Poem: Maud

Overview
Alfred Tennyson’s Maud (1855) is a dramatic monologue in a sequence of lyrics that charts the rise and collapse of an obsessive love against the backdrop of mid-Victorian social and economic upheaval. Its speaker, unnamed, alienated, and psychologically unstable, narrates his fixation on Maud, the daughter of a newly wealthy family whose fortunes, in his mind, are entangled with the financial disgrace and death of his own father. The poem moves from private passion to public crisis, blending courtship, jealousy, violence, madness, and finally a turn to patriotic warfare during the Crimean conflict.

Narrative Arc
In Part I the speaker lives angrily on the margins of a village dominated by Maud’s family, whom he despises as embodiments of a corrupt commercial order. He glimpses Maud and constructs a romance around her purity, contrasting it with what he calls the base world of “stockjobbers” and speculation. Despite social distance and his own volatility, he engineers meetings and gradually wins Maud’s affection. The courtship reaches a lyrical height in the nocturne “Come into the garden, Maud,” where he imagines a union that will redeem his life and heal inherited wrongs.

Opposition gathers in Maud’s household, most notably in her proud, censorious brother, who views the speaker as an unworthy suitor with dubious prospects and a scandalous family history. A tense confrontation escalates into a duel; the speaker kills the brother, then flees in horror and shock. His passion turns to frantic guilt and persecution anxiety as he escapes abroad, haunted by visions of Maud and by the sense that the moral order of his society is fatally poisoned by money and pride.

Part II presents his breakdown in jagged, hallucinatory lyrics. News or rumor reaches him that Maud has been taken away and is ill; later he believes she has died in a foreign land. Whether her death is real or a product of his derangement remains uncertain, but the effect is catastrophic: his inward world collapses into a winter of self-accusation, grief, and self-cancelling fantasy.

In Part III the tone pivots with reports of Britain’s campaign in the East. The speaker seizes on war as a purgative purpose larger than his private torment. He resolves to enlist, casting the battlefield as a moral arena where personal shame and social corruption might be burned away in service to a common good. The poem closes with his fervid march toward war, repeating the claim that it is better to fight for the good than rail at the ill.

Voice and Structure
Maud is a “monodrama”: multiple short poems in varied meters and moods trace a single consciousness in flux. The speaker’s voice veers from rapture to contempt, from crystalline song to fractured rant, mirroring both the intoxications of love and the convulsions of paranoia and guilt. Famous set pieces, the serenade in the garden, the fevered self-justifications, the martial peroration, compose a psychological portrait rather than a stable narrative.

Themes and Ambiguity
Love promises redemption but is stalked by class resentment, economic anxiety, and masculine pride. Violence ruptures the dream, and the shift to patriotic zeal raises unresolved questions: is war a true moral cure or another grand delusion for a mind seeking escape? Tennyson leaves the central facts, especially Maud’s fate and the speaker’s sanity, partly in shadow, inviting readers to weigh the cost of turning private passion into public crusade.