Maud - Part 1 - 2.
Maud - Part 1 - 2. - context Summary
Published 1855
This excerpt comes from Tennyson's dramatic monodrama Maud, first published in the 1855 collection Maud and Other Poems. It introduces an unreliable, emotionally volatile narrator whose admiration for Maud slides into clinical detachment and petty resentment. The passage signals themes of obsession, instability, and conflicted Victorian romantic feeling that recur through the poem. Tennyson uses the narrator's tone to foreshadow psychological unrest and moral ambiguity in later parts.
Read Complete AnalysesLong have I sigh'd for a calm: God grant I may find it at last! It will never be broken by Maud, she has neither savour nor salt, But a cold and clear-cut face, as I found when her carriage past, Perfectly beautiful: let it be granted her: where is the fault? All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen) Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, Dead perfection, no more; nothing more, if it had not been For a chance of travel, a paleness, an hour's defect of the rose, Or an underlip, you may call it a little too ripe, too full, Or the least little delicate aquiline curve in a sensitive nose, From which I escaped heart-free, with the least little touch of spleen.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.