Maud Part 1 3 - Analysis

First impression and tone

The speaker addresses a “cold and clear-cut face” with a tone that is at once intimate and accusatory. The mood shifts from quiet torment—“breaking a slumber in which all spleenful folly was drown'd”—to active restlessness as the speaker leaves his garden, moving from inward obsession to external desolation. Overall the poem feels elegiac and haunted, mixing admiration, reproach, and sleepless melancholy.

Contextual note

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Victorian poet often preoccupied with loss, memory, and idealized women, the poem reflects nineteenth-century sensibilities about mourning, beauty, and introspection. The speaker’s heightened emotional register and mythic references fit Tennyson’s romantic-medievalizing mode.

Theme: Obsession and the power of an image

The poem centers on the intrusive presence of a fixed image—the face that is “growing and fading and growing” within the speaker’s mind. Repetition emphasizes the relentlessness of obsession: the vision returns “half the night long,” undermining sleep and rationality. The face’s “passionless, pale, cold” qualities suggest that beauty can wound by its very perfection, provoking inward guilt (“a transient wrong / Done but in thought to your beauty”).

Theme: Death and emotional desolation

Death imagery saturates the stanza: the face is “deathlike,” an “eyelash dead on the cheek,” and cosmic figures lie low—“Orion low in his grave.” The dead daffodil and the “madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave” extend personal anguish into a devastated natural world, implying that the speaker’s inner bereavement collapses distinctions between private sorrow and external ruin.

Symbols and vivid images

Certain images recur as symbols: the face represents an idealized, unresponsive beloved or an idol of memory; the daffodil—now “dead”—traditionally signals renewal, here inverted to mark lost hope. Marine and celestial images (tide, shipwrecking roar, Orion) enlarge the speaker’s loneliness into cosmic terms, suggesting impotence before fate and the vast, indifferent processes that drown human feeling.

Final synthesis

Tennyson’s fragment compresses obsession, guilt, and mourning into a sequence of haunting images. The poem’s repeated motifs and tonal shifts—intimate accusation to outward wandering—create a portrait of a speaker undone by a beauty that is at once desired and fatal, leaving him in a wintered landscape where even stars and flowers lie dead.