Maud, and Other Poems

Maud's death impacts on the psychological state of the protagonist, and an emotional longing for contact with the deceased echoes the tones of In Memoriam.

The poem is a distorted view of a single reality, and the variation in meter can be seen to reflect the manic-depressive emotional tone of the speaker.

In "Maud", Tennyson returns to the poetry of sensation, and dwells on a consciousness constituted of fragments of feeling.

The chivalric style of the love-poem is combined with a contemporary cynicism, and so the Victorian tendency to look to remote cultures (here, medievalism) is insufficient.

The interweaving of death and life images gives expression to the greater concern for the afterlife, and the movement of the human race into a different age from past monuments.