Victorian poetry and patriotismsordid and mean, / And myself so languid and base" (I. 178-79);
remembering it, he longs for "a man to arise in me, / That the man I am
may cease to be!" (I. 396-97). He longs, too, for a "still, strong man in a
blatant land... / One who can rule and dare not lie"; "Whatever they call
him, what care I? / Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat -" or perhaps Laureate?
(I. 392-95). Moved, the speaker learns to hope; and he woos Maud in a
newly courtly springtime pastoral landscape to which Tennyson devotes
some of his lushest, most sensual, and most famous lyricism.
Maud herself is less a living woman than a form for the speaker's
projections and desires. Significantly, one of those desires is for salvation,
"Perhaps from madness, perhaps from crime, / Perhaps from a selfish
grave" (I. 558-59). Before long, however, crime arrives; and soon after,
madness. Surprised into a duel with Maud's "dandy-despot" (I. 231)
politician brother, the speaker hears her living voice emerge over the
grounds of the Hall for the last time:
Then glided out of the joyous wood
The ghastly Wraith of one that I know;
And there rang on a sudden a passionate cry,
A cry for a brother's blood:
It will ring in my heart and my ears, till I die, till I die. (II. 31-35)Like the "Echo" at the blood-rimmed "dreadful hollow" of the poem's
opening, which answers only "Death" (I. 4), Maud's voice resonates with
the remembered shriek of the speaker's own violently widowed mother.
"Would there be sorrow for meV (I. 57), the speaker had asked, contem-
plating his mother's loss and his own mortality before Maud's first arrival.
Now, it seems, he cannot hope even to avoid a "selfish grave"; for Maud's
cry, which might once have marked a patriot's reunion with darkness,
femininity, and divine law, reverberates through a newly abject, horrifying
English landscape on which he himself has spilled the blood of vile civil
strife. No wonder, in his subsequent madness, he wonders "why have they
not buried me deep enough?" (II. 334); no wonder he dreams, as an exile in
Brittany, of the dead Maud, singing "as of old" (II. 184) - only to hear her
ballad broken by "a passionate cry" (II. 187) that "there is someone dying
or dead" (II. 188), and a "sullen thunder" (II. 189). "An old song,"
presumably Maud's ballad of chivalrous death in battle, "vexes" his "ear";
but it is no longer his own: "that of" the Biblical killer Lamech "is mine"
(II. 95-96).
In the poem's third and final section, the speaker seems to emerge from
his madness. He has been inspired, he says, by a dream of Maud dividing
"from the band of the blest" (III. 10) to speak "of a hope for the world in
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