Mariana (poem)

Tennyson's version was adapted by others, including John Everett Millais and Elizabeth Gaskell, for use in their own works.

During that time, he was affected by his experience and the influence appears in "Mariana in the South",[3] which was published in 1832; it is a later version that follows the idea of "The Lady of Shalott".

Instead, he describes its various aspects as he begins:[7] 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.

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:[8] 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.

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:[9] 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; The poem ends with a description that even the sunlight is unable to do anything more than reveal dust in her home:[8] but most she loathed the hour When the thick-moted sunbeam lay Athwart the chambers, and the day Was sloping toward his western bower.

Additionally, the scene within the poem does not have any of the original context but the two works are connected in imagery with the idea of a dull life and a dejected female named Mariana.

Tennyson's Mariana and Gaskell's main character, Ruth, are sensitive to the sounds around them and are constantly looking out of their window in image that represents their imprisonment within their homes.

While Tennyson's character cannot recognise beauty within nature, Gaskell's character is able to turn to nature to gain spiritually in a manner similar to the Romantic poems, including "Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth or "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The difference is further compounded by Oriana's imprisonment coming from her own memories while Mariana's is the external results of her lover having not returned.

These sources include passages in the poetry of Sappho and Cinna, Virgil's Aeneid, Horace's Odes, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Measure for Measure, John Milton's Lycidas, Samuel Rogers's Captivity, and John Keats's Isabella, Sleep and Poetry, and The Eve of St. Agnes.

Fox praises the depiction of women within the whole of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and says that Tennyson's "portraits are delicate, his likenesses [...] perfect, and they have life, character, and individuality.

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.

[23] 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.

[25] 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, though 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.

"[6] 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 this early poem) in his description of the house that echoes her utter desolation".