Tennyson

Published 1830; ‘Juvenilia’. T. says: ‘The moated grange was no particular grange, but one which rose to the music of Shakespeare’s words.’ The epigraph is from Measure for Measure III i 212ff: ‘She should this Angelo have married: was affianced to her by oath, and the nuptial appointed.… Left her in her tears, and dried not one of them with his comfort.… What a merit were it in death to take this poor maid from the world!… There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected Mariana.’ The poem was influenced by Keats’s Isabella 233ff, where she waits in vain: ‘She weeps alone for pleasures not to be; / Sorely she wept until the night came on… / And so she pined, and so she died forlorn.’ Keats’s ‘aloof/roof ’ may have suggested the rhymes in ll. 73–5. Cp. Samuel Rogers, Captivity (1801): ‘Caged in old woods, whose reverend echoes wake / When the hern screams along the distant lake, / Her little heart oft flutters to be free, / Oft sighs to turn the unrelenting key. / In vain! the nurse that rusted relic wears, / Nor moved by gold – nor to be moved by tears; / And terraced walls their black reflection throw / On the green-mantled moat that sleeps below.’ These eight lines T. later praised to Palgrave ‘for their delicate music’ (Mem. ii 503). Rogers’ Poems (1812) was at Somersby (Lincoln). Ian Kennedy compares Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: ‘Wilhelm’s first love is an actress called Mariana… Goethe’s Mariana finds no such happy consummation [as Shakespeare’s]… she waits and watches for him in vain.’ Kennedy notes: ‘You came not’, her ‘weary life’, ‘I entreat thee, come, O come!’ with the constant repetition of the word ‘come’. He also suggests, as an influence on the refrain Lytton’s Falkland (1827, p. 330): ‘O God! O God! would that I were dead!’ (PQ lvii, 1978, 93–4, 1oo; the source was suggested by C. Y. Lang, Tennyson in Lincoln i, 1971, xi).

T. seems to have invented the stanza form; J. F. A. Pyre remarks that the best of the early poems are those that stay most strictly with a stanza, as here (The Formation of Tennyson’s Style, 1921, p. 26). Cp. Mariana in the South(p. 27). In a copy of 1830, T. inserted the titles of additional poems, presumably considering, before 1832, a revised edition of 1830. Before Mariana, he wrote Prologue to the Marianas; this either has not survived or has not been recognized. After Mariana, he wrote A Southern Mariana. (See C. Sturman, TRB iv, 1984, 123–4.)

With blackest moss the flower-plots

Were thickly crusted, one and all:

The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable-wall.

The broken sheds looked sad and strange:

Unlifted was the clinking latch;

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch

Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

Her tears fell with the dews at even;

Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;

She could not look on the sweet heaven,

Either at morn or eventide.

After the flitting of the bats,

When thickest dark did trance the sky,

She drew her casement-curtain by,

And glanced athwart the glooming flats.

She only said, ‘The night is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

Upon the middle of the night,

Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:

The cock sung out an hour ere light:

From the dark fen the oxen’s low

Came to her: without hope of change,

In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn,

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn

About the lonely moated grange.

She only said, ‘The day is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

About a stone-cast from the wall

A sluice with blackened waters slept,

And o’er it many, round and small,

The clustered marish-mosses crept.

Hard by a poplar shook alway,

All silver-green with gnarlèd bark:

For leagues no other tree did mark

The level waste, the rounding gray.

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

And ever when the moon was low,

And the shrill winds were up and away,

In the white curtain, to and fro,

She saw the gusty shadow sway.

But when the moon was very low,

And wild winds bound within their cell,

The shadow of the poplar fell

Upon her bed, across her brow.

She only said, ‘The night is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

All day within the dreamy house,

The doors upon their hinges creaked;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked,

Or from the crevice peered about.

Old faces glimmered through the doors,

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices called her from without.

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

He cometh not,’ she said;

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,

The slow clock ticking, and the sound

Which to the wooing wind aloof

The poplar made, did all confound

Her sense; but most she loathed the hour

When the thick-moted sunbeam lay

Athwart the chambers, and the day

Was sloping toward his western bower.

Then, said she, ‘I am very dreary,

He will not come,’ she said;

She wept, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

Oh God, that I were dead!’

73 Mariana