The Brief Night Goes
Tennyson, 'Maud' and 'Come Into the Garden Maud'
The Camelion has been on pause these last months, as I ‘adjust’ to a new working pattern at school. But I want to see if I can at least write a short post each week, even if that post is just a note about a poem I teach to my students, as this one is.
I’m tremendously fond of being wrong.
I first taught Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ a year ago, after a change in exam specification. To be frank, I heartily disliked it, (and him—after struggling through Stephen Batchelor’s solid and worthy biography) whilst trying very hard not to show this for the sake of my students.
I thought the poem baggy, hopeless in terms of plotting and characterisation, and difficult to teach for a number of reasons: all the characters apart from Maud have no names, events aren’t really described with any sharpness (especially the death of Maud herself—blink and you’ve missed it), the deranged narrator often doesn’t know what he’s done or how he feels, motifs recur and loop and lurch around crazily, even tiresomely, Maud isn’t so much of a character as a series of symbols and costumes and cries. Unlike Shakespeare’s Juliet, with whom she shares some similarities, she is never permitted to speak. Juliet is at least allowed to reason, respond and decide.
‘Mad,’ or ‘Mud’ were suggested as alternative titles for the poem by one wag of a reviewer in the 1850s, and I couldn’t help thinking both weren’t too wide of the mark. ‘Ulysses’ it is not. You wouldn’t find this being recited by Dame Judi in a Bond film.1
But now I’m teaching this damaged monodrama a second time, the picture looks different. I still feel the same way about Tennyson’s lack of plotting and characterisation; it’s worth noting that his attempts at writing plays for the stage were, as I remember, shaggy, farty failures. And my students are divided into two camps: those who hate ‘Maud’ despite my best efforts and those who are pretending to hate it so as not to upset the others.
Me? I’m disturbed to discover that I’m starting to become a fan of at least parts of the poem, especially since my witty students have started coming up with nicknames for characters (Maud’s ‘dark father’ has become Darth Vader; Maud’s brash, nouveau riche ‘suitor’ is now Gewgaw Gary). Reading it aloud again is also beginning to convert me. It often sounds magnificent, as Tennyson himself knew (he use to read the hour+ long poem aloud at parties instead of talking to people, sometimes stopping mid-verse to applaud himself with comments such as ‘that’s a nice touch!’).
Reading the most famous bit, ‘Come into the Garden Maud,’ you can almost forgive him his vanity. ‘She is coming, my dove, my dear’—how does Tennyson get away with this kind of alliteration, so close as it is to the bathetic love-speech in the Pyramus and Thisbe scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Asleep, my love? What, dead, my dove?”)? It should be bathetic, but instead drives on into a wildly erotic soundscape.
Someone let him loose on the tympanies and he knows how to play them: ‘She is coming, my life, my fate’ and what we get is desire and terror, a swerve away from the potentially saccharine ‘love’/'dove’ combo of the previous lines. Melodramatic, yes, but symphonic. Then he’s alliterating, personifying and symbolising all over the place. It’s joyous: ‘The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;"/ And the white rose weeps, "She is late."
Roses weeping and speaking—when Maud says nothing? Absurd, yet really gorgeous to the ear. Because who doesn’t want to feel things at this intensity at some point in their life? But the soundscape gets better: ‘The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;"' The mellifluous lateral alliteration softens things but adds a note of anxiety (larkspur are toxic flowers after all) and the next line is quieter still after all the sobbing: ‘And the lily whispers, "I wait." Those ‘w’ sounds blow quiet kisses with your mouth. Try it!
Yours, reader. What will you do with all those Tennyson kisses?
Though I’d love to see if Eddie/Suzy Izzard could stage it as one of her one-woman shows, after she’s finished with her solo Hamlet next year.
This is fascinating. I read, and wrote a Substack article about Maud earlier this year, I blinked and missed that she had died. I hadn’t seen this piece of yours at the time. I a really enjoyed reading your thoughts and hearing about the responses of your students.
I leave the link to my piece here, not as shameless self publicising. (Well not entirely as shameless self publicising) But because I would love to know what you make of it, and if you have any further tips that could set me straight.
https://zoomburst.substack.com/p/26-come-into-the-garden-maud