Maud Part 1 22 - Analysis

Introduction

Maud Part 1, section 22 is a lyrical, yearning address in which the speaker invites Maud into the garden at dawn. The tone blends ardent romantic longing with a quiet, almost reverent natural imagery; moments alternate between celebratory music and hushed anticipation. There is a steady shift from nocturnal revelry to the hush of morning, producing both excitement and fragile hope.

Relevant background

Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Victorian poet, often fused formal romanticism with contemporary sensibilities about feeling, nature, and social rank. The poem’s courtship language and emphasis on flowers and music reflect Victorian ideals of love, symbolism, and refined emotion.

Theme: Romantic longing and possession

The speaker’s desire is explicit and possessive: lines like "But mine, but mine... For ever and ever, mine." frame love as both devotional and claimed. Repetition of possessive phrasing and the envisioning of Maud as life, fate, and destiny intensify the speaker’s hunger and certainty that union would transform him.

Theme: Nature as mirror and agent of feeling

Nature does emotional work throughout: roses, lilies, and the dawn respond to Maud’s approach, echoing the speaker’s feelings. Phrases such as "the musk of the roses blown" and the garden’s waking—"a hush with the setting moon"—make the landscape an active witness and accomplice to love, linking inner states to sensory, vegetal life.

Theme: Music, movement, and stillness

Musical imagery—flute, violin, bassoon, dancing—contrasts with the eventual silence and hush, marking transition from social gaiety to intimate expectation. The poem uses rhythm and sound to portray emotional crescendo and resolution: the night's revels ebb so the speaker and Maud can stand alone.

Symbols and vivid images

Flowers function as character and symbol: the rose embodies passion and the speaker’s pledge ("The soul of the rose went into my blood"), the passion-flower’s tear signals intense feeling, and white/red roses articulate proximity and delay. The garden itself is a liminal space—private, cultivated, sacred—where promise, memory, and bodily renewal converge ("My dust would hear her and beat... And blossom in purple and red"), suggesting eros that revives even death.

Conclusion

Section 22 interweaves urgent romantic claim, responsive nature, and musical imagery to stage a pivotal moment of expectation and possible union. Tennyson shapes the garden as a charged arena where love transforms identity and even mortality, leaving the reader poised between consummation and longing.