Shall The Hag Evil Die With Child Of Good - Analysis

Introduction

This short lyric registers disgust and a violent desire for purification as the speaker confronts a monstrous figure of moral corruption. The tone is fierce, almost imprecatory, shifting toward yearning for cleansing forces from nature. Imagery grows increasingly physical and elemental, moving from bodily revulsion to a cosmic wish that light be restored.

Historical and Authorial Context

Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a leading Victorian poet, the poem reflects the era’s preoccupation with moral order, social disease, and the restorative powers of nature and providence. Tennyson often pairs heightened language with moral urgency, which helps explain the moralized horror and the appeal to elemental intervention here.

Main Theme: The Struggle of Good and Evil

The central conflict is cast as a binary: Good versus the “hag Evil.” Evil is not abstract but grotesquely incarnate—“hateful with hanging cheeks, a withered brood”—so the poem dramatizes a desire to end its propagation. The repeated question “Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good” frames the anxiety that virtue may fail to prevent vice from renewing itself.

Main Theme: Cleansing through Nature

Nature is imagined as a purifying agent. The speaker implores wind and blast—“that the wind which bloweth cold or heat / Would shatter and o’erbear the brazen beat”—to destroy the hag’s power. Elemental violence is preferable to human remedy, suggesting faith in natural or cosmic correction over human agency.

Main Theme: Light, Vision, and Restoration

Light imagery anchors the moral aim: banish the hag so she “no more might come between / The moon and the moon’s reflex” and not “blot with floating shades the solar light.” Evil here obstructs sight and truth; removing it restores clarity and the rightful play of light, a common Tennysonian symbol for truth and goodness.

Symbolic Images and Their Resonance

The hag functions as a synecdoche for systemic moral disease—“thronging the cells of the diseased mind” links social or mental corruption. Vivid physical images—“salient blood,” “cavernthroats,” “brazen beat”—mix bodily horror with mechanistic menace, implying both organic contagion and aggressive, drumlike force. The wind and hail become symbolically ambiguous: destructive but purgative. One might ask whether the poem’s desired annihilation borders on a wish for violent eradication rather than reform.

Conclusion

Through grotesque embodiment, elemental appeals, and luminous contrasts, the poem stages a vehement wish to eradicate moral evil and restore light and sight. Its significance lies in the fusion of physical revulsion and metaphysical longing: purification must be worldly and brutal to reclaim spiritual clarity.