from the 1830s, talked about Tennyson's power of creating scenery in keeping with some state of human feeling. And if we look at just the opening stanzas of this ‘dreadful hollow’...

 Seamus: Yes. Why don’t you read out the opening lines.

Mark: ... Let's see what our listeners make of this incredibly good example of the way in which scenery reflects some state of human feeling.

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
An Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers "Death."

And you find out in the next stanza that’s because his own father hurled himself down into this ghastly pit, and he was ‘mangled and flattened and crushed and dinted into the ground. There yet lies the rock that fell with him when he fell.’ And what would a Freudian make of that, do you think?

Seamus:  Well, it's one of the great interesting questions, isn't it, about this period. It's a period which is becoming extraordinarily interested in psychology and psychological states, which includes kinds of repressed or barely acknowledged sexuality, but it totally lacks a Freudian language to talk about it. And so you see, as it were, all the resources of lyric poetry, the description of landscape, and that sort of thing coming into play as a way of providing a language, as it were, for these incredibly complicated emotional responses to experience, of which Tennyson could only have been, I guess, 50% aware of what he was doing. But I don't know. How do you see it?

Mark: I think his own obsession with the poem suggests that it worked for him somewhat as laudanum worked for his father, or alcohol worked for his father. That poetry was actually, in my reading or understanding of Tennyson, a kind of neurotic response to his own neuroses. It was his way of coping with life. And he was so concerned that it was poetry rather than publication that he would compose poems as he walked along, whole long poems, and then couldn't be bothered to even write them down, let alone publish them. And it was Hallam who got him to publish initially, and other people had to get him to publish afterwards. He was very resistant to publishing. So along with the dramatisation, which seems to us quite frank, of a sexual neurosis or ancestral disease which is going on in here is this extreme reticence and desire in Tennyson not to be intruded upon. And that actually comes up towards the end of the poem where you whisper anything to a mouse and it gets out there. And of course Tennyson himself would police the borders of Farringford in the Isle of Wight, so any intruders were ejected, and even ones who had appointments to see him were still kicked out! Then they'd not show up for their appointments and he'd get angry, but he'd already dispatched them. So he was a superstar who was neurotic about intrusions on his privacy, and yet at the same time creating in something like ‘Maud’ and ‘In Memoriam’ documents of startling intimacy and an immediacy about his own private emotions. So that paradox runs through the poem. And in terms of the narrative of ‘Maud’, what becomes problematic for the narrator is when he tries to embody his feelings in some kind of action. There's this interesting relationship between emotion and action throughout Tennyson and action is normally bad in Tennyson, and as soon as he declares his love to Maud – initially he spurns her, because we should say that it's a kind of Romeo and Juliet-style story as well as a Hamlet story, that Maud is the daughter of the man who ruined the narrator's father in the speculation, whereas ‘the old man, now lord of the broad estate in the Hall, dropped off gorged from a scheme that had left us flaccid and drained.’ Again, you don't want to examine ‘flaccid and drained’ too closely, do you? But somehow this evil father of Maud has profited and he's now penniless, and Maud, who he played with as a child and who his parents kind of paired up at their birth, they were intended for each other, but she's only sixteen and she's been abroad. She comes back, he meets her. He thinks, I'm never going to fall in love with her. And there's a beautiful lyric, ‘Cold and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly meek?’. Her cold beauty is never going to stir him, and yet she starts haunting him. And haunting is the dominant experience of a Tennyson poem, that they're all about being haunted by things that you can't control, ghosts from the past, dreamy, desired women, whatever. It haunts him and it never becomes real. And when he tries to make it real, then disaster strikes. So while he falls in love with Maud after spurning her, that's all fine. And she bizarrely returns his affection!

Seamus: Well, so far as we know exactly what's going on, because of course everything is mediated through the voice and the perspective of the unnamed speaker, isn't it. It's very important that this particular representation of femininity, which can seem so retrogressive in a third person narrative, actually in this one because it's all seen through the perspective of the speaker, has a brilliant psychological justification to it in a way.

Mark: It is the concept of the poem. I think it's fantastic for that, and it shrouds the whole thing in indeterminacy of a certain kind that we cannot tell what is happening. But in general one can gather from the poem that the narrative as it is developed in the three parts is that the brother wants her to marry someone who’s inherited a lot of money from coal mining, a parvenu lord, the last thing, so lots of stuff about aristocracy is going on in the poem. But this parvenu lord, Maud is supposed to be betrothed to him. The brother wants that to happen, but Maud wants for whatever reasons to be with the narrator. They arrange to meet after a party. The brother shows up when they're about to meet. He's rude, then slaps him, pistols at dawn, the narrator kills Maud's brother and then flees to France, to Brittany. And we get these brilliant mad scenes later because he goes genuinely mad and thinks he's dead and has been buried, but we learn also that Maud has died as well. So in terms of the relationship between lyricism and death, there's a brilliant exploration in the poem of love and death, and death is woven as a strand into notions of love and the narrator voices that, and the poem then illustrates it, that Maud is dead, the brother is dead, the narrator survives but goes mad, and in Section Two thinks that he has been buried alive and can hear things, but not buried deep enough. And then finally the Crimean War breaks out and there are two ghostly Mauds. One is rather severe and isn't nice to him, and the other is beneficent and says, you should sign up for the Crimean War, that'll heal you. And he does so, and it ends with this ringing nationalist commitment to war in the Crimea, which caused all sorts of consternation among readers such as Gladstone. So that for our listeners is the narrative – I hope that's not too much of a spoiler if you haven't read it! – of ‘Maud’, and it licenses all kinds of different sorts of poetry in a very fragmentary set of lyrics which are pieced together by the reader, and which in that sense look forward to things like The Waste Land and other modernist poems in the ways in which it’s a fragmented creation of a narrative, which we as readers have to put together.

Seamus: Yes, absolutely. And something we should talk about, I suppose, if you're thinking about the style of the poem and the way that Tennyson uses his extraordinary innate lyric gift as a way of exploring this particular psychological condition is the use of repetition, for example. So the lines from the beginning that you read out introduce immediately the idea of echo. ‘Echo there, whatever is asked her, answers “death”’. And it's an extraordinary echoic poem, isn't it? I had a student once who counted the number of times the name Maud is used in the poem and it's extraordinary. What's so brilliant about it is at one level this is a piece of verbalist brilliance. The use of repetition is an ingenious piece of linguistic invention. But at the same time it also plays this brilliant psychological role as dramatising obsessionalism. A man who can't listen to rooks in the trees without thinking they're saying her name:

Birds in the high Hall garden
When twilight was falling
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud
They were crying and calling.

And I seem to remember a story of Tennyson meeting a lady who said how lovely the birds were and were they blackbirds, and Tennyson was extremely cross. Of course they weren't blackbirds, they were rooks, they're going ‘Maud, Maud, Maud!’ There's a wonderful way in which you can glimpse as it were the objectivity of what's being described, but only because you can discern it through the intense subjective veil of the voice that's discerning it.

Mark: Yes, and it's interesting that in the drafts he changed flowers that were initially narcissus, he changed to daisy, and there's another couple of occasions. So obviously, the use of the flower narcissus was flagging up to him too much that this is a poem about narcissism, so he changed it. But the extent to which it is a poem about narcissism, and Tennyson’s own anxieties about his own narcissism and the extent to which his own poetry grew out of narcissism are being dramatised in the poem. And the whole creation of the concept of the narrator in the monodrama is a way of distancing himself from this narcissism, while also allowing himself to indulge it.

Seamus:. It's very good, isn't it, about...There are bits of it, you read the poem and you feel yourself in the presence of just lovely love poetry, and then you take a step back and you suddenly realise that this is actually rather odd, rather bizarre and neurotic. So this is a lovely section of the poem, section 17 of Part One, where he's talking about his feelings for more that are now completely ones of infatuation at sunset.

Blush it thro’ the West.
Rosy is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are her cheeks,
And a rose her mouth.

At one level that's lovely, and at another level it's profoundly creepy, isn't it.

Mark: Well, the excessiveness of his language is something, and the most excessive lines in that particular one which always make me laugh is the idea of this blushing and rosing is going to spread all around the world. And he can't leave it alone.

Blush it thro’ the West;
Till the red man dance
By his red cedar-tree,
And the red man’s babe
Leap, beyond the sea.

And this is the moment where Tennyson could topple over into absurdity for us, or indeed for someone like Lewis Carroll who parodied this poem. The idea of Native Americans dancing because....

Seamus: ... because Maud is so gorgeous!

Mark: It’s a moment where I think also, to be a bit more serious, the imperial ripples of Tennyson's poems, the extent to which his imagination is always spreading beyond England itself towards some kind of empire, which is what happens at the end of the poem, is in embryo it'll exclude in relation to the red man's babe in terms of this particular image. So the excessiveness, the extent to which – to use Mill's notion that the scenery refracts the emotions of the subjective consciousness which is projecting it – it becomes ghastly and ghostly in various ways. One of the things that the poem is so disturbing about is that we can't tell what is real, and reality all gets transmuted into Tennysonian lyricism. And that is one of the mirages or dangers of Tennyson's lyricism, that it eats itself in some way. But the drama of it, I think, actually allows us to experience that as well as to be detached from it and to explore it as a condition rather than as what poetry is about.

Seamus: We should say something, shouldn't we, about the most famous lines of this poem, which is the very last section of Part One, ‘Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat night has flown.’ And, to go back to what you were saying a moment ago, this is the moment where he's lurking in the garden, waiting for this assignation. She's going to slip away from the Tory party dinner that’s going on in her house and come and see him. And it's a lovely poem. It's famous because it was set as a Victorian parlour song, and Tennyson hated that song, because I suppose it takes something which is extraordinarily emotionally ambivalent and difficult and turns it into something that is completely domesticated, something that you could sing with your grandchildren and grandmother around the parlour piano. It's a very striking piece of writing, isn't it. So this is the last lines of Part One before the terrible crisis of the whole poem, which of course is never actually directly narrated at all. We see the prelude to it, and we see the aftermath of it. But actually what happens in narrative terms at the very heart of the poem is only ever left implicit:  

She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
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.

Well, the odd sexualised psychodynamics of that passage are very striking, aren't they.

Mark: Yes, and the extent to which death is bound into it. And the next time we hear those words, ‘dead, long dead, long dead!’, and we get the ‘stream of passing feet driving, hurrying, marrying, burying’, so you get a kind of obverse of this lyricism. So the relationship between the hellish vision of it and the heavenly lyrical vision of it are like antitheses or polarities of the same condition. And I think that phantasmagoric aspect of it was one of the reasons that so much of Tennyson’s poems stuck with, say, T.S. Eliot. When you read The Waste Land, you often feel you are actually in a late Tennysonian city, full of these ghastly spectres who are inhabiting it. And this is like The Hyacinth Girl to that extent, that this is the potential of all these flowers to express erotic excitement, emotion, connection, is one which is, we know if we read the whole poem, about to be deprived. But the Tennysonian gift for such things – and the repetition, to go back to what I think is a really interesting aspect of the Tennysonian, that repetitiveness is like a piece of music which continues with variations. And he was brilliant at these variations. So, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead’ from ‘Mariana’, for instance, repeating itself, that sort of theme of variations was something that was like the Tennysonian poetic machine, one would almost say, which is why I'm so very struck by these wood carvings to be created by a steam-driven machine, these pyroglyphs. In some ways they are analogous to the whole Tennysonian poetic lyrical production line. And someone like Hopkins, for instance, quite astutely took some lines from ‘Enoch Arden’ and said, this is Parnassian. Tennyson is working at low pressure, just throwing this stuff out like a factory churns out replicas of the same thing. And Tennyson is aware that his own lyric gift is prone to the Parnassian, which is possibly why he was so sensitive to criticism, because it was an attack on his own authenticity, his own sense of himself as being ‘the bard’, and that really stressed him out. There's a funny anecdote, isn't there – Tennyson was a compulsive smoker, and there's a famous line, ‘the early morning pipe of birds’, and somebody saw him having his early morning pipe and said ‘the early morning pipe of bards’. Quite a good joke, really. Tennyson was mortally offended by this and said this line had been ruined for him forever! I tell that story just as a way of giving the extent to which it's balanced on a fine edge, the Tennysonian, and it can become repetitive and dreary and compulsive, or it can be this vertiginous, hellish descent into the unreal, which is what the narrator experiences in Part Two.

Seamus: Yes. What Whitman calls his ‘finest verbalism’, isn't it. And verbalism can simply be words, words, words, or it can be an extraordinary verbal gift, which is put to purpose, put to an end, I suppose.

Mark: Yes. Whitman saw himself in opposition to Tennyson a great deal, and we might pick up that in ‘The Song of Myself’, and thought of himself as the opposite. But for him it was to do with aristocracy, that the effeteness of the Tennysonian mode was a symbol of the exhaustedness of European hierarchies and European aristocracy, which is oddly what Tennyson is himself diagnosing in this particular attack on the aristocracy. The lord, the brother, is evil, is ‘a padded shape’, there’s all sorts of things wrong with him. He's effete, although in fact he's quite kind to Maud on one occasion when her mother is dying, and so on. So it's actually quite a complex multifaceted portrait that one gets. And always you are reading between the lines of his own interpretation of what he thinks has happened.

Seamus: Yes. We should say just in passing, I suppose, that the attack on the one hand on mammon and a culture whose values are totally destroyed by being organised exclusively around money, but also the attack on aristocracy, which is complicit with this, this all feels, if you put it like that, quite radical. But actually there's nothing especially socialist or republican about Tennyson’s view – this is a very peculiar kind of 19th century radicalism, isn't it, which, to bring up something you said before, is coming from Carlyle and I suppose to a certain extent from Matthew Arnold and people like that. It's a kind of social criticism which doesn't really ally itself with any of the kinds of 19th century ideologies that we might necessarily associate those complaints with at this retrospect.

Mark: And it was seen as contaminating the lyricism by his readers. That's what's interesting, that they were fine if Carlyle wrote about it, or Dickens in Hard Times or Oliver Twist or whatever, that was part of the brief of the novelist or the Victorian sage. But the lyric poet as defined by Tennyson shouldn't be doing this kind of stuff, and yet it's what he wanted to do and felt compelled to do. To some extent, it becomes rather scary in a Carlylean way when the narrator talks about... he's very anxious about his own manliness. So one way of approaching ‘Maud’ is as a critique or exploration of masculinity and manliness and what's involved in being manly, and can you be a manly lyrical poet? And the narrator, who is the vehicle or the vector for all this lyrical fine feeling, actually wants to be like a follower of a Hitler or Mussolini figure or an Übermensch, to use the phrase that Carlyle used, and he talks:

Ah God, for a man with heart, head, hand,
Like some of the simple great ones gone
For ever and ever by,
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.

And ah for a man to arise in me,
That the man I am may cease to be!

So somehow if you could hitch your wagon to the political fortunes of an autocrat, you might discover your masculinity, as he does at the end by wanting to go off to war. So if you explore the poem in terms of the crisis of masculinity – which you can do to any poem at any point in life if you fancy! – but anyway, if you do it in those terms, you find these fissures or faults that are running through the poem, which it’s attempting to compensate for by these visions of autocracy or some strong man who could get the nation in shape.

Seamus: It is interesting, isn't it, the way that one of the things that the poem associates is individual psychological turmoil with much bigger political crises, and a sense that the unhappiness of this young man is somehow part of a global cultural catastrophe. And that is another way in which I guess it's looking forward to modernist poetry like Eliot in The Waste Land or the early poems of W.H. Auden, where it's taken for granted almost that psychological distress is a pathological symptom of a disease in society at large.

Mark: Yes, and I think that's something the long poem does really well, isn't it, the long poem again deriving itself back to the traditions of epic. The long poem somehow refracts the national consciousness so that it becomes a condition of England poem, with the paradox being that people didn't want their poems to be condition of England poems. They wanted them to be ‘the woods decay, the woods decay and fall’ and so on. So there's a sense in which Tennyson is bucking the whole genre that he has created or the taste that he has created, but that in his ambitiousness or his compulsion to do this, his obsessiveness about this poem, he is in some ways getting England more fully than he does in ‘In Memoriam’. This is a greater litmus test, so to speak, of what England was like in the 1850s. It's recovering for poetry something that it had lost to the novel. The novel was the form for social protest. But it's also deeply personal in a way which becomes very distressing in Section Two. The body count – Maud is dead and the brother is dead, and obviously their father thinks he's dead, and yet he recovers himself when the good angel Maud tells him to associate himself with this venturing in the Crimea, and this is all part of the national destiny. We should say that Tennyson was utterly committed to empire and believed in empire, and the trajectory which ‘Maud’ develops is not that different from ‘In Memoriam’ in the sense that his own personal crisis and psychological difficulties in the end give way to a commitment to a national cause, which somehow allows him to identify himself with larger energies or belief system, which is a patriotic one. But there's also as in ‘In Memoriam’ a discussion of science, isn't there – when the eft ruled the world, eft, the lizard, the dinosaurs. So like ‘In Memoriam’ in particular, it does attempt to deal with the kinds of challenge to religion which geology in particular was presenting.

Seamus: And we should say that the nadir of the poem, as it were, his greatest lapse into unhappiness and desperation, that's where Tennyson puts the poem that we mentioned at the very beginning, ‘O that ’twere possible’. So it's a very telling moment if you think about Tennyson biographically, that it's the poem that he writes after the death of his beloved Arthur Hallam that he then recycles to put in the mouth of his suffering protagonist in ‘Maud’ to express, as it were, the absolute bottom of human fortunes.

Mark: And it becomes a kind of urban dystopia.

Seamus: Yes. He comes back to London, doesn't he. He goes off to Breton to try and escape, and then he comes back to London, and then we get these uncannily prophetic or proleptic Waste Land-type passages of being dead and living among the dead and having living dead people trample over your head on the pavements and so on.

Mark:

Then I rise, the eavedrops fall,
And the yellow vapours choke  –

– think of the yellow vapours from Prufrock –

The great city sounding wide;
The day comes, a dull red ball
Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke
On the misty river-tide.

I have to think that the river tide perhaps influenced the barges in Part Three of The Waste Land.

Seamus:  Absolutely, yes. And some of the manipulations of tone in Part Two I've always thought are brilliant. The wonderful lines where he says

O me, why have they –

– whoever ‘they’ are –

               – not buried me deep enough?
Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,
Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?

There’s a wonderful incongruity of tone, isn't there, which again has a kind of Eliotic quality to it.

Mark: Well, I think like in Eliot it derives from his reading of Jacobean or Elizabethan drama, doesn't it, the mad scenes like that of Ophelia or in Webster's Duchess of Malfi and so on, the mad scenes. This is his way of being able to make use of Elizabethan and Jacobean craziness. And Eliot had the same drive, and he's also a ghost in this. He's like one of the undead, a ‘wasted frame’,

The shadow still the same;
And on my heavy eyelids
My anguish hangs like shame.

So certainly the crisis is extreme. I suppose what so unnerved both reviewers at the time or readers and modern readers is this solution, which is a militaristic one, which is let's go to war and fight the evil Russians in the Crimea.

Seamus: Yes. So Tennyson comments upon this, doesn't he, in different ways. So at one point when he's describing the poem, he talks about his protagonist having ‘at length passed through the fiery furnace’, so that's, I suppose, Part Two, and has ‘recovered his reason, giving himself up to the work for the good of mankind’. So that would imply that in the Crimean War and in militaristic endeavour you find some kind of salvation, some kind of redemptive force. But other times, I suppose it's fair to say, he's a little bit more cagey about quite how much he aligns himself with the views of his speaker. Someone wrote to him and said, this seems – I'm paraphrasing – quite an odd way of finding salvation from an emotional problem. And Tennyson says rather edgily – as you said at the very beginning, he's very vulnerable to criticism –‘how could you or anyone suppose if I had to speak in my own person, my own opinion of this war or war generally, I should have spoken with so little moderation? I took a man constitutionally diseased and dipped him into the circumstances of the time and took him out on fire.’ And that would imply actually quite a lot of dramatic distancing of the very upbeat view that the speaker of the poem has about going off to fight in the Crimea. But then Tennyson continues very characteristically, ‘I do not mean that my madman does not speak truths too.’ So you don't really quite know where you are in terms of Tennyson’s own take on the spirits in which the narrator finishes the poem.

Mark: Yes. At his best, Tennyson does achieve that ambivalence, doesn't he, that's what makes him a good or interesting poet. But these things did press upon him in this time, in the 1850s and afterwards in particular, he did feel that his own lyricism somehow had to deal with these larger political issues in relating to empire. And people would write to him all the time. There was one letter of somebody which ended ‘yours in aversion’, and he would quote this again and again because he in fact almost cherished up these attacks on him. The effect that his poems had on people was something we find hard to imagine, I think, that it really did matter. It's true that a lot of people were dissatisfied with the end, but the narrator sees it as a spiritual regeneration and at last he's found something to commit to. And so to an extent this is almost like Tennyson metamorphosing from the lyric poet into the epic poet, the poet who can commit himself to the national project and can see lyricism and love as somehow just part of the journey. That's a bit rough on Maud and her brother who both die. And for me, rereading this poem, I've read it many times, but this time I was really struck by what I could think of as the ruthlessness of Tennyson and how that ruthlessness plays out in the poem, that at the end all things give way to his own onward trajectory or his own sense of momentum and all things become part of his own narrative. And I think that might be one of the aspects of the Great Poet. The same is true, you could say, of Wordsworth or Eliot, that everything becomes part of the narrative which they develop or concoct, so there is a ruthlessness or narcissism or egotism which drives the poem, which may be reflective of what it takes to write the successful long poem. Which is interestingly encoded into the poem through these suppressed references, the narcissus and the echoes and so on, the extent to which everything becomes a means of refracting his own anxieties and his own quest, and that quest supersedes all other quests. And I was thinking of those descriptions in the great Robert Bernard Martin biography – of which there's a terrific review, by the way, by Frank Kermode in the LRB, I really recommend that, and he is very admiring of the ways in which Martin reconfigures Tennyson's life after this terrible hagiography from which he suffered, that his own son Hallam burned most of his letters. Anything that casts any kind of shadow on Tennyson, Saint Alfred, was got rid of. But Bernard Martin gives us chapter and verse on the drug addictions, the alcoholism, and the extent to which Tennyson himself would take money left, right, and centre and never pay it back, never said thank you to people like Edward Fitzgerald. And that in the end he had a whole entourage. He had two houses as well, Farringford and Aldworth, and oddly both, particularly the Aldworth one near Haslemere, were fairly similar to the one that his evil grandfather and his evil uncle had constructed. So his own attacks on Victorian pretension and in ‘Maud’ on the ‘gewgaw castle’, as it’s called in the poem itself, Tennyson himself went on to build a gewgaw castle at Aldworth in Sussex.

Seamus: Well, as Coleridge says, we expect a poet to be a good man, though, not perhaps a goodie man! I like your point about quest, though, that the narrator of ‘Maud’ is engaged in a spiritual quest which in some way emulates or mirrors or parallels Tennyson’s own. And I think it brings up very interestingly the question of progression in the poem. The poem seems to be structured in this tripartite way as if it's making some kind of purposeful movement towards some kind of resolution. But it's so striking, isn't it, that it ends with almost exactly the same language with which it began. It starts by talking about blood-red heath, blood- red flowers and death, and it ends by talking about blood-red blossoms of war. And there's an extraordinary sense that we've got nowhere, we are in exactly the same position, exactly the same language that we were where we started, but he's just found a new location in which to deploy it.

Mark: I know. And I think that's one of the ways that as a dramatisation of subjectivity and the endlessness of subjectivity and the compulsion to repeat, and the compulsion to return and reframe the same dilemmas in different terms, is one of the ways in which I think this poem possibly can – or at least I hope – speak to our listeners. I don’t know how much Tennyson is read in a general way by the general public these days, but to some extent he can be shockingly – what's the right word? –not exactly shocking, but he is compulsive in his creation of the vagaries of consciousness and kinds of compulsion which one might take to a Freudian psychoanalyst. And it tells us interesting things both about himself and about the way the mind works.

Seamus: Why don't we end with you reading the closing lines of the poem so our listeners can judge for themselves the degree of ambivalence that's written into this militaristic climax.

Mark:

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;
It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d.