matthew bevis
member of the British public and a Russian leader with whom that public was at
war.Nicholas I was widely condemned in the British press as a liar because of his
claim to be fighting a holy war, not a war of aggression. But the same might be said
of the speaker’s homeland: the pretext for the war was that Britain was protecting
the rights of the Greek Christians in Turkey against Russian invasion; the subtext
was that Turkey was a key strategic location for Britain’s imperial commercial
holdings in the East.^49 As speaker inBlackwood’sremarked: ‘Above all, let us eschew
cant in giving our reasons for the war. We go to war because Russia is becoming
too powerful.’^50 War insists upon differentiation, butMaudis also listening out for
discomforting alliances.
Tennyson’s little Hamlet is a ‘true’ Victorian war poem because it acknowledges
and explores the warring claims that make the speaker’s own pronouncements part
of the viewpoint he criticizes. When he comes across Maud singing ‘a passionate
ballad...a martial song’ (i. v. 165–6), he hears her
Singingofmenthatinbattlearray,
Ready in heart and ready in hand
March with banner and bugle and fife
To the death, for their native land.
(i. v. 169–72)Their land, not our land. The accents of Fortinbras are overheard by an alien-
ated listener, who then begs ‘silence, beautiful voice’, for ‘you only trouble the
mind|With a joy in which I cannot rejoice,|A glory I shall not find’ (i. v. 180–3).
This moment encapsulates the predicament and the achievement of the most endur-
ing Victorian war poetry—a speaker drawn to, yet distrustful of, martial fervour,
who aspires to be included in the battle march, yet senses the limits of its rhythms
(hence the rich tonal ambiguity of ‘I shall not find’, which sounds at once envious,
lonely, critical, and proud). What he finds instead, and what we find through him
in the poem’s feverish repetitions and echoes, is a disturbing confluence of the
language that explores his romantic engagement with Maud with that which charts
his public engagement with the war (the name ‘Maud’ itself means ‘war’ or ‘battle’).
Erotic and martial vocabularies frequently overlap, as in the polysemic nature of
‘dying’, so that we begin to see the speaker’s love for Maud as a kind of death-wish,
and his final willingness to ‘die’ for his country not only as an ennobling sacrifice
for a cause, but also as a desperate attempt to conduct a courtship by other means.
The first glimmer of the speaker’s love-in-madness comes in the poem’s second line
when he tells us of the lips of the hollow ‘dabbled with blood-red heath’ (i.i.2);at
the end of the poem, when he talks of the ‘blood-red blossom of war’ (iii. vi. 53),
we sense that he is still seeing red.Maud’s final lines contain a strangely enervated
(^49) See Trevor Royle,Crimea: The Great Crimean War 1854–1856(London: Little, Brown and
Company, 1999).
(^50) G. C. Swayne, ‘Peace and War: A Dialogue’,Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 76 (1854), 592.