Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and patriotism

But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length

Into wail such as this - and we sit on forlorn

When the man-child is born. (91-95)

Yet though this mother and poet has been wrung into "wail," she still
speaks with a patriotic voice: her cry does not condemn the natural
unavoidable process that has given birth to her (masculine) nation, even as
it killed her sons.

IV

As a young man, Tennyson shared some of Barrett Browning's idealistic
internationalism: he not only wrote sonnets protesting Russian oppression
of Hungary and Poland ("Sonnet" and "Poland" [both 1832]) but also
participated in an abortive rebellion in Spain. By 1850, however, when
Tennyson accepted the position of Poet Laureate, there could be no doubt
that his patriotism was passionately English. Officially, Tennyson's first
major poem as Laureate was the dignified "Ode on the Death of the Duke
of Wellington" (1852), which casts England as "the eye, the soul / Of
Europe" (AT 160-61), promising that if God and "Statesmen" guard
against "brute control" (which John Lucas identifies as "mass democ-
racy" 26 ), the British model of "sober freedom" and "loyal passion for our
temperate kings" will "help to save mankind." Unofficially, however,
Tennyson preceded his ode to the Napoleonic War hero with a very
different sort of patriotic writing: a spate of vehement - not to say frenzied

• anonymous or pseudonymous periodical poetry calling British citizens to
  arm against a possible French invasion (see, for example, "The Penny-
  Wise," "Britons, Guard Your Own," and "Hands All Round" [all 1852]).
  The juxtaposition is suggestive, given Tennyson's next - thoroughly con-
  troversial - major work, Maud (1855). Called by Tennyson a "mono-
  drama," and at one point subtitled "The Madness," Maud plays out a
  succession of extreme, passionate states of mind. Set adrift in a terrifying
  mid-Victorian crisis of class, national, and gender identities, and tormented
  by fear of madness as well as by thwarted patriotic ambitions and erotic
  desires, the speaker of Maud is deeply unstable; and so, too, as many recent
  critics insist, are the formal and ideological structures of Maud itself. 27 As
  Linda M. Shires suggests, Tennyson's poem "tells a tale against itself." 28

"I hate the dreadful hollow" (ATI. 1). With these words, Maud evokes a
feminized, terrifyingly familial, English landscape whose "lips" (I. 2) or
"red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood" (I. 3). Here, wrecked
by the failure of a "vast speculation" (I. 9), the speaker's father died,

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