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Essay / The Speaker's Madness Manifested as Obsessions in Maud full of obsession, madness, death, love and patriotism in his creation of Maud. In Maud, the speaker's state of life and his mental health are called into question from the start. The speaker's initial mental state is one of madness, a melancholic morbidity that has been influenced by his father's suicide into a character who is neither perfect nor happy, but a disturbed man who has nothing to recommend it to a higher state. This morbid side is seen immediately when he says: "I hate the awful hollow behind the little wood, / Its lips in the field above are spotted with blood / red heather, / The red-veined cornices are dripping with a silent horror of blood. , / And Echo there, whatever is asked of him, answers / “Death”. (I,1-4). The speaker is already preoccupied with death and loss. He thinks in extremes. The extremes of death, love, loss and patriotism permeate his personality with such intensity that everything in his life is an obsession. The intensity of the character creates a situation where he never operates in the middle. He is always very high or very low, either in anguish or in happiness. It can be argued that his madness resonates as different phases of obsessions and that the sanity in the end is not a moot point because the reader never actually sees him operating in a sane situation. The speaker's patriotic speech in the third part is just another obsession, another tap of his inner madness that has found another purpose. The speaker is caught in a weave of madness that is present throughout the paper......he weaves as his focus shifts inwardly as he figuratively crawls into his "cave" where his mind can only focus on the immediate things around it, like the sounds of hooves and horses' voices. Tennyson finally snaps the speaker out of his inner madness and changes focus again. This time, the Crimean War becomes an escape for the speaker. He is now somewhat aware that his mind is not sane and he turns to the only thing that can give him peace, death. Tennyson's orator in his morbidity and inner speech is tragic, but in commenting on such acts of written eloquence, the reader cannot help but be trapped by his madness as he finds peace in his act crazy ending. Work cited Tennyson, Alfred. Maud. The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory.Ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle. Toronto: Broadview Press, Ltd, 1999. 254-277. Print.
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