Selected Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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‘Hard by a poplar shook alway,/All silver-green with gnarled bark:’ – This is almost the only vigorous image in the poem, and post-Freudian readers inevitably see the tree as phallic, and representing Angelo.

‘For leagues no other tree did mark’ – This suggests that she cannot escape her thoughts of him.

‘The level waste, the rounding gray.’ – A very effective line: a strong caesura, and strong stresses on the /ai/ sound of the assonance, which seems to fade away (miming the scenery). The long vowels are introduced by two trochees (‘level’ and ‘rounding’).

‘In the white curtain, to and fro,/She saw the gusty shadow sway.’ – of the poplar. Here it clearly represents Angelo.

‘But when the moon was very low,’ – the moon is seen as rather a sinister element in the poem, perhaps suggestive of the lunacy that is starting to afflict Mariana.

‘And wild winds bound within their cell,’ – Aeolus, Keeper of the Winds, traps them within the hollow island of Aeolea in Homer’s Odyssey .

‘The shadow of the poplar fell/Upon her bed, across her brow.’ – Upon her bed first, underlining the physical aspect of her suffering, then across her brow to show her gradual mental deterioration.

‘The doors upon their hinges creak'd;’ – the concentration on tiny sounds underlines the silence Mariana has grown used to, but also suggests a growing neurosis, even madness.

‘The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse/Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,’ – a harsh and violent sound from a mouse – it is almost as if sounds are being unnaturally magnified in her head (though a rodent’s scream can be surprisingly piercing).

‘Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors,’ etc. – hallucinations perhaps owing to the beginnings of madness.

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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