Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

The Lady of Shalott by George Edward Robertson

Another poem in which the poet has taken a story and adapted it.

Tennyson was a great poet, if technique is a criteria of greatness. Try writing stanzas using the rhythm and rhyme scheme he does here and see how hard it is. He doesn’t put a foot wrong if you pronounce glow’d/trode/flow’d/rode to rhyme.

There’s a sung version by Loreena Mckennit which brings out how melodious the lyric is far better than any reading can.

But being a great technician is not everything and for all the memorable lines, there’s something unpleasant about the story which is characteristic of Tennyson’s treatment of Arthurian material in general and the women in it in particular.

You are almost compelled to read the poem as a metaphor because as a story about people, even people in a fantasy pseudo-medieval world of magic, it doesn’t work unlike Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. The poem asks to be understood in a symbolic fashion. But precisely what is symbolised isn’t clear and attempts to naturalise it, one essay on the web claims ‘she freezes to death as she floats down the river’, emphasise how unreal it is.

it’s not irrelevant that so many male painters in the 19th century liked painting dead women or that this particular story was so attractive to them. (Do a google image and you’ll see how popular the subject was.)

There are two versions of the poem. One published in 1833, one in 1842. The earlier poem has an extra verse and ends:

They cross'd themselves, their stars they blest,
  Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest.
   There lay a parchment on her breast,
   That puzzled more than all the rest,
                 The wellfed wits at Camelot.
     'The web was woven curiously,
      The charm is broken utterly,
       Draw near and fear not,—this is I,
                 The Lady of Shalott.'

which is awful and a tribute to Tennyson that he cut it.

Although it may not have been his source, it’s revealing to compare this poem to Malory’s story of Elayne of Ascolat. The comparison illuminates the limitations of Tennyson’s version. Tennyson may have been a great technician, but Malory was great.