Shall The Hag Evil Die With Child Of Good - Analysis

Evil as a pregnant body

The poem’s central claim is a frightening one: evil may not simply end; it can reproduce by absorbing or even carrying good inside it. The opening question—Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good—imagines Evil as an old, repulsive body that is nevertheless pregnant. That paradox matters. If Good is inside Evil, then destroying Evil might also destroy what it carries; but letting it live risks Evil’s return. Tennyson sets up a moral dilemma as a biological horror story.

The diseased mind’s crowded cells

Very quickly, the poem moves from allegory to something like psychology. Evil does not only live “out there”; it can Throng the cells of the diseased mind. The language feels almost medical—cells, diseased—as if evil spreads like infection, multiplying into a withered brood. The grotesque portrait—hanging cheeks, a loathed kind—isn’t decorative; it’s meant to make Evil physically unbearable, something the speaker cannot tolerate coexisting with any trace of Good.

Blood as nourishment, not cure

The poem tightens its disgust into accusation when the brood is pictured hourly pastured on salient blood. Evil doesn’t starve; it feeds constantly, like livestock grazing—an image that makes violence feel routine, even agricultural. The tension here is stark: the speaker wants a world where Good can grow, yet Evil is shown as thriving precisely because it has a food supply. That suggests a bleak implication: evil’s endurance may depend on what living beings keep giving it, willingly or not.

The turn: from question to curse

The emotional hinge arrives with Oh!. The poem shifts from wondering what will happen to calling for extermination. The speaker summons the wind which bloweth cold or heat—a force that is impartial, elemental—to shatter the brazen beat of the brood’s broad vans (their heavy wings). What follows is almost gleefully violent: the wish to fling them into middle space, to bounce wild cries back down their cavernthroats, and to strike their heated eyne with blastborne hail. The tone becomes incantatory and punitive, as if only cosmic weather can do what human judgment cannot.

Clearing the sky: moon, reflex, and solar light

The final images widen from the mind’s “cells” to the heavens. The brood’s wan limbs should no longer come between the moon and the moon’s reflex, nor blot the solar light. This is more than a desire for clearer weather; it’s a desire for uninterrupted perception. Evil becomes whatever blocks reflection (the moon’s double) and illumination (the sun). Yet the contradiction remains: if Evil can be with child of Good, then the speaker’s total cleansing risks being a kind of blindness too—an attempt to achieve purity by erasing the complicated place where Good might be found, even in the wrong womb.

One sharp question the poem forces: if Evil can carry Good, is the speaker’s dream of blasting it into middle space a moral victory—or an admission that Good’s survival depends on conditions so fragile that any contamination must be annihilated, even at the cost of what’s unborn?