The relationship between art and the self is a recurring theme in Tennyson's poetry; in fact in the Palazzo dell'Arte the narrator declares “I have built my soul a stately house of pleasure”[i]; bridging the gap between the inside (soul) and the outside (palace) through art. In Maud we are given a poem that also deals with external and internal landscapes, seen through the subjective lens of the poet attempting to navigate his broken internal identity in a seemingly meaningless world. His muse, in the form of the ethereal Maud, serves as a vehicle for which the narrator can construct a sense of individuality, which ultimately deteriorates in her absence and subsequently in death. Tennyson connects the artist and his medium with the psychology of the self, highlighting how the breakdown of the relationship between the artist and his muse resembles, and may even be related to, the breakdown of the self. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The self is immediately challenged in the opening of the poem, as the narrator must face the harsh reality of a seemingly meaningless world. The catalyst comes in the form of the death of the patriarch – the narrator's father – whose body lies "crippled, flattened and crushed", with the brutal image reflected in nature itself as the "wind like a broken worldly lament". 'D". The narrator, without the guidance of a father figure – just like Hamlet – is left, in the words of critic Matthew Campbell, to “construct his own unstable conscience and his own story, in words”[ii]. The poem it becomes both the expression of a fragmented psyche and a means by which to forge meaning through history. However, the narrator encounters considerable difficulty in constructing this meaning, perhaps due to his skepticism towards the very institutions that are supposed to prescribe it, such as The Church he states in his mad frenzy, he “killed their Christ”; the scientist is “more glory-loving and vain”; the poet is “turbulent in madness and vice”. as a reflection of the anxieties of the 1850s, a decade in which science and religion broke down most noticeably with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (four years after Maud). Tennyson's poetry can be said to occupy a space incorporating a proto-Darwinian worldview, as illustrated in the line “nature is red in tooth and claw” from In Memoriam, which has become a “canonical descriptor” of Darwinism[iii]. It is also clear that Maud's narrator mourns the loss of old scientific thinking, lamenting the “sad astrology” that instead of providing meaning to the universe and the self – as in the divinatory astrology of old – results in “iron skies ”. ”. On the one hand, it is possible to see the narrator's conflicted psyche as a reflection of the challenges of a time when personal identity can be seen as separate from the institutions that previously defined it, as the narrator observes “we men are a small race ”. Arguably the narrator's story, which has a beginning, a middle and an end – although fragmented, can be seen as a way of providing a kind of structural ordering to a reality that lacks this quality. It is into this void of meaning that Maud steps in, providing the narrator with an outlet from which he can build a sense of individuality. Through the use of his “British English lily,” he is able to articulate a natural world that is not dark and antagonistic but painterly and decorous. From the middle of Part 1 the poem is filled with rich imagery ranging from “millions of emeralds” to “the liquid blue flower of a crescent ofsea". At the same time, the inner world of the narrator's psyche is shown to be alienated by the public discourse of “gossip, scandal, and spite.” Contemporary critics criticized Tennyson's decadent writing style with one reviewer referring to the poem as "a bit like the foam without the wave". Perhaps rather than adopting a purely historicist approach, which risks anachronism, it would be more appropriate to examine - in particular - the work as an examination of the poet's psychology. Contrary to the views of mid-century Victorian critics, when interpreted as an analogy of the artistic process, decadent language is an accurate representation of an aestheticized, proto-cinematic world of the artist or poet. By creating a poetic landscape around Maud, the narrator is able to search for meaning in her fragmented history, expressing hopes for the future with his “bride-to-be.” While the narrator's internal sense of self is alienated from the external world around him, Maud bridges the gap between the external and the internal as a seamless figure of divine beauty. There are moments in the poem where he literally merges with the natural world when "the sunlight falls from his lip" and "his mouth becomes a rose." Perhaps it is not only the romantic obsession, but also the artistic one that fuels the narrator: he treats it as if it were an art form or a “divine work”. As she moves away, he becomes more introspective, wanting to "bury myself in myself". Indeed, rather than the Cartesian sense of body and mind as simply two separate entities, for Tennyson the mind and self are also two distinct categories, with the narrator internalizing one into the other, claiming that "within me dwells such a dark mind." Interestingly, in The Poet's Mind, Tennyson actually implores the reader not to delve into the poet's psychology: ""Do not irritate the poet's mind with your superficial wit: do not irritate the poet's mind because you cannot understand it"[iv ] This is ironic when we consider that Maud, Tennyson's favorite of his works[v], is about a poet narrator trying to delve into his own mind to form a sense of self, if we are to accept the parallel between the narrator and the poet or artist, then it could be argued that the reason for the eventual descent into madness is because the narrator attempted something “that you cannot imagine” – the impossibility of forging a sense of self through the medium of poetry .A crucial aspect of the artist is his relationship with the muse, and in Maud the narrator projects his hopes and dreams onto the eponymous character to the extent that his sense of self becomes intrinsically linked to her Because of the subjective first-person narrative, Tennyson limits our access to Maud's interior life, resembling the treatment of female muses as figures destined for objectification. It simply becomes a “beautiful voice,” a “rose,” and even “femininity” itself. The merging of his image with nature, while helping the narrator construct meaning, reduces his character to a fantasy. In exploring the psychology of the self within the poem, it is crucial to note that the titular character's individuality is itself marginalized within the narrative. As the critic Robert E Lougy points out in his comparison of Maud to Graves's White Goddess, her cold, pale yet enchanting appearance "embodies an image of woman frequently found in nineteenth-century art". -The Raphaelites cannot be overstated, as both The Lady of Shallot and Mariana are viewed by members of the brotherhood. Perhaps the best criticism of the Victorian relationship between the artist and his muse comes from thesister of the artist Gabriel Dante Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, in her poem In the Artist's Studio. Written a year after Tennyson's Maud, the narrator laments that the muse in her brothers' study is “Not as it is, but was when hope shone; Not as he is, but as he realizes his dream.” Likewise, the character of Maud is an entity without individuality, acting more like a construction than an individual; just like Rossetti's muse, it is when she "fills" the narrator's dreams that she reaches her enigmatic and complex maximum, as the narrator proclaims in a broken verse for caesuras “what is it now? My dreams are bad. It could bring me a curse. This obviously lends itself to feminist interpretations, with critics such as Linda Shires arguing that the narrator's main struggle for self-knowledge stems from a crisis of masculinity, shown through his demonization of other male figures such as Maud's brother, who he describes as “this piece of land” and, finally, the murders, illustrate this insecurity. He also criticizes Tennyson for his portrayal of the female body as repulsive or as an object, even believing that the "terrible void" is a symbol of the womb, in which the narrator is "reborn"[vii]. Yet, although Tennyson describes the female muse as vacuous, perhaps this is his intention. In the second part of the poem the narrator declares – after Maud's death – “He could take her now, for he never says what he thinks” and “she is not beautiful now”. Arguably in some way the poem acts as a critique of the relationship between the artist or poet and his muse, for after her death the construct of the ethereal Maud dissolves, and with it the poet's sense of meaning. Because his sense of identity had become so intertwined with Maud – herself a projection, yet his only link to the outside world – her death results in his imminent loss of sanity. Therefore, while masculinity plays a role in the narrator's pursuit of individuality, it is the death of his muse – his creative outlet – that is the most important factor in his psychological collapse as his entire worldview is built around her. the muse and descent into madness lead to the dissolution of structure and language in the poem itself, as the poet struggles to express himself within his own medium. As the narrator continues to internalize or "bury me [him], bury me / Deeper, never so deeper" the meter and rhyme scheme become increasingly irregular with the triple rhyme of "foe", "low", and then two lines later "breath". It is this inconsistency that mirrors madness in a way that a medical friend of Tennyson called the “closest representation since Shakespeare”[viii]. Without any meaning from which to produce his art, the poet struggles to articulate language itself, regressing into what Lougy deems “babble”[ix]. Furthermore, Lougy argues that in a state of true madness, poetic form ceases to function and Tennyson comes as close as possible to the means of replicating it. Indeed, if he had chosen to end the poem at the end of Part 2, one might see the death of the muse as the symbolic, or literal, death of the poet and his sense of self. Yet the complete change of tone in the third part complicates this idea: his poetry continues without a muse, and instead finds meaning in the Crimean War and chauvinistic national pride. The apparent support for war as “God's purpose” contradicts the narrator's earlier commitment to the insignificance of man, and the ending sees a return to the institutions that were rejected at the beginning of the poem. It is possible to see the fragmented nature of a real war as a natural attraction