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The relationship between Tennyson's Maud and In Memoriam, is palpably difficult, providing many similarities and paradoxically, contradictions which result in allowing the reader to witness the poets crisis's of faith and self acceptance. Maud is most certainly the strangest of these two poems, demonstrating through the speaker, Tennyson's own emotional and mental difficulties. The poem is far more insular than In Memoriam, the narrator far lesss approachable and conducive to the empathy we tend tofeel with regard to Tennyson's lament for Arthur Hallam. It is difficult to see Maud as a comedy. The lexis of the poem is frequently violent and assaulting. The comedy stems not from predicament, but from the narrator's on view of Maud, himself and the world without himself, that he views with arrogant disparity. Though the speaker declares that he will emerge himself within himself, to separate from the universe he so dislikes, the irony is that he absorbs everything he so dislikes and renders his total aloofness, impossible. The first stanzas of the poem deal with the death of the speakers fahter, which is htrough suicide. We are tol