Progressively, Mariana laments, ‘My life is dreary’ in a repeated refrain repeated throughout the poem at the end of each stanza. She is ostensibly suicidal for she ‘would that [I] were dead!’ The exclamation mark emphasises her desperation and longing for her lover quite clearly.
There is a continuous sense of repetition and routine throughout the poem. In the second stanza, Tennyson makes it evident that she never stops crying, for ‘her tears fell with the dews at even’ and ‘her tears fell ere the dews were dried’. This sense of routine is exemplified also through the use of refrain in the last four lines of each poem, which adds to a prosaic and dreary air about the poem. She is so depressed that she ‘cannot look on the sweet heaven’ in the morning or evening, which perhaps describes her aversion to all things beautiful.
There is an aura of mystery and omen in the following lines, for ‘after the flitting of the bats’, in ‘thickest dark’, she draws back her curtains and looks out the window at the ‘glooming flats’. The use of pathetic fallacy conveys Mariana’s melancholy such that her miserable emotions are reflected in the weather and her surroundings. The darkness that ensconces her suggests that she is more comfortable in the dark because she is feeling utterly wretched and desperate for the coming of her renegade lover. All around Mariana are ‘glooming flats’, connoting perhaps barren and lifeless land. In the night, she laments how ‘the night is dreary’ and goes on to say ‘He cometh not’, and ‘I am aweary, aweary’. The only change in the refrains throughout the poem is of the words ‘life’, ‘night’ and ‘day’. This suggests that everything is the same to her, day or night because of her irrevocable suffering; however, it does still imply that there is a transience of time, and that life still passes by despite her indifference towards it.
In Mariana’s world it seems always to be dark; in the third stanza, the ‘cock sung out ere light’ and she awakes to a ‘gray-eyed morn’. This exemplifies the use of pathetic fallacy yet again, where the surroundings aptly reflect Mariana’s emotions. Nightly sounds such as the night-fowl ‘crowing’, and the oxen’s ‘low’ contribute to an eldritch atmosphere, and that she is surrounded by nobody but sinister animals. Her isolation is emphasised further in the line ‘About the lonely moated grange’. She has little faith in the return of her lover, so much that even in sleep, she ‘walk[s] forlorn’.
The fourth stanza goes on to describe the surroundings of the grange, a stone-cast from the wall away. Everything beyond the grange is, also, still: the ‘sluice with blacken’d waters slept’ and ‘marish mosses crept’. The verbs used by Tennyson connote the lack of life on the lands that surround Mariana, to such an extent that the water is ostensibly black in colour. Yet, standing in the barren wasteland - the ‘the level waste, the rounding gray’ - around Mariana is a singular poplar tree with ‘gnarled bark’, ‘gnarled’ perhaps suggesting the anger and suppressed pain of Mariana. The poplar in mythological terms is symbolic of infelicitous events in love, because it symbolises the renegade lover who will never return. The poplar is also a phallic symbol of her sexual hunger within. The poplar seems to be an apt symbol for Mariana because it has flat, stemmed leaves, which shake in the slightest wind, perhaps symptomatic of Mariana’s fragility.
A ghostly image of the grange is depicted in the following stanza, where Tennyson uses onomatopoeia to convey the full, rich sounds in the scene: ‘the shrill winds’ that cause the ‘white curtain’ to billow to and fro. There is further reference to the wind in the line ‘wild winds bound within their cell’, alluding to a classical myth where winds were kept in a cave in the mountains and great storms occurred whenever they escaped. Perhaps this is representative of Mariana and her raging desire to escape from the grange with her lover, the alliteration in ‘wild winds’ highlighting the intensity of her emotions at the time. Where the ‘shadow of the poplar fell/ upon her bed, across her brow’, this places emphasis also on her sexual desires as aforementioned.
The sixth stanza illustrates a portrait of sounds, with the hinges creaking, the mouldering wainscot shrieking and Mariana hearing voices and footsteps all around her. The fact that Mariana hears these sounds suggests that she is so lonely to such an extent that all sounds around her are amplified. There is a repetition of ‘old’ also, perhaps suggestive of the ‘dreamy’ house filled with memories and this is all she has to keep her company.
In the final stanza, Tennyson makes the readers aware of the transience of time, with the ‘slow clock ticking’, suggesting that life still goes on albeit slowly despite Mariana’s melancholy. There is further reference to the ‘wooing wind aloof the poplar made’, underscoring her desperation for her lover. The personification of the wind suggests that the sound is indeed amplified in Mariana’s senses, thus highlighting her loneliness once more.
The ‘thick moted sunbeam’ suggests that there is dust when rays of light cut through the air, indicative of the derelict nature of the house. These rays of light are ‘sloping towards his western bower’, suggesting that it is sunset. Sunsets typically allude to the end of a day, and this aptly forms a closure to the poem. it could, however, also allude to the ‘sunset of her life’ as she does go on to say ‘ I am very dreary/ He will not come’, the tone being definitive as opposed to the refrains in the other lines which merely say ‘My life is dreary/ He cometh not’. Mariana also for the first time weeps, which signals the culmination of her desperation and jadedness.
The tone of the poem is a contemplative one, and exudes an air of lament. The poem constitutes no action and no narrative whatsoever. In effect, it seems to be a ‘freeze frame’ of Mariana’s life at the grange, thus capturing the essence of her misery whilst she ponders and bemoans the nonappearance of her lover. The rhyme scheme is reflective of the era Tennyson lived in, where most poems were meticulously structured; the refrain contributes to a mysterious chant-like effect that altogether represents the monotony of Mariana’s life.
