Alfred Tennyson, one of the most popular poets in the English language,

excelled at penning short lyrics, such as "In the Valley of Cauteretz", "Break,
Break, Break", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears" and
"Crossing the Bar".
Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as
"Ulysses," and "Tithonus."
Mariana:
The subject of this poem is drawn from a line in Shakespeares
play Measure for Measure : Mariana in the moated grange. This line
describes a young woman waiting for her lover Angelo, who has abandoned
her upon the loss of her dowry. Just as the epigraph from Shakespeare
contains no verb, the poem, too, lacks all action or narrative movement.
Instead, the entire poem serves as an extended visual depiction of
melancholy and isolation.
One of the most important symbols in the poem is the poplar tree that can be
interpreted as a sort of phallic symbol: it provides the only break in an
otherwise flat and even landscape; On another level, however, the poplar is
an important image from classical mythology: in his Metamorphoses, Ovid
describes how Oenone, deserted by Paris, addresses the poplar on which
Paris has carved his promise not to desert her. Thus the poplar has come to
stand as a classic symbol of the renegade lover and his broken promise.
The first, fourth, and sixth stanzas can be grouped together, not only because
they all share the exact same refrain, but also because they are the only
stanzas that take place in the daytime. In themselves, each of these stanzas
portrays an unending present without any sense of the passage of time or the
play of light and darkness. These stanzas alternate with the descriptions of
forlorn and restless nights in which Mariana neither sleeps nor wakes but
inhabits a dreamy, in-between state: Mariana cries in the morning and
evening alike and awakens in the middle of the night ;sleeping and waking
meld. The effect of this alternation between flat day and sleepless night is to
create a sense of a tormented, confused time, unordered by patterns of
natural cycles of life.
The final stanza begins with a triple subject (chirrup, ticking, sound), which
creates a mounting intensity as the verb is pushed farther back into the
sentence. At this point, the setting shifts again to the early evening as the

recurrent cycle of day and night once more enacts Marianas alternating
hope and disappointment. The stanza ends with a dramatic yet subtle shift in
the refrain from He cometh not to the decisive and peremptory He will
not come.
The refrain of the poem functions like an incantation, which contributes to
the atmosphere of enchantment. The abandoned grange seems to be under a
spell or curse; Mariana is locked in a state of perpetual, introverted
brooding. Her consciousness paces a cell of melancholy.
Thus, all of the poets descriptions of the physical world serve as primarily
psychological categories; it is not the grange, but the person, who has been
abandonedso, too, has this womans mind been abandoned by her sense.
This is an example of the pathetic fallacy. When the narrator describes her
walls he is seeing not the indifferent white of the paint, but rather focuses on
the dark shadows there. Arguably, Tennyson here also uses the method to
create great emotional force.
-themes: love, solitude, melancholy.