Maud

            The relationship between Tennyson's Maud and In Memoriam, is palpably difficult, providing many similarities and paradoxically, contradictions which result in allowing the reader to witness the poets crisis's of faith and self acceptance.
             Maud is most certainly the strangest of these two poems, demonstrating through the speaker, Tennyson's own emotional and mental difficulties. The poem is far more insular than In Memoriam, the narrator far lesss approachable and conducive to the empathy we tend tofeel with regard to Tennyson's lament for Arthur Hallam.
             It is difficult to see Maud as a comedy. The lexis of the poem is frequently violent and assaulting. The comedy stems not from predicament, but from the narrator's on view of Maud, himself and the world without himself, that he views with arrogant disparity. Though the speaker declares that he will emerge himself within himself, to separate from the universe he so dislikes, the irony is that he absorbs everything he so dislikes and renders his total aloofness, impossible.
             The first stanzas of the poem deal with the death of the speakers fahter, which is htrough suicide. We are told that villainy is afoot, that it is Maud's father who has remotely caused this tragedy. Throughout the poem, we will continue to be reminded by the speaker, that I is those around him who create his mental irregularities, that in his view, they are not innate, even though he contradicoraliy fears that a suicidal fate is what he will suffer. In the Speakers view, mental affliction is in fact an infliction, which is hereditary only in so far as the Father's death affects the son and vice versa. This tenuously reflects Tennyson's own fear of mental illness, which was a very influential part of his life.
             In Maud, death is a horrifyingly physical state. Dull, onomataopeaic words such as 'Dinted and Crushed assault the ears with mimetic tedium.