Some people read the “dreadful hollow” as a menstrual vagina, which gives the narrator a slightly eery fear of female bodies. If you’re in that camp, then the “lips” of the hollow represent labia.

And no, I’m not going to put a picture of labia here.

Maud is a love poem, charting the growth and death of a relationship between its (unnamed) narrator and the title-character Maud. But is it? Tennyson immediately messes with our expectations: the love poem starts with the words “I hate”, and Maud herself isn’t mentioned until l. 67.

Tennyson called his poem a “monodrama”, which means that it’s like a drama, only with one person. Like many dramas, the focus is on emotions, and on moments on high emotional tension (the narrator will eventually go mad). So he kicks things off with one of the strongest emotions of all: “I hate”.

The narrator imagines himself dead, buried beneath the street. His death, though, does not bring the release of unconsciousness. He can also still talk in dope verse.

It’s possible that these lines are a reference to the tradition of burying suicides at crossroads. In his despair, the narrator could be contemplating suicide. Then again, he might just be on the Underground.

This line evokes the words from the Anglican burial service: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”. T. S. Eliot later alluded to this line in The Waste Land.

Another of the poem’s more famous sections, this was apparently written in twenty minutes. Pretty impressive, considering that a psychiatrist later called it “the most faithful representation of madness since Shakespeare”.

Maud is a chronic smoker.

Just kidding. Woodbine is another name for the honeysuckle, a sweet-smelling flower which smells stronger at night:

This section is suffused with the imagery of nature: as the dawn comes in, the nature of night goes out. It makes sense for night to be a bat, particularly when the bat’s as cute as this one:

One major theme of Maud is ownership. The narrator is obsessed with the idea that he can own Maud – shown here as the word “own” appears three times, once in the superlative. In “My own heart’s heart”, ownership is nested within ownership: he owns his heart, which owns her (heart). Meta.

A shallop is a type of large boat, usually with a mast or two and sometimes with guns.

Not the same as a shallot. Or, indeed, a Shalott.

Because the shallop “flitteth” and has “silken” sails, it’s being likened to a moth (particularly a bombyx). This adds to the airy, mysterious, twilit atmosphere of the whole poem.