The relationship between art and self is a recurring theme in Tennyson's poetry; indeed, in The Palace of Art, the narrator declares: “I have built my soul a lordly house of pleasure”[i]; bridging the gap between the inside (the soul) and the outside (the palace) through art. In Maud we receive a poem that equally deals with external and internal landscapes, seen through the subjective lens of the poet attempting to navigate his broken inner identity in a seemingly meaningless world. His muse, in the form of the ethereal Maud, acts as a vehicle for which the narrator can construct a sense of individuality, which ultimately deteriorates in her absence and later in her death. Tennyson connects the artist and his medium to the psychology of the self, emphasizing how the breakdown of the relationship between the artist and his muse resembles, and can even correlate with, the breakdown of the self. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The self is immediately called into question from the opening of the poem, as the narrator must face the harsh realities of a seemingly meaningless world. The catalyst arrives in the form of the death of the patriarch – the narrator's father – whose body lies "mutilated, flattened and crushed", with brutal imagery reflected in nature itself as "the wind like a broken moan of the world ". 'd". The narrator, without the aid of a father figure – much like Hamlet – must, in the words of critic Matthew Campbell, "construct his own unstable consciousness and his story in words"[ii]. The poem becomes both the expression of a fragmented psyche and a means of forging meaning through history. However, the narrator encounters significant difficulties in constructing this meaning, perhaps due to his skepticism. with regard to the very institutions which are supposed to prescribe it The Church, as he claims in his mad frenzy, has "killed their Christ" the scholar is "more glorious and vain"; madness and vice. Darwin's Origin of Species (four years after Maud). Tennyson's poetry can be said to occupy a space that incorporates a proto-Darwinian worldview, as exemplified by the line "nature red in tooth and claw" from In Memoriam, which has become a "canonical descriptor" of the Darwinism[iii]. It is also clear that Maud's narrator mourns the loss of old scientific thinking, lamenting the "sad astrology" which, rather than making sense of the universe and the self – as in the fortune-telling astrology of formerly – results in “iron skies”. ". On one level, it is possible to see the narrator's conflicted psyche as reflective of the challenges of an era where self-identity can be seen as distinct from the institutions that previously defined it, as the narrator remarks: "we , men, we are a small race.” ". Arguably, the narrator's story, which provides a beginning, middle, and end – although fragmented, can be seen as a way of providing some sort of structural order to a reality that lacks this quality. It is into this void of meaning that Maud enters, providing the narrator with an outlet from which he can construct a sense of individuality. Through the use of his 'British English lily' he is able to articulate a natural world that is not dark and antagonistic but painterly and decorative. From the middle of thefirst part, the poem is filled with rich imagery ranging from “a million emeralds” to “the liquid azure bloom of a sea crescent.” At the same time, the inner world of the narrator's psyche is revealed to be alienated from the public discourse of "gossip, scandals and nastiness." Contemporary critics criticized Tennyson's decadent writing style, with one critic calling the poem "a bit like the foam without the wave". Rather than adopting a purely historicist approach, which risks anachronism, it might be more appropriate to examine – notably – the work as an examination of the poet's psychology. Contrary to the views of mid-century Victorian critics, when interpreted as an analogy to the artistic process, decadent language is an accurate representation of an aestheticized, proto-cinematic world of the artist or poet. By creating a poetic landscape around Maud, the narrator is able to seek meaning from her fragmented story, expressing his hopes for the future with his "future wife." While the narrator's internal sense of self is alienated from the external world around her, Maud bridges the gap between exterior and interior as a seamless figure of divine beauty. There are moments in the poem where she literally merges with the natural world as "sunlight comes from her lip" and "her mouth is a rose." Perhaps it is not just a romantic, but also an artistic obsession that fuels the narrator – he treats her as if she were an art form or a “divine work”. As she becomes more distant, he becomes more introspective, wanting to "bury myself in myself." Indeed, rather than the Cartesian sense that body and mind are simply two distinct entities, for Tennyson, mind and self are also two distinct categories, with the narrator internalizing one into the other, asserting " that such a dark spirit dwells within me.” Interestingly, in The Poet's Mind, Tennyson actually implores the reader not to delve into the psychology of the poet: "Thwart not the poet's mind with thine superficial mind: vex not the poet's mind for thou "I can't understand it."[iv] This is ironic considering that Maud, Tennyson's favorite work[v], is about a poet narrator who seeks to delve into his own mind to form an idea of self. Indeed, if we accept the parallel between the narrator and the poet or artist, then it could be argued that the reason for the eventual descent into madness is because the narrator tried something "that you can't understand” – the impossibility of forging a sense of self through poetry. A crucial facet of the artist is his relationship with the muse, and in Maud the narrator projects his hopes and dreams onto the eponymous character to the extent that his own sense of self becomes intrinsically linked to her. Yet, in part because of the subjective first-person narration, Tennyson restricts our access to Maud's inner life, which resembles the treatment of female muses as figures meant to be objectified. She simply becomes a “beautiful voice”, a “rose” and even “femininity” itself. The confusion of his image with nature, while helping the narrator to construct meaning, reduces his character to a fantasy. In exploring the psychology of the self in the poem, it is crucial to note that the individuality of the main character is itself marginalized in the narration. As critic Robert E Lougy points out in his comparison of Maud to Graves' White Goddess, her cold, pale but haunting appearance "embodies an image of woman frequently found in 19th-century art." »[vi] Indeed, Tennyson's influence on the pre-Raphaelites cannot beoverestimated, the Lady of the Shallot and Mariana being visualized by the members of the brotherhood. Perhaps the best critique of the Victorian relationship between the artist and his muse comes from the artist Gabriel Dante Rossetti's sister, Christina Rossetti, in her poem In the Artist's Studio. Written a year after Tennyson's Maud, the narrator laments that his brothers' studio muse is “Not as she is, but she was when hope shone; Not as she is, but as she fulfills her dream.” Likewise, the character of Maud is an entity without individuality, acting more like a construct than an individual; just like Rossetti's muse, it is when she "fills" the narrator's dreams that she is most enigmatic and complex, as the narrator proclaims in an interrupted line. what is she now? My dreams are bad. She could bring me a curse. This of course lends itself to feminist interpretations, with critics like Linda Shires arguing that the narrator's major struggle for self-knowledge arises from a crisis in masculinity, exemplified by his demonization of other male figures such as the brother of Maud, whom he describes as "this piece of earth" and ultimately murders, illustrates this insecurity. She further criticizes Tennyson for his depiction of the female body as repulsive or objectified, even viewing the "terrible hollow" as a symbol of the womb, in which the narrator is "reborn"[vii]. Yet even though Tennyson describes the female muse as meaningless, this may be his intention. In the second part of the poem, the narrator states – after Maud's death – “He can take her now, for she never says what she thinks” and “she is not beautiful now”. In a way, the poem arguably acts as a critique of the relationship between the artist or poet and his muse, for after her disappearance, the construct of the ethereal-Maud dissolves, and with it the sense of meaning of the poet. With his sense of identity having become so closely tied to Maud – herself a projection, and yet his only connection to the outside world – her death results in his imminent loss of sanity. Therefore, although masculinity plays a role in the narrator's search for individuality, it is the death of his muse – his creative outlet – that is the most significant factor in his psychological breakdown, while his entire vision of world is built around it. the muse and descent into madness leads to the dissolution of structure and language in the poem itself, as the poet struggles to express himself in his own medium. As the narrator continues to internalize or "to bury [him], bury me / Deeper, ever deeper", the meter and rhyme scheme becomes increasingly erratic with the triple rhyme of "enemy" , “weak”, then two lines later. "blow". It is this inconsistency that reflects madness in a way that a doctor friend of Tennyson called "the closest representation since Shakespeare"[viii]. Without any sense from which to produce his art, the poet struggles to articulate language itself, regressing into what Lougy considers “babbling”[ix]. Furthermore, Lougy argues that in a state of true madness, the poetic form ceases to function, and Tennyson gets as close to the medium as possible to reproduce this. Indeed, if he had chosen to end the poem at the end of the second part, we could see the death of the muse as the symbolic, or literal, death of the poet and his self-consciousness. Yet the complete shift in tone in Part Three complicates this idea – his poem continues without a muse, and instead finds meaning in the Crimean War and chauvinistic national pride. The apparent plea for