Key quotes + explanation

• For there in the ghastly pit long since a body was found

  The tragic loss of the speaker's father
• He mutter'd and madden'd


  The father went mad after the loss of money
• That old man...dropt off gorged from a scheme that left us flaccid and drain'd


  Mauds father benefited from the speaker's family's money, in Tennysons life this could be a reference to Dr Matthew Allen and Charles Tennyson.
• When the poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each sex, like swine


  Reference to poverty in the London slums leading to overcrowding
• When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee


  Infanticide, greed of family for money but also sheer desperation of the poor
• Smoothfaced snubnosed rogue


  Describing mauds brother
• What! Am I raging alone as my father raged in his mood?

  Must I too creep to the hollow and dash myself and die


  The speakers fear of inheriting his fathers madness is the same as the terror Tennyson had for inheriting his family's black blood.
• I play'd with the girl when a child...Maud with her sweet-purse mouth when my father dangled the grapes...the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling


  The speakers relationship with Maud before the vast speculation and their huge loss of money
• I will bury myself in myself


  The speakers isolation and mental illness
• Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection, no more


  The speaker sees maud as an object, empty of anything but her beauty
• Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike, deathlike, half the night long growing and fading and growing, till I could bear it no more


  The speaker is perhaps experiencing insomnia here- his fixation on Maud is the catalyst for his problems beginning. Death is associated with beauty from the beginning- sex and and death, memento mori
• Village....with gossip, scandal and spite


  The speakers hatred for his village reflects Tennysons hatred for Lincolnshire and its 'provincial stuffiness
• Her father, the wrinkled head of the race


  Mauds father has all the power and the speaker has an a cute awareness of the pecking order
• Your father has wealth well gotten and I am nameless and poor.


  Contrast between the two families- how one benefited from the vast speculation and one did not
• I keep but a man and a maid


  Highlights how much of an unreliable narrator the speaker is- says he is poor while others starve he still has two servants.
• We are puppets...do we move ourselves, or are we moved by an unseen hand


  Just as Nora is a puppet of her father then her husband, the speaker is controlled by God? Determinism versus free will
• be mine a philosopher's life...far-off from the clamour of lies


  The speaker thinks everyone in his village is cruel, want to be isolated and far away from them.
• Maud...you milkwhite faun


  The speaker sees Maud as unspoiled and virginal, a 'Madonna
• Your mother is mute in her grave...

  Your father is ever in London


  Maud is actually quite isolated, other than the brother she is quite alone and has little support
• A voice by the cedar tree...a martial song like a trumpet's call.....to the death....and myself so languid and base


  The speaker stalks Maud and hears her signing a patriotic song urging men to go to war, he himself has no agency or purpose in life, this triggers him to do something but also warns him of the potential dangers
• Whom but Maud should I meet? And she touch'd my hand with a smile so sweet


  This very limited interaction leads the speaker to misinterpret this as love or affection- in reality this has a much larger effect on him that it does her,
• she meant to weave me a snare of some coquettish deceit, Cleopatra-like.


  The speaker already accuses Maud of trying to flirt with him, obviously a biased narrator as we do not see how she is tripping to entice him
• Yet, if she were not a cheat [...] then the world were not so bitter but a smile could make it sweet.


  Daughter ps inheriting the bad qualities of their fathers, same as Nora
• Dandy-despot....jewell'd mass....oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull smelling of musk and insolence

  The speaker apparently hates Mauds brother but describes him in shocking detail- perhaps the speaker finds the brother attractive and is trying to repress his feelings.
• Well, if it prove a girl, my boy will have plenty: so let it be


  Here is the interaction between the speakers father and mauds father- the agreement to let them marry. Again an arranged marriage, same as with Nora and Torvald. Women are 'sold off' to the highest bidder
• She lifted her eyes....and suddenly, sweetly, my heart beat stronger and thicker


  He feels physically better when Maud looks at him- a physical response to addiction.
• This new-made lord...first of his noble line...gewgaw castle shine


  The speaker resents mauds new suitor, he is the opposite of him- not money, acquired it. He represents the nouveau riche and seems to have been set up with Maud
• What, has he found my jewel out?...a bought commission....what is is he cannot buy?


  The speaker feels that he owns Maud and no other man should have her. She is being sold/prostituted to the highest bidder- objectification of women.
• This broad-brimm'd hawker of holy things


  People rallying against the war, the speaker thinks this is against the queens will and should be punished as a crime
• What matter if I go mad....to a life that has been so sad

  At this point in the poem we are convinced the speaker has gone mad and sees his life as pathetic
• She took the kiss sedately


  Maud love for the speaker is minimal if even existent- she accepts it but does not reciprocate anything-just out of politeness?
• Go back, my lord, across the moor, you are not her darling


  This is ironic as, in his monomania, the speaker doesn't realise this line also applies to him.
• Comeliness, red and white....six feet two...barbarous opulence jewel-thick


  The speaker means to insult the brother but really is just complimenting him- further expedience to support him being attracted to the brother as he notices so many physical characteristics
• A gray old wolf and a lean

  Mauds father
• Maud is as true as Maud is sweet...the sweeter blood by the other side...her mother had been a thing complete


  Maud has, according to the speaker, inherited all of her mothers good traits
• That huge scapegoat of the race'


  All of Maud's father's bad traits have been passed onto the brother - pangenesis
• Maud has a garden of roses, and lilies fair on a lawn


  Maud has a beautiful garden (Eden, sexual imagery?). Also Rosalyn- someone Romeo stalked in Romeo and Juliet. Prelapsarian utopia (before the fall of man)
• She sits by her music and books and her brother lingers late with a roystering company


  Maud is not particularly sociable while the brother is- trying to develop his political career. He is a 'man about town', looking to promote his career and find allies.
• If I be dear to some one else, then I should be to myself more dear


  The speaker thinks if someone were to love him he would heal from his mental illness
• This lump of earth has left his estate


  The speaker references the brother leaving the family home to visit his father in London