fighting talk music even though the speaker agrees to march to the death. ‘Their native land’
becomes‘my native land’:
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;
It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned.
(iii.v.55–9)‘We have hearts in a cause’ might sound both full- and half-hearted (‘a cause’
is finally something he can stand for, yet ‘a’ cause, not ‘the’ cause, suggests that
any cause will do). During the 1850s and 1860s attention was turning towards
enlistment, and, as one official report noted, ‘few enlist from any real inclination for
military life....Enlistment is, for the most part, occasioned by want of work—by
pecuniary embarrassment—by family quarrels—or by any other difficulties of a
private nature.’^51 The private difficulties and embarrassments ofMaud’s speaker
are occasion for the poem’s ending. What we are observing is the progress from
private grief to civic responsibility,and—more disturbingly—a link between a
patriotic fervour and a pathological fever, and the rhymes in the stanza provide
insight into the mental status of a speaker in favour of war at all costs: ‘still/ill’.
Contemporary reviewers disagreed about what position Tennyson was taking in
Maud, some arguing that the Laureate was for the Peace Party since he allowed a
madman to speak in defence of war, others insisting that the war passages were
evidence of his support of England’s involvement in the Crimea.^52 But Tennyson’s
dramatic form is investigating positions, not taking them. His poem is an echo
of a war-cry, an echo of questionable fidelity that provokes rather than distils
thought.
Maud’s ghost, and the ghost of the Crimean conflict, haunted collections of
Victorian poetry after the war. InThe Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems
(1858), William Morris set himself to challenge traditional conceptions of chivalry
by mingling a focus on warlike emblems with an attentiveness to another kind
of detail. ‘Concerning Geffray Teste Noir’, for example, begins with a speaker
recalling ‘The dancing trumpet sound, and we went forth;|And my red lion on
the spear-head flapped’, but its progression marks a shift from collective battle
charges to isolated waverings, as the earlier excitement of those repeated ‘and’s
turns sour:
And I, being faint with smelling the burnt bones,
And very hot with fighting down the street,(^51) Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Present System of Recruiting in the Army
(London, 1861), p. xvii. 52
See Edgar Shannon, ‘The Critical Reception of Tennyson’sMaud’,PMLA, 68 (1953), 397–417.