Experimental form in Victorian poetrycommitment to public and cosmic fate: "I embrace the purpose of God, and
the doom assigned" (III. 59). Formalist closure in Maud draws attention to
the dialogical link between subjective and public constitution, asking
implicit questions about the connections between public and private sanity
and morality.
Maud also exploits the impetus toward referential reality in narrative
method for another purpose: to disrupt any cultural assumption of a simple
cause and effect relationship between social reality and subjective percep-
tion. The poem frequently encourages the sense of a literal context within
which the speaker's story takes place, and yet referents are notoriously
vague. Is the "dreadful hollow" (I. 1), where the speaker's father died,
literal or figurative? It appears to be literal and yet it functions figuratively.
Did the betrothal to Maud when she and the protagonist were children
actually happen? We might observe that expression in the poem, the
speaker's utterance, continually responds to the demands of experience. But
in Maud these are demands that require experience to be always already a
fusion of event and interpretation. Experience - active observation or
participation - is not therefore simply a literal event: it is always an
articulated (and in the poem lyrically formalized) embodiment of the
speaker's thinking and expression. In other words, experience is constituted
as much by figuration as by literalness. A classic example occurs in Part I
(lines 190-284), where the speaker posits a range of explanations for
Maud's smile. In this lyric, his experience comprises both smile and
speculation. Consequently, the section reads as a lyrical endeavor whose
explanatory excesses refuse any easy separation of event (smile) from effect
(speculation). What the reader receives is therefore predominantly effect:
cause is continually an inference. As Herbert F. Tucker observes, Maud is
"a poem not only written backward but inevitably read backward as well,
from moment to moment, despite the forward thrust of its plot." "This
monodramatic retrospection," he adds, "kinks up the chain of cause and
effect by compelling us to gather the story by extrapolation from what the
hero tells us." 25 The thematic result, however, of this inverted reading
process is that cause becomes diffused through an array of effects (since it is
left to the reader to extrapolate events). Thus the usual narrative structure
of a plot based on cause and effect connections is broken apart, challenging
conventional narrative expectations and their inherited cultural assump-
tions about causality and continuity. With this point in mind, Tucker
suggests that the poem exposes how the question of causal linkage in any
narrative remains potentially "arbitrary and inferential." Yet given that
each section of the poem habitually presents a response to events that have
already occurred (Maud's arrival, Maud's kiss, Maud's smile, Maud's
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