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The Lily and the Rose: Symbolic Meaning in Tennyson's Maud

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

E. D. H. Johnson
E. D. H. Johnson*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

“You have but fed on the roses and Iain in the lilies of life.” With this Swinburnian line Tennyson concludes the introductory section of Maud and turns to the lyrical development of the conflict for which preparation has been made. In its immediate context the statement is deliberately ambiguous, suggesting little more than that Maud has hitherto led a sheltered and luxurious life. Yet the announcement of the lily and rose motifs in this place is not without significance. Considered apart, the two flowers evoke a wealth of traditional symbolic meaning, traceable throughout English poetry from Chaucer on; placed in direct relation to each other as here, they create an added potential for dramatic interplay. That Tennyson understood and desired to exploit the dramatic uses to which symbols may be put becomes apparent on analysis of the conditions under which the lily and rose reoccur in subsequent passages of the narrative.

Type
Comment and Criticism
Information
PMLA , Volume 64 , Issue 5: Issue 1 part 1 , December 1949 , pp. 1222 - 1227
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1949

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References

1 The lily appears in songs xii and xix; the rose in songs xvii, xvii, and xxi. The two flowers appear together only in xiv, where Maud's garden is first described.

2 The reference to the white rose in this stanza is unique and has the effect of providing a skillful emotional transition between the red rose of the preceding line and the lily: “And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’.”

3 It will be observed that in his memory of Maud's garden, just as in his first effort to imagine it (i, xiv), the lover eliminates all flowers but the lily and rose.

4 An exhaustive analysis of the flower imagery in the poem would have to take into account a number of other varieties. Of those which recur and are used with obvious symbolic intent, two are noteworthy : the daffodil (i, iii, 1. 14; i, xxii, 1.10; iii, i, 1. 6), and the passionflower (i, xiv, 1. 8; I, xxii, 1. 60).

5 i, i, 11. 10, 53.

6 i, iv, 1. 55; i, xi, 1. 6; i, xiv, 1. 38; i, xvi, II. 22–23; i, xviii, 11.46,60; i, xx, 1. 23.

7 i, i, 11. 21–52.

8 I, x, st. 4; ii, ii, st. 6; ii, iv, st. 6.