John Ruskin coined the term ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ in 1856 to “signify any representation of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions” (Abrams 203). This idea of emotion being projected onto the surrounding environment till nature becomes a kind of mirror is epitomised in Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘Mariana’.
The poem, published in 1830, was inspired from a scene in William Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, where Mariana waits for her lover to come. In Tennyson’s poem, Mariana’s yearning is unfulfilled and her deepening unhappiness is depicted to an extremely significant extent by the decaying environment around her, that is, the use of pathetic fallacy to depict her sorrow. The purpose …show more content…
However, time proceeds in a stilted manner that adds to the feeling of disease and neglect that construes this world. Mariana’s senses are muddled and confused; the only centre of her dysfunctional world is her desire for her lover “The slow clock ticking...did all confound /Her sense” (74-77). She hates the sunlight and day which is marked by the visual process of time as depicted in “but most she loathed the hour /… and the day /Was sloping toward his western bower”(77-80) because it marks one more day where her lover has failed to arrive. Trapped in her “dreamy house” (61), Mariana shows the most activity at night when “When thickest dark did trance the sky, / She drew her casement-curtain by, /And glanced athwart the glooming flats” (18-20). This appears to be a world where reasoning have been inverted, where night becomes the time of movement and hope perhaps because it is unmarked by a visual progress of time. This timelessness suits the stagnant world that Mariana has created because it is a place of hope; the day is proof that her lover has jilted her whereas the night still holds promise of his arrival the next …show more content…
Landow gives a valuable counter-perspective on pathetic fallacy when he says, “Although such a poetry proves eminently valuable in its ability to educate the reader about the experiences of life, it can never present a balanced, complete view of nature and man's existence”( “Ruskin’s Discussion of the Pathetic Fallacy”). However, in a poem like ‘Mariana’ it would seem that the lack of ‘balance’ is what makes the poem even more meaningful. Harold Bloom finds in Tennyson a mixture of Victorian scientific and Romantic thought in the depiction of nature because the latter attempts to “spiritualize nature in the sense of making it subservient to the needs of the human soul and of forcing it to become symbolical of human moods and passions” (147). He finds that “No lyric by Tennyson is more central to his sensibility than “Mariana,”” (xiv) and that “no poet has ever shown such depths of tenderness or such skill in interweaving the most delicate painting of nature with the utterance of profound emotion” (137). For Rhoda L. Flaxman, the use of “word-painting” in the poem creates a “faithfulness to a precise and consistent perspective focused through the viewpoint of a particular spectator. This point of view often yields an effect we moderns call cinematic, implying progress from one element to the next in a 'narrative of landscape’”(qtd in Lollar,“Word-Painting in Mariana and Pickwick”). David Goslee says, “the poem moves us toward the realization that she is not
The poem, published in 1830, was inspired from a scene in William Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, where Mariana waits for her lover to come. In Tennyson’s poem, Mariana’s yearning is unfulfilled and her deepening unhappiness is depicted to an extremely significant extent by the decaying environment around her, that is, the use of pathetic fallacy to depict her sorrow. The purpose …show more content…
However, time proceeds in a stilted manner that adds to the feeling of disease and neglect that construes this world. Mariana’s senses are muddled and confused; the only centre of her dysfunctional world is her desire for her lover “The slow clock ticking...did all confound /Her sense” (74-77). She hates the sunlight and day which is marked by the visual process of time as depicted in “but most she loathed the hour /… and the day /Was sloping toward his western bower”(77-80) because it marks one more day where her lover has failed to arrive. Trapped in her “dreamy house” (61), Mariana shows the most activity at night when “When thickest dark did trance the sky, / She drew her casement-curtain by, /And glanced athwart the glooming flats” (18-20). This appears to be a world where reasoning have been inverted, where night becomes the time of movement and hope perhaps because it is unmarked by a visual progress of time. This timelessness suits the stagnant world that Mariana has created because it is a place of hope; the day is proof that her lover has jilted her whereas the night still holds promise of his arrival the next …show more content…
Landow gives a valuable counter-perspective on pathetic fallacy when he says, “Although such a poetry proves eminently valuable in its ability to educate the reader about the experiences of life, it can never present a balanced, complete view of nature and man's existence”( “Ruskin’s Discussion of the Pathetic Fallacy”). However, in a poem like ‘Mariana’ it would seem that the lack of ‘balance’ is what makes the poem even more meaningful. Harold Bloom finds in Tennyson a mixture of Victorian scientific and Romantic thought in the depiction of nature because the latter attempts to “spiritualize nature in the sense of making it subservient to the needs of the human soul and of forcing it to become symbolical of human moods and passions” (147). He finds that “No lyric by Tennyson is more central to his sensibility than “Mariana,”” (xiv) and that “no poet has ever shown such depths of tenderness or such skill in interweaving the most delicate painting of nature with the utterance of profound emotion” (137). For Rhoda L. Flaxman, the use of “word-painting” in the poem creates a “faithfulness to a precise and consistent perspective focused through the viewpoint of a particular spectator. This point of view often yields an effect we moderns call cinematic, implying progress from one element to the next in a 'narrative of landscape’”(qtd in Lollar,“Word-Painting in Mariana and Pickwick”). David Goslee says, “the poem moves us toward the realization that she is not