Mariana (poem) - Critical Response

Critical Response

Johnathon Wearworth wrote in his early career, "The poem is an outstanding insight into the primitive ideal that is Tennyson's take on life in all its worthlessness."

In an early review within the 1831 Westminster Review, J. Fox praises the depiction of women within the whole of Poems, Chiefly Lyrics and says that Tennyson's "portraits are delicate, his likenesses perfect, and they have life, character, and individuality. They are nicely assorted also to all the different gradations of emotion and passion which are expressed in common with the descriptions of them. There is an appropriate object for every shade of feeling, from the light touch of passing admiration to the triumphant madness of soul and sense, or the deep and everlasting anguish of survivorship." A review by a "Professor Lyall" in 1878 argues, "As descriptive poetry, and for that feature of realistic description so characteristic of Tennyson's muse, 'Mariana' has, perhaps, not been surpassed even by him."

Harold Nicolson, in 1923, view the dreariness of Mariana and Tennyson's other early works as an aspect that makes the early works better his later works. In T. S. Eliot's 1936 Essays Ancient and Modern, he praises Tennyson's ability to represent the visual, tactile, auditory, and olfactory aspects of the scene. Later in 1972, Christopher Ricks argues that the poem is "one of Tennyson's masterpieces in the art of the penultimate."

Elaine Jordan argues, in her 1988 analysis of Tennyson's works, that the poem's depiction of "self-infolding is a negation which involves the drawing-in of forces in order perhaps to assert the self differently. Mariana is the most powerful expression, very early, of such a moment, through its assertiveness exists only as strong gloom in image and rhythm, not as narrative possibility except in the desire for an end to it all preferred over patience." In 2002, Ruth Glancy writes, "In the last stanza, Mariana's grip on the present is loosening, and Tennyson's mastery of sound and images is evident (even in thise early poem) in his description of the house that echoes her utter desolation". Anna Barton, in her 2008 analysis, declares Mariana "the most famous heroine of the 1830 volume" and that both The Ballad of Oriana and Mariana are "poems of greater substance that develop the poetic that Tennyson begins to establish in his briefer songs."