Symbol Analysis
Mariana sits in a house that's surrounded by a moat, waiting for a man to come rescue her—sound familiar? Well, Shmoopers, that's where the fairy-tale parallels end.
In the epigraph, we find out who Mariana is: she's the jilted woman in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, waiting in vain for her former love to return to her. And in the fourth stanza we see the "sluice with blacken'd waters" that sleeps around the abandoned farmhouse (38).
It's not exactly a romantic picture. The water is thick and black and hasn't moved for a long time (because nobody has been coming or going). By placing a moat and a missing man in a poem about heartbreak, though, Tennyson reminds us that not all love has a fairytale ending.