In the light of Chris Howell's comments regarding Tennyson's intent and the quality of "Maud" as poetry, it night be illuminating to recall the link between the poem and the Rondo of Elgar's Second Symphony (I quote from Michael Kennedy's note in the Hyperion label issue): "Elgar associated this passage with lines from Tennyson’s Maud: ‘And my heart is a handful of dust / And the wheels go over my head … / The hoofs of the horses beat / Beat into my scalp and brain’. He described it to orchestras in rehearsal as ‘like that horrible throbbing in the head during some fever’.
This tends to support the idea that Tennyson adapted his habitually beautifully sonorous and mellifluous style to depict derangement in stark brutality, the main tenor of the poem contrasting vividly with the sentimentality and lyricism of its best known section, "Come into the garden, Maud", so aptly set to music by Balfe.
That's the point: most of the poem is dark, jagged and obsessive, whereas the ballad forms an ironic interlude.
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