Lord Alfred Tennysons The Lady of Shalott: Symbolism and Pictorial Quality

Lord Alfred Tennysons The Lady of Shalott is a symbolic tale of a lady

condemned by a mysterious curse to weave ceaselessly a magic tapestry. The poem itself
has something of the tapestry , notably in the description of the passersby ,but it is far
from being a piece of sentimental medievalising. Part I shows us the island castle of
Shalott inhabited by the mysterious lady , and the road to Camelot , image of the
external world of action . In part ii we move to the lady herself weaving compulsively
under the strange curse, seeing external reality only through the mirror she uses for her
weaving, and seeing it as pageant in which she has no part. In the third section, which
takes place in harvest times, the magnificent Sir Lancelot, lover of Queen Guinevere,
appears, riding to Camelot, and singing as he goes. The Lady leaves her tapestry and
looks down to Camelot, and the curse is fulfilled. In part (iv), the dying lady floats down
the river to Camelot singing her last song.
The stanzas continually contrast the active and external Camelot with the contemplative
and with drawn shallot, except in part (iii), where Lancelot replaces Camelot in stanza
(ix), and shallot in (xii). The four parts alternate between the external world and the
world of the lady. There is also a division between the contemplative present tenses of
part-1 and part ii and the active past tenses of parts ii and iv, prefigured by the first
preterits in the poem in the last stanza of ii : ' want ' , ' came ' , ' said ' ,
This poem shows clearly the influence of Keats in its colour , its nature pictures , its use
of contrast and its hyphen - words . Like Keats, Tennyson had a keen appreciation of
natural beauty and he used his eyes, and the result is the unerring description which
comes from the poet's command of language joined with first hand observation. In part
1 we notice the exact description at the beginning of stanza and such a choice of
adjectives as ' bearded barley . The pictures are given at length, elaborated with detail,
colour and richness ---The poem combines two different aspects of Keats, the weird, magical suggestion of La
Belle Dame Sans Merci and the definiteness and colour of a poem like The Eve of st .
Agnes. The lady is fairy lady; the land is a romantic, visionary land: the exact nature of
the spell undefined. The curse seems more to be dreaded because it is mysterious curse
which can not be met. The haunting refrain adds to the magic. Yet the landscape is given
in some detail, and the colouring of part - (iii) is rich and glittering.
The contrast between the colour of part (iii) and what immediately precedes and
follows: the warmness of the last stanza of part (ii) and the brilliant, rich colouring of
part - (iii), and the dazzling sunlight of part (iii) and the heavy stay and rain of the first
stanza of part (IV) are striking. The weather harmonizes with each scene, helping to give
the appropriate atmosphere of sympathetic background.

The Lady of Shallot is not an allegory though as in Marina the images sometimes
have the power of symbols says Steane . The mirror, for instance, suggests much beyond
its role as an item in a fairy story. For as the Lady weaves the mirror's magic sights in
her tapestry she is herself partly taking the role of the artist , and her existence in the
island castle has something in common with the artist's apartness . Moreover, as she
sees reality only through her mirror so the artist may tend to experience vicariously
drawing his knowledge not from direct contact but from other words of art. He has his
own special nature, like the lady; partly an affection to him this sense of difference,
partly a blessing and possibly the very condition of his being an artist at all .For life in
the ordinary day to day life he may be all unfit, as was the Lady, and, for him as for her,
only disaster may follow the attempt to break the bounds. This is not ' the message ' of
The Lady of Shallot but it is , definitely , a part of the ground out of which the poem grew
.