This article seeks to look beyond the common consideration of the poem as about being on Art, revealing sources of ambiguity.
Source: Donna di Scalotta
Although the poem's elements are Arthurian, Tennyson states the poem was derived from the Italian romance Donna di Scalotta. This makes the poem’s source and setting indeterminate, and as Bloom suggests, echoes the sense of illusive meaning.
Ambiguity is seen also in the Lady’s lack of provenance; the reasons for her life within the tower, the intensity in weaving, and her curse are unexplained. Upon her death, she inscribes not a name, but the cryptic title “The Lady of Shalott” upon the boat, which offers nothing towards her identity. This gives her a mystical, airy feeling that conceals any concrete knowledge about her.
Narrative Structure of The Lady of Shalott
The narrative voice plays a role in creating distance through its third person position. When dialogue is uttered, the Part ends abruptly, as if attempts to attain intimacy through speech are rebuffed with disconnection. At the next Part, the voice has lapses back to the distanced stance. This echoes the idea that the poem’s meaning, as illusive.
Tennyson’s Constant Revision
Critics such as F.E.L Priestly have noted Tennyson made extensive revisions, from 1832-1842. For instance, Tennyson reduces the excessive sibilance that created a geese-like hissing. Other changes are visual; a description of the Lady in “A pearl garland” and “velvet bed” is replaced with the question “who has seen her..?” This embellishes her as mysterious “legend and a voice” rather than as a proper figure.
Priestly sees this as a process of enhancing a poem initially seen “only as a medieval legend..suitable for a rich pictorial development”, as Tennyson understands his poem better and is able to craft the words to fit a greater theme.
Camelot and Shalott
Part of this ‘greater theme’ might be seen comparing where Shalott and Camelot cross.
Shalott appears mysterious and also insignificant to the villagers busy with their “Long fields of barley and rye”. The only faint link is a song, yet the villagers can only identify the singer as “the fairy Lady”, presenting lack of understanding and also detachment from Shalott.
This gap seems irresolvable. When the Lady reaches out to view Camelot(and Lancelot), she broaches a protection that seeing the mirror offers, the result being the activation of the curse and her death: “Out flew the web and floated wide” and “The mirror crack’d from side to side”.
The final part of the poem is most telling, as the Lady, in her death, drifts down the river to Camelot. There are various interpretations, but the common denominator could be the inability to give a precise definition of the Lady.
Inability to Define Shalott
Priestly sums up the arrival of Shalott into Camelot elegantly: “the gray world..intrudes into the joyous active world..for a moment, and grips it with its stillness”.
As everyone gathers, there is a sense of curiosity, but more overwhelmingly, of fear for a “dead-pale” shape with frozen blood and eyes that were “darkened wholly”. The Lady might be still be beautiful, but the way knights “cross’d themselves in fear” implies they are scared chiefly because they do not understand her. Borrowing Gerhard Joseph’s idea that as only her signatory act is seen, she becomes a “poetic text in microcosm” in death as she was in life, the incomprehensibility of the characters in the poem mirrors the inscrutability which a reader has to confront.
Lancelot’s reaction is slightly different, as only he recognizes her “lovely face”, and shows pity in his prayer that “God in his mercy lend her grace.” There might perhaps be said to be a link between them that still persists, despite its unfulfilment in love. This love, and its destructive nature is another enigmatic aspect, which Christopher Ricks questions, considering ideas such as whether love is inherently destructive, or perhaps the quality is the due to the Lady’s constant seclusion.
However, Ricks agrees that whilst the poem as as whole is mysterious, Lancelot's final muses are a fitting end, and afterall, Tennyson was "drawn to the right kind of conclusion in which nothing is concluded”.
It might be best of to end with Tennyson’s famous comment:
Poetry is like shot-silk with many glancing colours. Every reader must find his own interpretation according to his ability, and according to his sympathy with the poet.
The Lady of Shalott is enjoyable on first reading, but readers will be able to find further meaning in their own readings of a poem rich in ambiguity. This is true for poetry in general, but especially so in the Tennyson's longer and later works, for instance Maud.
Bibliography
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems Edited by Christopher Ricks
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Bloom’s Major Poets Edited by Harold Bloom
Tennyson: Longman Critical Readers Edited by Rebecca Stott
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