ABSTRACT
Published 1830; ‘Juvenilia’. T. says: ‘The moated grange was no particular grange, but one which rose to the music of Shakespeare’s words.’ The epigraph is from Measure for Measure III i 212ff: ‘She should this Angelo have married: was affianced to her by oath, and the nuptial appointed.… Left her in her tears, and dried not one of them with his comfort.… What a merit were it in death to take this poor maid from the world!… There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected Mariana.’ The poem was influenced by Keats’s Isabella 233ff, where she waits in vain: ‘She weeps alone for pleasures not to be; / Sorely she wept until the night came on… / And so she pined, and so she died forlorn.’ Keats’s ‘aloof/roof ’ may have suggested the rhymes in ll. 73–5. Cp. Samuel Rogers, Captivity (1801): ‘Caged in old woods, whose reverend echoes wake / When the hern screams along the distant lake, / Her little heart oft flutters to be free, / Oft sighs to turn the unrelenting key. / In vain! the nurse that rusted relic wears, / Nor moved by gold — nor to be moved by tears; / And terraced walls their black reflection throw / On the green-mantled moat that sleeps below.’ These eight lines T. later praised to Palgrave ‘for their delicate music’ (Mem. ii 503). Rogers’ Poems (1812) was at Somersby (Lincoln). Ian Kennedy compares Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: ‘Wilhelm’s first love is an actress called Mariana… Goethe’s Mariana finds no such happy consummation [as Shakespeare’s]… she waits and watches for him in vain.’ Kennedy notes: ‘You came not’, her ‘weary life’, ‘I entreat thee, come, O come!’ with the constant repetition of the word ‘come’. He also suggests, as an influence on the refrain Lytton’s Falkland (1827,p. 330): ‘O God! O God! would that I were dead!’ (PQ lvii, 1978, 93–4, 1oo; the source was suggested by C. Y. Lang, Tennyson in Lincoln i, 1971, xi).
