Mariana

Again, "Mariana" is one example of Tennyson's exceptional skill with image and mood. In responding to this, remembering our earlier discussion of the effect of setting in Gothic fiction, identify/describe the MOOD of this poem, and discuss how the images (consider here those which appeal to the senses of sound and feeling, as well as that of sight) create this mood.

The mood here is morose and dreary, as the woman keeps saying of her life, “She only said, ‘My life is dreary’”. The way things are described, the reader feels as though they are dragging through the time alongside this waiting woman. We are with her in the “moated grange” or farmhouse. A farmhouse with a moat is already a strange image to us today, though perhaps not in these times or in Shakespeare’s time during which this woman, Mariana, is plucked for this poem. Everything about her is aged or unkept, “With blackest moss the flower-plots//Were thickly crusted, one and all” Even the thatched roof of the grange is grown over with weeds “Weeded and worn the ancient thatch//Upon the lonely moated grange” This is not a cheery place. Not even the coming of the day improves things, “Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn//About the lonely moated grange” The light coming with the morning isn’t sunny and bringing blue skies, it is grey and chilly. She can hear the sound of the water nearby, “A sluice with blackened waters slept” Or perhaps she didn’t is the “sluice” had “slept”? Either way, again, the water is murky, black. Further on, creepy quiet noises abound, “The doors upon their hinges creaked;//The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse//Behind the wainscot shrieked” Nearly everything is called old and though the woman is beckoned or thinks she is so, she still sits in her depression, “Old faces glimmered through the doors//Old footsteps trod the upper floors,//Old voices called her from without” I personally think the most downcast things of the whole poem is Mariana’s repetition, “She only said, ‘My life is dreary,//He cometh not,’ she said;//She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,//I would that I were dead!’”