Mariana, by Alfred Lord
Tennyson – Romanticism in Victorian poetry
By MªJosé Jorquera Hervás
The
Poem: Mariana
Mariana, Alfred Lord Tennyson
"Mariana in the Moated
Grange"
(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure)
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "The day is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary
I would that I were dead!"
And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then said she, "I am very dreary,
He will not come," she said;
She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!"
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mariana. First published in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
(1830).
A Collection of Poems by Alfred Tennyson, edited by Christopher Ricks; Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY, 1972
The Complete
Poetical Works of Tennyson, edited by W.J. Rolfe;
Houghton Mifflin Co.,
Analysis of the poem
In this paper I will try to interpret the meaning of the poem ‘Mariana’ from the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), through an approximation to the environment of the poet and the thought of the Victorian period (which starts in 1837 when Queen Victoria ascended the throne). I will deal with offering a vision of what the gender and more in particular the women meant in that time, how it could affect the contemporary poets. Furthermore, an explanation will be given on a possible relation between this specific issue treated in the Victorian period and the previous Romantic period.
If we should analyse the poem through the verses, we would notice that Tennyson introduces in this poem a lady located in an abandoned house, in the middle of nowhere. We can know the state in which both the lady and the house are, by its continual descriptions. First, this house is a big ancestral home which has been abandoned, it is now dirty and old, grimy and broken by the passage of time, the poet makes a perfect description of the bad conditions the house is: “with blackest moss the flower-plots / were thickly” (first stanza), “the broken sheds look’d sad and strange / unlifted was the clinking latch” (first stanza), “after the flitting of the bats / when thickest dark did trance the sky” (second stanza), “waking she heard the night-fowl crow / the cock sung out an hour ere light” (third stanza), “from the dark fen the oxen’s low / came to her (third stanza) about the lonely moated grange” (third stanza), “about a stone-cast from the wall / a sluice with blacken’d waters slept” (fourth stanza), to such an extent that it is presented as a really scary big house, characteristic of terror novels or films. It is in some points of the poem it has this scary ingredient that it can produce some kind of frightening in the reader, as if it was kind of house that keeps a monster inside of it: “the gusty shadow sway / but then the moon was very low / and wild winds bound within their cell / the shadow of the poplar fell” (fifth stanza), “the doors upon their hinges creak’d / the blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse / behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d / or from the crevice peer’d about (sixth stanza), the sparrow’s chirrup on the roof / the slow clock tocking (seventh stanza).
But actually it has nothing to do with this first impression. The only one who is inside the house is Mariana, a lady that feels sad, depressed, in the deepest loneliness and in the heaviest melancholy. We can guess her longing feeling for a dear person, this is her lover, and we know this by the last verses of each stanza. These are extremely important, they play a notorious part because they give the poem a grace that makes a faster reading possible, a harmony of rhythm, so the reader goes faster at the end of each stanza and it makes him/her feel comfortable while reading, pleasantly, as if it was kind of a childish song, popular saying, or legend. Despite this, reality is so different for this lady, she is depressed, because in spite of being waiting patiently for his lover who doesn’t come back, time has gone by and it leaves a mark: it leaves everything dead by its passing, as we can see in the descriptions of her and the place itself. Everything is dying, no sign of living existence is evidenced. Mariana has been losing little by little the hope of his return, and now she is hopeless, so the sentence she breathes out with such a deep-rooted pain and boastfulness: “My life is/ The night is/The day is/I am very…” (depending on the stanza, which remarks the strength of this feeling, since everything for her is dreary) “…dreary, He cometh not, … I am aweary, I would that I were dead!”
As she has been long years indoors waiting for her lover to come back, this has turned Mariana into a slave, which makes her be not only a devout of her lover, but even more; she has renounced life, to her own life, in order to stay and wait patiently although it is the hardest and most painful thing she’s done. Therefore she herself has become a slave, hence she lies in a solitary and bitter prison that is her own home, only waiting for her lover: “she drew her casement-curtain by / and a glanced athwart the glooming flats” (second stanza), “all day within the dreamy house” (sixth stanza), “old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors” (sixth stanza), “old voices called her from without” (sixth stanza). She has no more license to live happily, because her pain and sorrow, her daily grieve, the living conditions and her increasing desperation, has made her isolate from everyone and everything, in order to live her grief and sadness, and live this feeling alone, as to that who is in the threshold between life and death and needs to implore whoever. This is why she cries hopelessly and asks God for being dead as not to suffer more.
Tennyson uses in this romantic poem irony throughout the poem, as well as he plays with double meanings in his purpose of establishing a comparison between the house and the lady. This is how we can see how Mariana and the house come to mean the same thing, and the remarkable point of this poem is that, through the feelings of the lady, the poet has perfectly reflected these emotions in the house she lives in, thus, the house is the mirror of Mariana, they both are or represent the same thing, just as we can understand by the poet’s words: Mariana feels alone, sad and dejected, the house is full of dirt, abandoned in the end, that is just the state Mariana herself is in. Desolation and desperation are found in the descriptions the poet makes of the house as well as the landscape, a deserted place in the middle of nowhere, that no one remembers at all. With all, this comes to represent the abandonment Mariana is suffering for her lover, she cries for him and asks him to come back, every night and day, till she’s lost any hope of being rescued and reinserted in the world.
Thus we come to the meaning or main theme of the poem, the idea Tennyson want us to transmit is the place or situation of the woman, how she had to live and was considered during Victorian period. ‘Woman was relegated to private sphere, housework stuff, the introspection and the care of the husband and children. Tennyson has gone to extremes in his purpose of letting us see this situation of Victorian women, introducing us a typical woman who does not succeed publicly, that is at second stage, behind the scenes, hidden in what is considered to be her place, home life, indoors, where she feels safe, comfortable and protected, the one who is not allowed to come to light, outside, acknowledged, but only her husband is. She is, other way, related to housework, to elegant and graceful but discrete manners. The house represents the prison the Victorian lady is in, just by her sex, by being a female.’ (Manuel).
This is how we come to know that Mariana is imprisoned and she does not find a way to set herself free, because she is not allowed to because of her society, the same way Victorian women couldn’t find support of their society in order to escape that prison. They just could resign themselves and let their husbands play the main part in their lives. This way, these men are to be heroes, they would play that role as they come to rescue the lady that is imprisoned (the same as happens in ‘Mariana’), but the lady is finally not rescued, because of the society, that places everyone in a specific point and sets the roles. The lady would go out no more, during Victorian ages. Mariana is not rescued and this is what provokes her anguish.
‘The work of Michel Foucault (notably his introductory volume to The History of Sexuality, 1976) and the research of countless feminist scholars of the 1980s demonstrated how the Victorians constructed the categories of normal and perverse, heterosexual and homosexual, masculine and feminine. During the nineteenth century gender and sexuality were particularly useful in providing an arena into which political material could be transferred and depoliticized. Because of the way in which the Victorian culture constructed public and private, economic production and cultural and sexual intricately intertwined with issues of art and artistry.’ (Psomiades, Kathy Alexis)
‘Representations of masculinity shifted several times in Victorian England. During the first half of the nineteenth century, as Herbert Sussman demonstrates in Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculiness Poetics in Early Victorian England (1995), a discourse about the manliness was constructed in response to industrialization and changes in the socioeconomic class system. The traditional distinction between upper-class landowing aristocracy versus lower-class unpropertied laborers was complicated by the rise of a middle class of industrialists, bankers, merchants, and a variety of professionals. Historicians Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall point to the ‘delineation of gender difference’ as one of the mail features of the Victorian middle class. In particular, the balance between brawn and brains in the paradigm of masculinity was transformed. Manhood now involved work that might be more mental than physical. (…) For example, the early Victorian sage Thomas Carly defined manliness in terms of strenuous effort, both in the workplace and in the soul. His On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840) became a guidebook for several generations of Victorian men seeking a firm gender identity. (…) An identity of separated spheres for men and women took hold during the beginning of the nineteenth century. The definition of womanliness complemented that of manliness: the true woman was devoted to care of the family and maintenance of the home, while the true man dedicated himself to pursuit of economic success and his role as paterfamilias. This domestic ideology meshed with the larger political goals of the middle class: manly aggressiveness ensured the prosperity not only of the family but also the nation, while womanly spiritually provided support for both men and their heirs. (…) Victorian male poets inhabited an ambiguous space: as poets, they were expected to express deep feelings and explore private states of consciousness, yet this was identified in domestic ideology as the preserve of the feminine. Tennyson’s early poetry exemplifies the tension between the masculinity of the poet and the feminity of this gender: Victorian critics found the texts about women and their emotions in domestic settings in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) unacceptably effeminated. Consider the poem ‘Mariana’ (1830) which describes the heightened senses of a woman waiting for her lover in a “lonely moated grange’.’ (Morgan, Thaïs E. )
Now we have seen the situation of women and men and their roles played during Victorian time, we can relate somehow this period to the previous one, the Romanticism, through the figure of one of the greatest romantic poets: Lord Byron.
‘To establish this comparison we need to go back and look through the romantic poets, we easily find all these characteristics in Byron and his Byronic hero, the romantic hero, that establishes the basis of that clear distinction between the feminine and masculine gender, and separation of spheres, of women and men’s worlds with their own characteristics, almost ever opposite and with the result of an absolute restriction of women rights and a strong dependence of men, that, in the poem, it’s turned not only into a physic loneliness, inside the house, but a psychic, spiritual one, that vetoes the woman from any right just for being a female, and a total dependence on men because of the customs, manners and thought of that time, giving absolute priority to the man, he was the star, he had any kind of rights and managed his own business, he had benefits and success, he would play his willingness everywhere and every moment, he was acknowledged, was someone. Not the woman. She was considered to be weak and incapable, every time devoted to her husband, without self considering, she had in her lover her strongest and unique support, without him, she was nothing, she would no longer be accepted in society, and devoted as well to the house that had to be attended 24 hours a day and children, she herself had to carry the weight of the whole family, and, what is called womanhood, that is every connotation of what has always belonged to the feminine world, a culture that still today girls are learning. She looked after the whole family and indoors world so they were the perfect happy family. The metaphor of the house in “Mariana” represents her own prison, loneliness, resignation, annulment, as a woman, without being able to escape or break the heavy rules of that time and express one’s own as men did. Thanks to Tennyson we can imagine this situation through the images he let us see and the continuous metaphors that contributes to the idea of the Victorian culture.’ (Manuel)
Let’s see now why the conception of the woman and man during the Victorian period and the roots or influences that we find in the Romantic period with Byron and his Byronic hero are somehow related.
‘The Byronic hero
-so named because it evolved primarily due to Lord Byron’s writing in the
nineteenth century- is, according to Peter Thorslev,
one of the most prominent literary character types of the Romantic period:
“Romantic heroes represent an important tradition in our literature… In
In conclusion, I think that the conception of the strong, brilliant, powerful, expressive, independent and masculine man in Romantic times, through Lord Byron, was letting us see this line of attitude, stressed with the Victorians, and especially with Tennyson’s heroic character poetry in an attempt to reconcile the Romantic element of his work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Prof. Carmen Manuel, 2006
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. ‘ “The Lady of Shalott” and the critical
fortunes of Victorian Poetry’. The
Morgan, Thaïs E. ‘The
poetry of Victorian masculinities.’ The
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(10/02/07)
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