Maud (Annotated)

Alfred Tennyson's Maud (1855) is a dramatic monodrama in verse, tracing the unstable consciousness of a young speaker whose grief, class resentment, erotic idealization, and patriotic fervor converge in psychological crisis. Composed in shifting lyric metres, the poem moves from private obsession to public violence, from garden-song rapture to the rhetoric of war. Its fragmented structure and inte...