Tennyson, Alfred [Lord]
" The Lady of Shalott " (1832, 1842)

This poem can be read in comparison with "Mariana." In each poem the central figure is a woman who is isolated and frustrated in her wait for something or someone--a lover, in Mariana's case; possibly also in the Lady's.

STYLE. Tennyson carefully builds the scene with details that suggest symbolic meanings.

PART 1. The beginning establishes the Lady's isolation. She dwells in the tower of a castle on an island in a river. Camelot, the city of King Arthur, is downstream; on either side of the river lie fields of grain.

PART 2. This part describes the Lady as she sits alone at a loom. In the mirror hanging opposite her loom the Lady sees who and what passes along the road outside the window. She never looks directly on life but merely on reflected images. She weaves images of these reflections into her tapestry--her "magic web." While ordinary folk come and go, she must stay at her loom, always observing life but never participating. All this is because of a mysterious curse; she must keep on weaving, and she must not look directly on Camelot. A the end of part 2 the Lady utters a complaint after watching the reflections of two lovers: she is "half sick of shadows"--that is, of being confined to a world of reflected "shadow" images.

PART 3. In part 3 Lancelot, one of the heroic knights of King Arthur's court, appears. Star-like and gorgeous, Lancelot parades by the Lady's tower in shining splendor. The Lady, seeing his image in her mirror, is compelled to leave her loom and look down to Camelot, thus activating the curse.

PART 4. We see in part 4 that it is a curse of death. The Lady descends from her tower and finds a boat, on the prow of which she writes her own name. She boards the boat and at the close of day unties it and drifts downstream toward Camelot. She floats along singing, and by the time the boat arrives in Camelot, she is dead. Everyone in the town comes to the river to see the Lady lying dead in the little boat. The knights bless themselves in fear, except for Lancelot, who says that "she has a lovely face" and prays for God's mercy on her.

This poem, like an old folk ballad, narrates the bare events of a story giving no interpretation and offering no moral. How the Lady came to be curse is not suggested. Tennyson teases the reader with many suggestive details, but the Lady and her death are essentially mysterious. She is a maiden imprisoned by enchantment for whom reality is fatal.

QUOTE:

But in her web she still delights

To weave the mirror's magic sights,

For often through the silent nights

A funereal, with plumes and lights

And music, went to Camelot;

Or when the moon was overhead,

Came two young lovers lately wed:

"I am half sick of shadows," said

The Lady of Shalott.

DETAIL:

Positive response to the art/life question. The allegory is simple and lucid. It stresses the "magic" of art, and its necessity. The "fairy" lady weaves the "magic" sights from her mirror into a "magic" tapestry. But at last she grows weary of mirror images. Her attention is seized by the brilliant figure of Sir Lancelot. She leaves the tapestry and the mirror to look at him directly. These objects break and she suffers the "curse." She surrenders herself to the swollen river and the stormy night and is carried down to Camelot singing into death. The meaning of the fable is clear. The artist has no choice. She follows her calling, and fate decides the rest. Her moral stance is not dedication but submission. Her artistic stance is reverence for the magic and mystery of her art. The artist is both the magician and the enchanted, the wielder of the magic power and its subject. The poem asserts this in the fable and in its own poetic magic -- the power of its images, its insistent and subtly varied rhythms, its intricately shaped stanzas and patterned lines, its sharp pictorialism, its brilliance of detail: It effect the verbal illusion of a new art experience, of a Pre-Raphaelite tapestry-enamel finely and glowingly colored. It is Tennyson's "Kubla Khan," the creation of the possessed, visionary poet, working his spell of words with such insinuating memorability.

Matthew Arnold found "natural magic" to the highest degree in Shakespeare and Keats . . . There is nothing familiar, no human motivation, nothing for the reader to identify with or to understand in terms of his own experience or an imaginative experience other than the experience of the artist and his art. Perhaps this very exclusiveness and concentration are the secrets of its power, its symbolism so compelling that the allegory and fable assume the universality of myth. Certainly the poem carries Tennyson's personal myth of the artist's isolation, his loneliness and vulnerability, his "magic' of creation, his surrender to its working, his fatalism, his submission to necessity, to Camelot's river of life, which is for him the dark river of dissolution.

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