Mariana (poem) - Poem

Poem

Within the poem, Tennyson does not teach the audience what melancholy means. Instead, he describes its various aspects as he begins:

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 looked sad and strange:

Unlifted was the clinking latch;

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch

Upon the lonely moated grange.

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 1–12)

The narrator of the poem is disconnected from Mariana, and he is able to see what she cannot. In particular, he is able to describe the "sweet heaven" whereas Mariana refuses to take in the scene as well as she is unable to understand the movement of time:

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. (lines 13–16)

She is surrounded by stillness and there is little movement within the poem. The water is calm and there is only the growth of moss:

About a stone-cast from the wall

A sluice with blackened waters slept,

And o'er it many, round and small,

The clustered marish-mosses crept. (lines 37–40)

Mariana is trapped by her surroundings, and the last stanza begins with her becoming sensitive to sound as she starts to mentally lose her place in reality:

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; (lines 73–77)

The poem ends with a description that even the sunlight is unable to do anything more than reveal dust in her home:

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 77–80)

The poem ends with an altered version of the refrain, which serves to show that although she wishes her death she is still alive and, in the final moment, allows her to end the poem instead of allowing the poem to end her:

Then, said she, "I am very dreary,

He will not come," she said;

She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,

O God, that I were dead!" (lines 81–84)