Tennyson: Mariana

Lord Alfred Tennyson like John Keats has a tendency to focus on tragedy or despair. Some of this comes from the depression he entered into after the death of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, but Tennyson's poetry had a dreary flair even before Hallam's death. In Mariana, Tennyson portrays a lonely woman who is lamenting her loss of her lover.

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.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, "'The night is dreary,
He cometh not,'" she said;
She said, "'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'" (line 13-24)

She lives in despair and alone. She cannot experience emotion other than her grief and longing for her husband to return. To her it does not matter if it is morning or evening, she constantly experiences her dejection. In the night, she cannot sleep or when she wakes she only comments that "the night is dreary, he cometh not" (line 21-22). No hope or happiness exists in her world. She only exists alone on the grange waiting for her lover to return. Living a live of shadows which slows drives her insane from her grief. She laments the shadow of the popular hits her bed because it reminds her of her estranged husband (line 55-56). Her lover does not return to her to keep her company while she sleeps or even while she wakes. She is living an isolated life separated from any form of happiness. She is cursed to live day to day  without change or hope of her lover returning to her. She is destined to live in her dejection. However, the women has no intentions of leaving or overcoming her despair. In the final stanza, she declares "'I am very dreary, He will not come'" she said; She wept, 'I am aweary, aweary, Oh God, that I were dead!'" (line 81-84). Her tone has changed from the night or her life being dreary to herself being dreary. She has accepted her desolation, and her unhappy destiny to live alone and cursed on her farm. Whatever little hope she may have possessed has now disappeared. Her husband is actually gone. She pleads with God for her death because her life now is worse than death.