Maud is most certainly the strangest of these two poems, demonstrating through the speaker, Tennyson's own emotional and mental difficulties. The poem is far more insular than In Memoriam, the narrator far lesss approachable and conducive to the empathy we tend tofeel with regard to Tennyson's lament for Arthur Hallam.

It is difficult to see Maud as a comedy. The lexis of the poem is frequently violent and assaulting. The comedy stems not from predicament, but from the narrator's on view of Maud, himself and the world without himself, that he views with arrogant disparity. Though the speaker declares that he will emerge himself within himself, to separate from the universe he so dislikes, the irony is that he absorbs everything he so dislikes and renders his total aloofness, impossible.

The first stanzas of the poem deal with the death of the speakers fahter, which is htrough suicide. We are tol

In Maud, death is a horrifyingly physical state. Dull, onomataopeaic words such as 'Dinted and Crushed assault the ears with mimetic tedium. There is no glory in death here, it is not described with the same prosaic eloquence with which Tennyson mourns Hallam, but with a subliminal and cynical violence. The departed is not mourned as a loss to mankind, but rather the loss of what might have been. Cynisiscm permeates the poem, making Tennyson's 'Little Hamlet' a rather disliked and unnapproachable work, lambasted by Leslie Stephen and inciting some of Tennyson's admirers to 'hate,' him, the poet and the man.

Maud, rather than being a positive figure of resolution, is a threatening prescence. The speaker cannot be redeemed through love, as his heterosexual longings are an indication of the masculinity he abhors. Maud's own identity is a cause for his concern, as he cannot wholly separate her from her father or brother in terms of kinship and biological make up. Again Tennyson is concerned with origin in terms of perpetuation. In In Memoriam, such evolution becomes a means for rebirth, improvement and an uncertain type of et

Some topics in this essay:
Leslie Stephen, Arthur Hallam, Maud Memoriam, Memoriam Maud, maud memoriam, , tennyson's own,