In Measure for Measure, Mariana is abandoned by her lover Angelo. Although a minor part of the play, Tennyson uses the small scene to great effect: “The moated grange was..one which rose to the music of Shakespeare’s words.” The poem, with its steady iambic tetrameter, well structured 12-line stanzas, and refrain, is notable for its exquisite expression of both desolation and Mariana’s hopelessness.
Desolation in Man-made Objects
The poem’s beginning shows the grange as unkempt with “rusted nails”, “broken sheds”, and hinges that “creaked.” There is atrophy in the human constructs, where they have degenerated with no foreseeable repair or renewal, and their dilapidated state contributes to desolation in the poem.
Yet the desolation is still rather than violent. Near the wall, “A sluice with black’d waters slept”. The slumber of the personified sluice is emphasized by the sibilance in the words “sluice” and “slept”, and the line “All day within the dreamy house” gives a sense of constant stupor in the poem. Yet the sleep is not one of serenity and relaxation, but rather one of enervation; Mariana is regardless of the time, really neither exactly asleep or awake.
Natural Life in the Poem
Natural life such as animals or plants is often used to enliven the mood in the poem. Instead, Tennyson creates the opposite effect.
Plants:
The first stanza mentions the thick crust of the “blackest moss” upon the flower pots, the colour giving a sense of depression, and the depth showing its extent and pervasiveness. Tennyson also uses “the pear to the gable-wall”, rather than his earlier choice of a peach, commenting that it “spoils the desolation of the picture.”
The poplar is the only tree that marks “The level waste, the rounding gray”, and is the solitary monument in an austere landscape. It is an allusion to Ovid, where Paris carved a promise never to desert Oenone on the tree's bark, but abandons her eventually.
Animals:
The sharp sense of movement, in the “flitting of the bats”, is covered by “the thickest dark that did trance the sky”, blanketing out whatever sense of life the bats might have conveyed.
In the third stanza, the oxen, night-fowl, and cock are devoid of personality; their cries and role act as mere markers of time passing. The irony is that despite their calls which signal movement of time, there is in Mariana’s life a sense of permanent sleep and stillness, “without hope of change”
There are animals within the house, where “The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse/Behind the mouldering wainscot shried’kd”, and the sparrow “chirrup[’s] on the roof”. Yet despite the most sonorous or strident voices they can muster, the insignificance of these creatures is blanketed by the sense of age in the repetition of the “Old” things which dominate the house.
Weather and Celestial Objects
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide
Day and night are inconsequential to Mariana’s feelings; the morning is depressing and “gray-eyed”, and at night time, the moon hangs low rather than high up in the heavens. Their confluence, ”When the thick-moted sunbeam lay/..and the day/Was sloping towards his western bower” is the time most hated and loathed by Mariana. Perhaps this is just due to the sunset’s marking of the end of yet another dreary day, but the illusion of change and movement, as change is never accompanied by hope in Angelo’s arrival.
The wind is another significant motif. Described as “cold”, “shrill” and wild, it is alive and billowing within the poem, yet is devoid of comfort and a negative element which “did all confound/Her sense”.
Mariana's Character
Mariana’s refrain is laden with repetitive assonance, in what “She said” as well as the words “dreary” and “aweary, aweary”. This is each time punctuated by the exclamation and plosive “I would that I were dead!” Each repetition of the refrain contributes to the tediousness and weariness in the poem, as her emotions are dragged out without flux.
There is slightly variation at each refrain. Most significantly is how the constant tinkering with the words “life”, “night” and “day”, and the sense of awaiting someone who “cometh not”, is finally substituted with the declarative and more forceful “I am very dreary/He will not come”. Her final implore “Oh God, that I were dead!” also emphasizes a religious plea which was not anticipated earlier, and hence forceful and more effective.
Other Readings
There is a sense of isolation and disconnection from the outside world, not only with the physical boundary of the moated grange but also through the other elements in the poem.
The loneliness of a single, unloved woman trapped by herself is also explored in Tennyson’s more famous The Lady of Shalott. His other poem, Mariana in the South is also worth looking at. For Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam, it is a return , “a kind of pendant”, which expresses again desolate loneliness, drawing from impressions created from range of barren country in the south of France, and succeeds in conceiving “a greater lingering on the outward circumstances..than was the case in the former poem”
Bibliography:
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems Edited by Christopher Ricks
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