Mariana - Analysis

Introduction

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Mariana" presents a sustained mood of desolation and waiting. The poem's tone is mournful, obsessive, and claustrophobic, with only small shifts—from dusk to night to day—that underline the speaker's unchanging despair. Repetition and recurring sensory details create a circular, trapped atmosphere rather than forward motion.

Authorial and Historical Context

Tennyson, a leading Victorian poet, often explored melancholy, isolation, and the inner life of women constrained by social expectations. Though not a direct biographical account, the poem reflects Victorian anxieties about female passivity and the social costs of unmarried or abandoned women.

Main Theme — Isolation and Stasis

The dominant theme is isolation: Mariana is cut off physically and emotionally. Repeated refrains—especially "He cometh not," and "I am aweary, aweary"—function like a mantra that freezes time. Images of a "lonely moated grange," broken sheds, and "weeded and worn" thatch emphasize neglect and lack of movement.

Main Theme — Yearning and Despair

Alongside isolation is crushing yearning that turns into despair. Mariana's wish, repeated in variants—"I would that I were dead" and later "O God, that I were dead!"—shows a progression from passive longing to an almost prayerful plea, deepening the pathos and suggesting emotional collapse rather than hope.

Imagery and Symbols

Recurring images—blackest moss, the poplar, the sluice with blacken'd waters, and the curtain's gusty shadow—symbolize decay, singularity, stagnation, and intrusive memory or fate. The poplar's shadow falling "Upon her bed, across her brow" reads as a literal and symbolic imposition of doom or inescapable fate. The moated grange and stagnant sluice suggest barriers to escape and circulation, reinforcing stasis.

Voice, Repetition, and Psychological Portrait

Repetition structures the poem's psychology: refrains and parallel scenes (evening, night, morning, day) simulate habit and obsession. The external environment often mirrors Mariana's internal state—dampness, rot, creaking doors, and shrill winds echo her weariness—so the landscape acts as an extension of her subjectivity rather than mere backdrop.

Conclusion

"Mariana" offers a concentrated study of unrelieved sorrow: through refrains, claustrophobic images, and a landscape of decay, Tennyson crafts a portrait of a woman immobilized by loss and social circumstance. The poem's power lies in how repetition and setting make emotional paralysis palpable, leaving readers with the uneasy sense that the world itself participates in her imprisonment.