Tennyson Close Analysis
English Close Reading Analysis
The poem Mariana by Alfred, Lord Tennyson was published in 1830 and is the text I have chosen to do closely analyze. The subject matter of the poem was taken from one of Shakespeare’s plays titled “Measure for Measure”, and the line: “Mariana in the moated grange,” gave Tennyson the inspiration to write of a young woman waiting for her lover. The two texts share a common theme of abandonment, as in Shakespeare’s play the young woman is also diligently awaiting the return of her lover Angelo after his desertion upon discovering her loss of dowry. Similarly to Shakespeare’s text, Marianna lacks action or any narrative movement, the entire poem serving as an extended depiction of the melancholy isolation a young woman experiences whilst pining for her vacant lover. The language, meter, format and tone of the poem contribute to the inherent themes of isolation, death and decay, which I will closely examine in this close reading exercise.
Unlike some of Tennyson’s other works such as Ulysses, Marianna doesn’t have a dramatic monologue although it does feature a refrain. This method isolates Mariana from us, and the poem being written in a third person lyrical narrative makes the title figure unable to linguistically control her own poem. The refrain is the only part within the poem in which Mariana is able to speak out directly to the reader as well as the only form of dialogue: in the first stanza, line’s 9-12 “’My life is dreary/He cometh not’ she said:/She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!” Her desperation is evident to the reader, and ‘she said’ being written in past tense is significant since we are left wondering of her fate as a result of her misery. The refrain undergoes minor changes throughout the poem, giving a small fragment of hope to both the reader and Mariana who is stuck in a monotonous cycle of despair. In the second, third and fourth stanza she alternates between ‘day, night and light’,
The poem Mariana by Alfred, Lord Tennyson was published in 1830 and is the text I have chosen to do closely analyze. The subject matter of the poem was taken from one of Shakespeare’s plays titled “Measure for Measure”, and the line: “Mariana in the moated grange,” gave Tennyson the inspiration to write of a young woman waiting for her lover. The two texts share a common theme of abandonment, as in Shakespeare’s play the young woman is also diligently awaiting the return of her lover Angelo after his desertion upon discovering her loss of dowry. Similarly to Shakespeare’s text, Marianna lacks action or any narrative movement, the entire poem serving as an extended depiction of the melancholy isolation a young woman experiences whilst pining for her vacant lover. The language, meter, format and tone of the poem contribute to the inherent themes of isolation, death and decay, which I will closely examine in this close reading exercise.
Unlike some of Tennyson’s other works such as Ulysses, Marianna doesn’t have a dramatic monologue although it does feature a refrain. This method isolates Mariana from us, and the poem being written in a third person lyrical narrative makes the title figure unable to linguistically control her own poem. The refrain is the only part within the poem in which Mariana is able to speak out directly to the reader as well as the only form of dialogue: in the first stanza, line’s 9-12 “’My life is dreary/He cometh not’ she said:/She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!” Her desperation is evident to the reader, and ‘she said’ being written in past tense is significant since we are left wondering of her fate as a result of her misery. The refrain undergoes minor changes throughout the poem, giving a small fragment of hope to both the reader and Mariana who is stuck in a monotonous cycle of despair. In the second, third and fourth stanza she alternates between ‘day, night and light’,
References: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Mariana’, ‘NAEL’, vol. E, pp. 1159-61