TRICIA LOOTENS"mangled, and flattened, and crushed" (I. 7); here the orphaned son fears
he too may someday "creep" to commit suicide (I. 54). Condemned to class
exile within England, he haunts his "own dark garden," which rings with
the "shipwrecking roar" (I. 98) of the sea and "the scream of a maddened
beach" (I. 99), and a woodland "world of plunder and prey" (I. 125).
Although he traces his immediate suffering to a "wretched swindler's lie" (I.
56) by his cousin Maud's father, he associates such betrayal with a larger,
brutal, and commercial "Civil war" (I. 27) that has corrupted all England
and even threatens Europe. As passive Great Britain has fallen prey to "lust
of gain" (I. 23), Russia has been left free to wreak its "rod" on Poland and
Hungary (I. 147). At first, however, when the speaker cries for "loud war"
(I. 47), it is merely as an open honorable substitute for vile underhanded
"Civil war." "Shall I weep if a Poland fall?" (I. 147), he asks. "Shall I shriek
if a Hungary fail?" No: "I have not made the world, and He that made it
will guide" (I. 149).
This situation soon changes. For at the center of the speaker's conscious-
ness, in a space both symbolically charged and vacant of individual
presence, emerges Maud herself, a figure whose very name means battle,
might, and strife. Suddenly, as he is out walking, the speaker hears
A voice by the cedar tree
In the meadow under the Hall!
She is singing an air that is known to me,
A passionate ballad gallant and gay,
A martial song like a trumpet's call! (I. 162-66)The voice is, of course, that of "Maud with her exquisite face, / And wild
voice pealing up to the sunny sky / And feet like sunny gems on an English
green" (I. 173-75). "Singing of Death, and of Honour that cannot die,"
Maud is in fact the poem's first patriotic singer (I. 177). What sings itself,
through her, is the combined folk and chivalric tradition from which the
future author of Idylls of the King (1859-85) was to draw his most
ambitious attempts to link England's idealized past to its future. Ringing
out over a pastoral green, from the lips of an artlessly aristocratic lady, this
already "known" ballad momentarily allows the speaker to listen as if he
were a patriot of another time - an era, presumably, in which mid-Victorian
peace societies, supported by Manchester School industrialists who
opposed war because it blocked free trade, did not send "huckster" pacifists
to "preach our poor little army down / And play the game of despot kings"
(I. 367-68), and in which military authority did not take the form of "a
lord, a captain, a padded shape, / A bought commission, a waxen face" (I.
358-59). Hearing Maud's song, the speaker "could weep for a time so
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