The Full Text of “Mariana”
1With blackest moss the flower-plots
2Were thickly crusted, one and all:
3The rusted nails fell from the knots
4That held the pear to the gable-wall.
5The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
6Unlifted was the clinking latch;
7Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
8Upon the lonely moated grange.
9She only said, "My life is dreary,
10He cometh not," she said;
11She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
12I would that I were dead!"
13Her tears fell with the dews at even;
14Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
15She could not look on the sweet heaven,
16Either at morn or eventide.
17After the flitting of the bats,
18When thickest dark did trance the sky,
19She drew her casement-curtain by,
20And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
21She only said, "The night is dreary,
22He cometh not," she said;
23She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
24I would that I were dead!"
25Upon the middle of the night,
26Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
27The cock sung out an hour ere light:
28From the dark fen the oxen's low
29Came to her: without hope of change,
30In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
31Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
32About the lonely moated grange.
33She only said, "The day is dreary,
34He cometh not," she said;
35She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
36I would that I were dead!"
37About a stone-cast from the wall
38A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
39And o'er it many, round and small,
40The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
41Hard by a poplar shook alway,
42All silver-green with gnarled bark:
43For leagues no other tree did mark
44The level waste, the rounding gray.
45She only said, "My life is dreary,
46He cometh not," she said;
47She said "I am aweary, aweary
48I would that I were dead!"
49And ever when the moon was low,
50And the shrill winds were up and away,
51In the white curtain, to and fro,
52She saw the gusty shadow sway.
53But when the moon was very low
54And wild winds bound within their cell,
55The shadow of the poplar fell
56Upon her bed, across her brow.
57She only said, "The night is dreary,
58He cometh not," she said;
59She said "I am aweary, aweary,
60I would that I were dead!"
61All day within the dreamy house,
62The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
63The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
64Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
65Or from the crevice peer'd about.
66Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
67Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
68Old voices called her from without.
69She only said, "My life is dreary,
70He cometh not," she said;
71She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
72I would that I were dead!"
73The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
74The slow clock ticking, and the sound
75Which to the wooing wind aloof
76The poplar made, did all confound
77Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
78When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
79Athwart the chambers, and the day
80Was sloping toward his western bower.
81Then said she, "I am very dreary,
82He will not come," she said;
83She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
84Oh God, that I were dead!"
The Full Text of “Mariana”
1With blackest moss the flower-plots
2Were thickly crusted, one and all:
3The rusted nails fell from the knots
4That held the pear to the gable-wall.
5The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
6Unlifted was the clinking latch;
7Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
8Upon the lonely moated grange.
9She only said, "My life is dreary,
10He cometh not," she said;
11She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
12I would that I were dead!"
13Her tears fell with the dews at even;
14Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
15She could not look on the sweet heaven,
16Either at morn or eventide.
17After the flitting of the bats,
18When thickest dark did trance the sky,
19She drew her casement-curtain by,
20And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
21She only said, "The night is dreary,
22He cometh not," she said;
23She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
24I would that I were dead!"
25Upon the middle of the night,
26Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
27The cock sung out an hour ere light:
28From the dark fen the oxen's low
29Came to her: without hope of change,
30In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
31Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
32About the lonely moated grange.
33She only said, "The day is dreary,
34He cometh not," she said;
35She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
36I would that I were dead!"
37About a stone-cast from the wall
38A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
39And o'er it many, round and small,
40The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
41Hard by a poplar shook alway,
42All silver-green with gnarled bark:
43For leagues no other tree did mark
44The level waste, the rounding gray.
45She only said, "My life is dreary,
46He cometh not," she said;
47She said "I am aweary, aweary
48I would that I were dead!"
49And ever when the moon was low,
50And the shrill winds were up and away,
51In the white curtain, to and fro,
52She saw the gusty shadow sway.
53But when the moon was very low
54And wild winds bound within their cell,
55The shadow of the poplar fell
56Upon her bed, across her brow.
57She only said, "The night is dreary,
58He cometh not," she said;
59She said "I am aweary, aweary,
60I would that I were dead!"
61All day within the dreamy house,
62The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
63The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
64Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
65Or from the crevice peer'd about.
66Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
67Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
68Old voices called her from without.
69She only said, "My life is dreary,
70He cometh not," she said;
71She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
72I would that I were dead!"
73The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
74The slow clock ticking, and the sound
75Which to the wooing wind aloof
76The poplar made, did all confound
77Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
78When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
79Athwart the chambers, and the day
80Was sloping toward his western bower.
81Then said she, "I am very dreary,
82He will not come," she said;
83She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
84Oh God, that I were dead!"
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“Mariana” Introduction
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"Mariana" is Alfred, Lord Tennyson's haunting evocation of loneliness, desolation, and despair. The poem paints a picture of Mariana, a character from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Abandoned and betrayed by her faithless lover, she withdraws to a "moated grange" (a farmhouse surrounded by a moat) and sinks into a profound depression. Her surroundings embody her misery: "lonely," empty, cheerless, and overgrown, this dreadful place is a reflection of its inhabitant's soul. The poem captures a state of bleak, grey hopelessness that Tennyson himself knew all too well. "Mariana" was first collected in Tennyson's 1830 volume Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.
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“Mariana” Summary
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The flowerbeds were all overgrown with black moss. The rusty nails that held the pear tree to the wall were all falling out. The ruined sheds looked forlorn and eerie; nobody opened the garden gate; the thatched roof was worn out and growing weeds, there at the isolated house surrounded by the moat. Mariana said only one thing: "My life is empty and dull. My beloved hasn't come. I'm so, so tired; I wish that I were dead."
Every evening, when the dew fell on the grass, Mariana began to cry. Every morning, before the dew had dried up, she cried more. She couldn't bear to look at the lovely sky, whether in the morning or the evening. When the bats came out and the sky began to darken, she would pull back her curtain and watch the plains around her getting gloomier and gloomier. She said only one thing: "The night is empty and dull. My beloved hasn't come. I'm so, so tired; I wish that I were dead."
In the middle of the night, she would awake to hear night-birds calling. An hour before sunrise, the rooster crowed, and she would hear cattle mooing out in the dark marshes. Without any hope that things might change for her, she dreamed of walking all alone until the chilly winds awakened the grey morning around the lonely house. Mariana said only one thing: "The days are empty and dull. My beloved hasn't come. I'm so, so tired; I wish that I were dead."
A stone's throw from the house's wall, a channel of dark water flowed sluggishly. Clumps of moss crept over its surface. Nearby, a twisted, silvery poplar tree shook in the wind—the only tree for miles and miles around in the flat, grey, empty surroundings. Mariana said only one thing: "My life is empty and dull. My beloved hasn't come. I'm so, so tired; I wish that I were dead."
When the moon sunk and the shrieking winds dragged at the white curtains, she watched the dancing shadows. But when the moon was even lower and the winds were quiet, the shadow of the poplar tree fell across her bed and her face. Mariana said only one thing: "The night is empty and dull. My beloved hasn't come. I'm so, so tired; I wish that I were dead."
All day in the sleeping house, the door hinges creaked. Flies whined in the window, and mice squeaked in the walls or peeped out from cracks. Only the memories of people who were once here flitted through the doors, or could be heard heard walking upstairs, or called to Mariana from the garden. Mariana said only one thing: "My life is empty and dull. My beloved hasn't come. I'm so, so tired; I wish that I were dead."
Mariana couldn't stand any of the sounds of the house: chirping sparrows, the tick of the clock, the sound of the wind in the poplar. But most of all, she hated that hour in the late afternoon when low sunbeams, thick with dust, cut through the rooms. Then she said only one thing: "I feel so, so empty and dull. My beloved will never come. I'm so, so tired; oh dear God, I wish I were dead!"
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“Mariana” Themes
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Despair and Perception
In "Mariana," Tennyson paints a portrait of deep depression. The poem's main character, the titular Mariana, has been abandoned by her beloved, and is now isolated in a "lonely moated grange," a remote house surrounded by a moat. This isolated, deathly place becomes an image of Mariana herself. Deep despair, the poem suggests, is very much like being trapped in a place that no light, joy, or company can reach.
In her “lonely moated grange,” all of Mariana’s days and nights are exactly the same. She paces around a cheerless house, observing the ruins of happier days: flowerbeds encrusted with “blackest moss,” waters overgrown with “cluster’d marish-mosses,” walls filled with “shriek[ing]” mice. Nothing ever changes in this place, and no one ever comes here. Mariana herself does nothing with her days but repeat the same old tragic refrain:
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"Dreariness, weariness, the absence of her lover, and her longing for death are all she can think about, in a ceaseless loop.
Mariana’s isolation and the sameness of her days are so complete that the grange starts to feel more like a state of mind than a real-life house. Her despair is like this prison, a “level waste” of featureless nothing.
That impression grows clearest in those moments when she encounters something that might just conceivably strike her as beautiful. Even when these things appear, she has no capacity to enjoy them. There’s a “sweet heaven” above her, a lovely changing sky, but she “[can] not look” at it. A sparrow sometimes chirps on her roof, but the sound “confound[s] her sense,” both confusing and disgusting her ear. A low golden sunbeam full of dancing dust sometimes slants across her room in the late afternoon, but she “loathe[s]” this most of all, reminding her as it does that another day has passed and her lover has not returned. Her despair turns even beauty into horror.
The hypnotic, nightmarish, impenetrable sameness of this poem thus does more than paint a picture of one character from a Shakespeare play. Rather, it conjures up what it feels like to be trapped in despair, left in a state where the days and nights all feel the same, beauty becomes unbearable ugliness, and one feels no hope that anything could possibly change.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Mariana”
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Lines 1-8
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 look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.In Shakespeare's sinister, troubling "problem play," Measure for Measure, Mariana is a woman scorned. She's the lover of the treacherous Angelo, who rejects her after her family loses all its wealth, then slanders her to get out of his promise to marry her. Devastated, she retires to what the play's Duke describes as a "moated grange," a lonely house surrounded by a moat.
The words "moated grange" must have struck a chime with Tennyson, who chooses the unhappy Mariana as the subject of this poem. While Mariana eventually becomes an active player in the world of Measure for Measure, in Tennyson's vision she's deep in her grief, paralyzed by despair. The grange around her reflects that paralysis.
As the poem begins, readers see the world through Mariana's eyes. The imagery of the opening eight lines sets a dismal scene of decay in the garden. Once, perhaps, this moated grange was rather a nice place to be, a thatch-roofed house surrounded with "flower-plots" (flowerbeds) and with a decorative pear tree trained up its walls. But all that has come undone now. All that remains in the flowerbeds is "blackest moss," "thickly crusted," crackly and dead. The nails holding up the ornamental pear tree have given up the ghost, dropping "rusted" from their positions. Weeds grow in the thatch.
The place, in short, looks abandoned. Tennyson makes its loneliness clear indirectly, never saying outright that no one comes here. Rather, he observes the "sad[ness]" of the "broken sheds," and the fact that the "clinking latch" of the garden gate goes perpetually "unlifted."
Readers don't get a glimpse of Mariana herself here. But then again, they do. A garden that should be full of flowers and fruits and happy people, left all alone to decay and die? This place is a perfect symbolic reflection of the woman who's been forced to hide herself here. She is the "lonely moated grange," cut off from the world and rotting away.
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Lines 9-12
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!" -
Lines 13-20
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. -
Lines 21-24
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!" -
Lines 25-36
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 seem'd 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!" -
Lines 37-48
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled 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!" -
Lines 49-60
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!" -
Lines 61-72
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' 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!" -
Lines 73-80
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. -
Lines 81-84
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!"
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“Mariana” Symbols
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The Moated Grange
The poem's setting—a lonesome farmhouse encircled by a moat, set in the middle of a vast treeless plain—works as a symbol for Mariana herself. Like Mariana, this place feels abandoned. Nobody is taking care of the weedy roof and the sad garden, there's no company but mice and croaking "night-fowl," and there's no life in the surrounding landscape. Plus, the moat that runs around the house cuts it off from the rest of the world. Symbolically, this house is a portrait of the poem's sad and languishing lady, likewise abandoned, neglected, lifeless, and isolated.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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The Lone Poplar
The shivering poplar tree is a smaller symbol of Mariana's predicament within the larger symbolism of the whole grange. The poplar is a pretty tree, "silver-green with gnarled bark," but it's also an isolated one. As Tennyson tells the reader, there's no other tree "for leagues" around in the "level waste" that surrounds the grange.
In its isolation, the poplar haunts Mariana, reminding her constantly of her own loneliness. She can't escape that loneliness even in her sleep: the shadow of the lone poplar in the moonlight haunts her bedroom like a ghost. And when the wind blows in its branches, its howls to the "wooing wind aloof" suggest Mariana's own cries of pain to her cruel lover: once "wooing" (romancing her), now "aloof" (ignoring and abandoning her).
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Mariana” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
In "Mariana," Tennyson immerses readers in a world of despair through relentlessly gloomy imagery. Nothing at the "moated grange" in which the title character lives is pleasant to look at or listen to, and much of it seems even uglier because it speaks of happier times now lost.
For example, consider the cheerless garden that Tennyson describes in the first stanza:
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 look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.Blackly crusted, clinking, rusty, weedy: this garden is in terrible disrepair. But once upon a time, it was a lovely place, with "flower-plots" (flowerbeds), an ornamental pear trained up the side of the house, and a gate latch that was lifted by happy visitors. By focusing his imagery on the garden's decay, Tennyson evokes Mariana's sense of loss, capturing her emotions in the very landscape.
This first passage also starts a pattern that will carry on throughout the poem: a narrow gloominess of color palette. It begins with the blackest black of that moss, and later, the reader will encounter "thickest dark," a "grey-eyed morn," "blacken'd waters," and a "white curtain." All is shadowy, nearly colorless, shades of black and white and grey. A touch of relief appears in a "silver-green" poplar tree, but that's not much comfort. This is the only living tree for miles in the "rounding grey" of the flat landscape.
Even when color and light do come to this place, they come joylessly. Describing a "thick-moted sunbeam" that falls across Mariana's rooms in the late afternoon, Tennyson summons up a beam of golden light flecked with golden dust—though he doesn't go so far as to mention its color explicitly. But this potentially dreamy vision is hateful to Mariana, who "loathe[s]" it even more than the uniform greyness of the rest of her life. Brightness and color can only highlight her misery, and afternoon sunlight can only remind her that another lonely, loveless day has passed.
The poem's sound imagery evokes Mariana's desolation, too. Sounds here are few and unpleasant. There's the "creak[]" and "clink[]" of rusty, unused hinges and latches; the unmelodious "s[o]ng" of flies in the window; the "shriek[]" of mice in the walls; the "slow clock ticking." Behind it all, the "cold wind" blows "shrill" or low. What there isn't is the sound of any other people, except for the ghostly "old voices" she imagines calling her from the garden.
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Refrain
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Allusion
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Repetition
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"Mariana" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Flower-plots
- Gable-wall
- Moated grange
- Even
- Ere
- Trance
- Casement
- Athwart
- Night-fowl
- Fen
- The oxen's low
- A stone-cast
- Sluice
- Marish-mosses
- The rounding gray
- Wainscot
- Confound
- the day / Was sloping toward his western bower
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Flowerbeds.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Mariana”
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Form
"Mariana" has seven stanzas of twelve lines apiece. Each of those stanzas divides into two parts: an eight-line passage of description (all of it gloomy) and a four-line refrain, in which Mariana laments her "dreary" life and cries, "I would that I were dead!"
Tennyson devised this shape, with its strikingly long stanzas, specifically for this poem. Besides helping to create a mood of dreary suffering that always comes to the same obsessive, hopeless end, these drawn-out twelve-line stanzas might also invite readers to think about the passage of time.
Mariana watches the movements of the sun and moon with equal cheerless boredom. "The night is dreary," and "the day is dreary" too. The weather changes, the winds and the clouds come and go, but the days always feel exactly the same, so long as Mariana's beloved isn't there. Time passes at a crawl. Perhaps by choosing to write in stanzas of twelve lines, Tennyson (very subtly) reflects Mariana's agonizing sense of the "slow clock ticking": twelve lines, one for each of the twelve hours on that slow clock's dial.
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Meter
"Mariana" uses two patterns of meter, one steady and one strange. The first eight lines of each stanza are written in pretty consistent iambic tetrameter—that is, lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in lines 1-2:
With black- | est moss | the flow- | er-plots
Were thick- | ly crust- | ed, one | and all:While there are a few little variations, this rhythm stays fairly regular. But the meter in Mariana's sad refrain is much stranger. Listen to the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in lines 9-10:
She on- | ly said, | "My life | is dreary,
He com- | eth not," | she said;The rhythm here forces readers to slow down, stop, or stumble. First of all, the extra unstressed syllable in "dreary" demands a pause: there's no way to move on at the same pace the regular iambic tetrameter has created up until now, or two unstressed syllables will collide awkwardly. So, the reader is forced to take an extra beat of silence before moving onto line 10. That line is shorter than what the reader has been led to expect: it's written in iambic trimeter, just three iambs.
So, those lines end up sounding like this:
She on- | ly said, | "My life | is dreary,
[BEAT] He com- | eth not," | she said;And if that feels disconcerting, the closing lines are even stranger:
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would | that I | were dead!"There's just no way to read line 11's "aweary, aweary" in the same rhythm the poem has prepared the reader for. Even more colliding unstressed syllables make Mariana's weariness tangible: the line slows right down, dragging its feet, conjuring up the dreadful slowness of Mariana's days.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme of "Mariana" runs like this:
ABABCDDCEFEF
This mirrored pattern—with two four-line passages of alternating rhyme framing that central CDDC—helps to capture the terrible tedium of Mariana's days. The little swell of energy that the new rhyme pattern provides in the middle of the stanza comes to nothing in the end, just as Mariana's daily hope that her beloved might arrive is always disappointed.
Compounding that sense of futility and hopelessness is the poem's refrain. The closing EFEF section rhymes on the same words all across the poem: dreary / said / aweary / dead. Dreariness, weariness, and a longing for death are the constant themes of Mariana's life.
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“Mariana” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a narrator, a removed observer who looks on and describes Mariana's sufferings. Mariana is a tragic figure who originally appeared in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. At the moment Tennyson describes her, her fiancé Angelo has jilted and betrayed her, and she has withdrawn into a "moated grange" (a country house surrounded by a moat) to lament her fate alone.
Tennyson's speaker doesn't provide any of that Shakespearean context, however. They just describe Mariana's lonely surroundings and observe her despair.
In doing so, they enter her perspective. The things the narrator notes—the "blackest moss" that has overgrown the flowerbeds, the distant croaks of "night-fowl"—are all seen through the eyes of dejection. Perhaps in a different mood, Mariana's moated grange might seem rather beautiful, in a bleak and ruinous sort of way. But for the devastated Mariana, the whole world is a desolate waste, and it's a desolate waste the speaker describes.
For Mariana can think about only one thing, and that one thing colors her whole experience. When Mariana speaks for herself in this poem, she always says almost exactly the same thing:
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
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“Mariana” Setting
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"Mariana" is set in the "moated grange" (a farmhouse surrounded by a moat) where the unhappy Mariana has hidden herself away to lament her lost love. There's no comfort to be found in this bleak, solitary place, or even in the natural world around it. Everything here speaks of long years of neglect and isolation, from the "blackest moss" that has crept over the flowerpots to the "rounding grey" of the flat and barren countryside. Mariana's only fellow residents appear to be mice and flies, creatures that symbolically suggest decay.
This setting reflects Mariana's state of mind as much as anything else. Perhaps a lady in a happier frame of mind might embrace the wild bleakness of this landscape and find beauty in it. But the betrayed and abandoned Mariana can't even find beauty in those rare moments when the "thick-moted sunbeam" pierces her window. In fact, she "loathe[s]" the late afternoon sunshine the most, reminding her as it does that another day has gone by and her beloved has still not arrived.
The poem's setting thus reflects, or perhaps even embodies, Mariana's emotional world. The landscape around her is as "dreary" as the landscape inside her. That's no coincidence. Misery, this poem suggests, can drain the world of its beauty and can even make a glimpse of the lovely skies ("sweet heaven") feel unendurable.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Mariana”
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Literary Context
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) was one of the most influential and beloved poets of the Victorian era. Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria herself, he became the famous public face of mid-19th-century English poetry.
Tennyson began his poetic career as a student at the University of Cambridge. There he met Arthur Henry Hallam, a friend who would become one of his greatest influences—but not, alas, because of a long and happy shared life. Hallam tragically died just before he was to marry Tennyson's sister. Tennyson's overwhelming grief would go on to inspire much of his most powerful verse—most notably, In Memoriam, a wildly popular book-length elegy that would fuel a Victorian obsession with grief and mourning.
Tennyson also endured a different kind of lifelong sorrow, suffering multiple bouts of depression. This poem is only one of many of his visceral portraits of despair.
Like his friends Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson was influenced by the Romantic poets, from whom he inherited a taste for mythology, magic, and melancholy. The death of the dashing Lord Byron came as a meaningful shock to him as a young boy (though he admired Byron less as he got older), and echoes of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley run all through his work. But Tennyson also considered himself part of a longer English poetic lineage that reached back to Milton and Shakespeare. "Mariana" alludes to Shakespeare directly: the "moated grange" and its sad inhabitant come straight out of Shakespeare's troubling Measure for Measure.
While Tennyson fell out of style among the Modernists (who dismissed his work as too quaint, too pretty, and too conservative), recent scholars have given him more credit, praising his deep sense of mystery and wonder. There's no question that he's an important and influential writer: to this day, poems like "The Lady of Shalott" are among the best-known and best-loved in the world.
Historical Context
Tennyson wasn't just a popular poet during his time, but a major public figure. As Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, Tennyson wrote for the British Empire at its peak.
During Victoria's reign, proverbially, the "sun never set on the British Empire." Britain had colonial holdings across the world and saw itself as the rightful, "civilized" ruler of all the lands it had conquered. Some of Tennyson's own work reflects the intense British patriotism of the time. His "Charge of the Light Brigade," for instance, is a bombastic celebration of military self-sacrifice. But it's also a tragedy and reflects another major Victorian preoccupation: mourning.
Queen Victoria's beloved husband Prince Albert died when Tennyson was about a decade into his tenure as Poet Laureate. Victoria went into deep mourning for the rest of her life, sparking a craze for flamboyant public grief. Victorian mourners would wear black for years, make elaborate wreaths and jewelry out of the hair of the dead, and pose corpses for post-mortem portraits. Tennyson fanned the flames of this obsession with his great elegy "In Memoriam," a long poetic commemoration of a beloved friend, dead too young.
Perhaps the Victorian obsession with death and mourning also speaks to the melancholy of a changing 19th-century world. The burgeoning Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of rapid, dirty, and dangerous change. Britain embraced its new economic might—but also mourned disappearing ways of life and a blighted countryside.
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More “Mariana” Resources
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External Resources
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Tennyson at the Victorian Web — Visit the Victorian Web to find a treasure trove of Tennyson resources.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem (and hear the way the meter changes in those sad, drawn-out refrains).
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The Poem in Pop Culture — Watch a clip from the 1964 film version of My Fair Lady, in which the opening lines of "Mariana" play a surprising role.
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An Artistic Response to Mariana — See an image of a famous work inspired by this poem: John Everett Millais's "Mariana." (It might be worth asking: why might Millais have filled this painting with so much color and texture, in sharp contrast with the poem's bleak and monochromatic imagery? How does this interpretation respond to the poem's themes?)
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of Tennyson.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson
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