TRICIA LOOTENSthe coming wars" and to promise "I tarry for thee" (III. 11-12). In this
longed-for restoration of patriotic authority as elsewhere, however, Maud
tells a tale against itself. For since Maud's "ghastly Wraith" appeared after
the duel, it has not left. "A disease, a hard mechanic ghost / That never
came from on high / Nor ever arose from below" (II. 82-84), this
"shadow" (II. 151) or "deathlike type of pain" (II. 198) has in fact become
the speaker's "spectral bride" (II. 318). "Silence, beautiful voice!" (I. 180),
he had thought upon first hearing Maud's passionate ballad, thus echoing
Hemans's "Triumphant Music" in his yearning (and perhaps feminized)
alienation from patriotic song. Now he has his silence: "not beautiful now,
not even kind" (II. 204), the phantom never leaves, and "she never speaks
her mind" (II. 305). He has heard Maud singing, and she will not sing to
him. She is, in fact, "ever the one thing silent here" (II. 306). Is she a
speechless unappeased "internal enemy"? Does she foreshadow Woolf's
imaginary "daughters of educated men" in Three Guineas, who pledge
themselves "not to incite their brothers to fight, or to dissuade them, but to
maintain an attitude of complete indifference"? 29 She is surely no vessel or
catalyst for patriotic feeling.
Eventually, the speaker decides that it is "time" (III. 30) for "that old
hysterical mock-disease" to "die" (III. 33). Cleaving to a "cause I felt to be
pure and true" (III. 31), he enlists for the Crimean War; and as he mixes his
"breath / With a loyal people shouting a battle cry" (III. 34-35), he
watches Maud's "dreary phantom arise and fly / Far into the North, and
battle, and seas of death" (III. 36-37). "Let it go or stay," he proclaims (III.
38). The English "have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble
still" (III. 55); and he himself has "awaked, as it seems, to the better mind"
of a truer patriot (III. 56). "It is better to fight for the good than to rail at
the ill" (III. 57); better (and easier, perhaps) to fight a Russian "giant liar"
(III. 45) than dishonest "Jack on his ale-house bench" (I. no). For the Poet
Laureate of the 1850s, perhaps, as for his speaker, war offers an opportu-
nity to cease "rail[ing]" against the liars at home.
"I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind / I embrace the
purpose of God, and the doom assigned" (III. 58-59): thus the poem ends.
This would be a rousing conclusion, could one forget its speaker and his
situation. For if "sentimental love" of a rural "mother-country" is "central"
to late-nineteenth-century "expressions of Englishness," as Brooker and
Widdowson assert, 30 then perverse fascination with gothic maternal visions
of England's soil seems no less central to what Herbert F. Tucker calls the
"cultural entombment" celebrated at the close of the poem. 31 What might
it mean to "feel with" a "native land" whose literal manifestations include
the gaping, womb-like "blood-red" hollow - or even Maud's lush garden,
266