Alfred Lord Tennyson

Maud - Part 1 - 3.

Maud - Part 1 - 3. - context Summary

Written During Personal Turmoil

This excerpt from Maud (Part I, published 1855 in Maud, and Other Poems) frames a speaker haunted by a pale, spectral woman whose beauty fuels obsession and despair. The stanza shifts from inward torment to a bleak night walk where natural images—dead daffodils, a low Orion, roaring tide—mirror his fraying mind. The poem reflects Tennyson’s personal turmoil and themes of madness, grief, and melancholy.

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Cold and clear-cut face, why come you so cruelly meek, Breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown'd, Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead on the cheek, Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom profound; Womanlike, taking revenge too deep for a transient wrong Done but in thought to your beauty, and ever as pale as before Growing and fading and growing upon me without a sound. Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long Growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more. But arose, and all by myself in my own dark garden ground, Listening now to the tide in its broad-flung shipwrecking roar, Now to the scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave, Walk'd in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave.

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