Ed Friedlander MD scalpel_blade@yahoo.com

If you are approaching Tennyson's poem, "The Lady of Shalott", this page will help you get started. It is intended especially for students (high-school age and older) who have read the poem in class.

The Story

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott 1888 The Lady of Shalott is a magical being who lives alone on an island upstream from King Arthur's Camelot. Her business is to look at the world outside her castle window in a mirror, and to weave what she sees into a tapestry. She is forbidden by the magic to look at the outside world directly. The farmers who live near her island hear her singing and know who she is, but never see her.

The Lady sees ordinary people, loving couples, and knights in pairs reflected in her mirror. One day, she sees the reflection of Sir Lancelot riding alone. Although she knows that it is forbidden, she looks out the window at him. The mirror shatters, the tapestry flies off on the wind, and the Lady feels the power of her curse.

An autumn storm suddenly arises. The lady leaves her castle, finds a boat, writes her name on it, gets into the boat, sets it adrift, and sings her death song as she drifts down the river to Camelot. The locals find the boat and the body, realize who she is, and are saddened. Lancelot prays that God will have mercy on her soul.

This is one of Tennyson's most popular poems. The Pre-Raphaelites liked to illustrate it. Waterhouse made three separate paintings of "The Lady of Shalott". Agatha Christie wrote a Miss Marple mystery entitled "The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side", which was made into a movie starring Angela Lansbury. Tirra Lirra by the River, by Australian novelist Jessica Anderson, is the story of a modern woman's decision to break out of confinement.

Notes

The story of the Lady of Shalott is a version of "Elaine the fair maid of Astolat", from Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Elaine's naive love for Lancelot was unrequited. She died of a broken heart (i.e., committed suicide -- Malory's book contains her justification of suicide). Her dead body (with suicide note between her hands) was floated down the Thames to Camelot. Eventually Tennyson wrote a long poem about "Lancelot and Elaine". It contains the line which I have found helpful, "He makes no friend who never made a foe."

However, Tennyson claimed he did not know the English version of the story in 1832, when he wrote the first draft of the poem. He took it from an early renaissance Italian story "Quì conta come la Damigella di Scalot morì per amore di Lancialotto de Lac." The body ends up on the Camelot beach, with a letter, and is examined by a crowd.

I met the story first in some italian novelle: but the web, mirror, island, etc., were my own. Indeed, I doubt whether I should ever have put it in that shape if I had been then aware of the Maid of Astolat in "Morte Arthur".

Tennyson found the basic story in the Italian source, including the death-letter (which he eliminated from the 1842 version). But he made up the curse, the mirror, the song, and the weaving. Tennyson also explained,

The Lady of Shalott is evidently the Elaine of the Morte d'Arthur, but I do not think that I had ever heard of the latter when I wrote the former. Shalott was a softer sound than "Scalott".

William Maw Egley, The Lady of Shalott

Like many other famous poems, this one deals (on one level) about writing poetry. Tennyson's son Hallam quoted his father as saying it's about:

the new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world for which she had been so long excluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities.

Hallam also said:

The key to this tale of magic symbolism is of deep human significance and is to be found in the lines
Or when the Moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
"I am half sick of shadows," said
The Lady of Shalott.

The Kraken is a science-fiction sort of creature that will become conscious only moments before its spectacular death.

The Lotus-Eaters are in a drug-haze.

Tithonus is lost in extreme old age.

Miriana and Oenone are poems about lonely women.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" glorifies the men who died as a result of a terrible military error.

"Ulysses" glorifies a heroic quest for even-Ulysses-doesn't-know-what. If you know the story from Dante, you remember that Ulysses and all his crew drowned.

"The Idealist" spoofs a philosopher who thinks the world is his hallucination.

Here are some more interesting things to notice about "The Lady of Shalott":

The key line, "I am half-sick of shadows", says the Lady's mind, and probably the poet's mind, is divided about the right choice.

Each of the four stanzas ends with somebody saying something. Otherwise nobody says anything.

Most of the knights are riding as buddy pairs. Lancelot is riding alone. He has no partner except his reflection in the river. The reflection in the river is in turn reflected in the mirror.

The poem has been very popular among illustrators, perhaps for its suggestiveness. Note Lance's lance in the one picture.

"Tirra lirra" comes from "The Winter's Tale" by Shakespeare. The red-cross knight is the hero of the beginning of Spenser's "Faery Queene".

Not everybody thinks that "Tirra lirra by the river" is a great line. But notice that "river" rhymes with "river", either because there is no other obvious rhyme, or because there is a reflection in the river. Mirror doesn't really rhyme with river, but it sort of rhymes with tirra lirra. Uh, yeah, I agree that "plankèd wharfage" sounds silly today.

Lancelot prays that God will have mercy on the Lady. At the time, Lancelot is the queen's illicit lover, and thus false to the king he loves. Eventually a contrite Lancelot became a man of God. Lancelot is the one who will receive mercy. Lancelot's prayer that God will have mercy on the lady probably comes from the old version in which she is an actual suicide.

You've probably already thought about how the Lady's castle and mirror compares with Plato's Cave. In Plato, the reflections are the phenomenal world; in Tennyson, the phenomenal world casts the reflections. Leaving both cave and castle supposedly results in disaster.

How can you read something that was written "below the stern" of a boat? It would be below the water line. One early reviewer pointed this out.

John Stuart Mill understandably disliked the last stanza of the 1832 version in the London Reveiw, July 1835.

If you are allowed to do "Compare and Contrast" papers (i.e., if you are only beginning your study of literature), get Tennyson's "Life of the Life", a companion-piece to "The Lady of Shalott".

Funeral barges and dead bodies going down rivers are some sort of archetype. Ophelia, Buoconte di Montefeltro (Dante Purg. V), and Boromir ("Lord of the Rings") are three other favorites from classic literature.

Because the Lady of Shalott is an allegorical figure, she has no given name.

One of my correspondents (Catherine Mulligan) pointed out that at the start, there's no color, only shadows. Later, the lady chooses "the bright colors of reality". When she dies, we hear only of white, one of the hueless "colors" of death.

What's It All About, Alfie?

Obviously the Lady looking at the world in a mirror and depicting it in a work of art is some kind of allegory for the life of the artist-writer. I think that "The Lady of Shalott" is partly about how being an artist (writer, poet, scholar, etc.) can make you feel isolated from ordinary life. You can develop this idea yourself, based on your own experience and observations.

It's the Lady's romantic yearnings that finally make her look out the window. In the 1830's, a poet was supposed to be a spokesman for a "Victorian" ideal in which sexuality is suppressed. Tennyson wrote "The Lady of Shalott" in his early 20's, just after being forced to leave Cambridge for financial reasons. He would not marry until 1849. The young Tennyson must have wondered whether he could hold to the supposed contemporary standard for a single man rather than seeking out sexual relationships. He must have been afraid that choosing the latter would ruin his morals and his writing.

You can look at Tennyson's own life and letters and decide for yourself to what extent "The Lady of Shalott" reflects the hopes and fears of a young man who grew up bookish, super-smart, isolated, and probably repressed.

You can also look at what others have said about the old question of whether an artist or writer must be isolated from the ordinary world. Shakespeare and Chaucer were men of the world, who probably did not consider their writing to be their main professions. Lord Byron and Robert Burns embraced life and sexuality wholeheartedly. By contrast, Keats dropped out of medical school to become a full-time poet, Coleridge was a passive man who became dependent on the good will of others to be able to continue his work, and Emily Dickinson was a recluse. Bertoldt Brecht pretended to be a man of the working class, but he really had nothing to do with the people for whom he claimed to speak. You can supply many more examples.

Today, "The Lady of Shalott" invites us to think about:

What sacrifices must a person make to be a poet, artist, scientist, or scholar? We all have emotional needs. Can we really make these sacrifices? What happens when we fail?

Each of us lives partly in a world of make-believe, much of it inherited from our families and our cultures. What happens when it is challenged and/or we choose to discard it?

On an Ambling Pad: One resource says, "Taking a casual walk"; I think that since William Collins refers in his poem "In the Downhill of Life" to wanting "an ambling pad pony to pace o'er the lawn", and since a character in Henry Fielding's "Journey from This World to the Next" rides home on an ambling pad, it's probably "riding a horse." My dictionary says that "pad" can be British dialect for a walking path, or a saddle pad, or simply to walk in a leisurely way ("amble" is a synonym), or a horse that walks at an easy pace.

Baldric: Belt worn over one shoulder and the opposite waist

Mischance: Bad luck (i.e., Tennyson's psychic foresees his own disaster)

Greaves: Armor for the fronts of the shins

Wold: Unforested plains, especially between forests.

The Culture War:

If you or your teacher are active in the perennial three-way struggle for control of the school curriculum and everything else, you can write an essay on "The Lady of Shalott" without being untruthful.

Partisans of the Religious Right can point out the dangers of the occult, how the Lady was disobedient to some higher authority by seeking out sexual experience, how a good person stays aloof from the world, etc., etc.

Partisans of the politically-correct Left can talk about how chivalry supposedly idealized women in order to confine and oppress them.

Partisans of scientific naturalism can discuss Tennyson as the great poet of Darwin's era, giving brilliant expression in his later works all the religious doubts of the by-then post-Christian world. Even in this early poem, the Lady gives up a world of unreality to look at and finally experience the world as it really is.

Not everybody will agree with all these positions.

I hope you like The Lady of Shalott, and that I've been of some help.

To include this page in a bibliography, you may use this format: Friedlander ER (1999) Enjoying "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred Tennyson Retrieved Dec. 25, 2003 from http://www.pathguy.com/shalott.htm

For Modern Language Association sticklers, the name of the site itself is "The Pathology Guy" and the Sponsoring Institution or Organization is Ed Friedlander MD.