Dec 25, 2009
“Mariana” is a lyric poem of seven twelve-line stanzas, each ending in a refrain. The epigraph, “Mariana in the moated grange,” is from William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), in which Mariana has been deserted by her lover, Angelo. The poem is also indebted to John Keats’s Isabella (1820).
“Mariana” begins with a vivid depiction of setting and mood. The grange and its garden have fallen into disrepair. The flower plots are clogged with “blackest moss.” Like Mariana, they are fertile but bereft of human care; they...
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