Housekeeping
I wrote about semi-conductors for The Critic.
Last week I wrote about late bloomers and Alfred Hitchcock. There are still some guest posts to come and I will bring up one or two things from the archives soon also as there as so many new readers.
The book club schedule is at the bottom of the post at this link. The next meeting is 10th September, 19.00 UK time. We are reading The Annotated Alice.
On Thursday 7th September, I am running an InterIntellect salon. It is the first in a series of three salons, called ‘How to Read a Poem’.
The Lady of Shalott
Today I am going to show you how Romanticism was transmogrified into Victorianism through Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. First, the poem is a re-working of Keats, especially To Autumn. Second, it represents the ideal of an artist, described by Mill in 1833, himself inspired by Wordsworth. Finally, the poem became an archetype of femininity that captured the Victorian imagination.
The Lady of Shalott remains popular today. Dana Gioia sent me Canadian singer Loreena McKennitt’s setting of the poem in Celtic folk style. These two videos of the song have over one-hundred-thousand views each. Dana pointed out this comment from one of those videos:
Taught the poem in my class. Nobody cared. Showed them this video. Everybody crying and learning the song by heart.
The Lady of Shalott can still capture our imaginations, too. As J.S. Mill wrote in his review of the poem, “Every line suggests so much more than it says, that much may be left unsaid.”
Contents
Elaine of Astolat
First, a brief word on sources. The Lady of Shalott is a retelling of the Arthurian myth of Elaine and Lacelot. Elaine is the daughter of Bernard, the lord of Astolat (or, in the Italian sources, Escalot.) Bernard organizes a tournament, which Arthur and his knights attend. Lancelot stays with Bernard before the tournament and Elaine falls in love with him. Elaine gives him her token, which he can only wear in disguise—if Queen Guinevere sees him with another woman’s token, there will be hell to pay. And, of course, Guinevere is married to Arthur. Oh what a tangled web we weave! (You can see that soap opera plots have long lineage.)
So, Lancelot goes to the tournament wearing Elaine’s token, using her brother’s shield, so as to be in disguise. He wins—defeating Arthur’s knights—but is injured and has to be carried back to Bernard’s house. Elaine nurses him to health. When he recovers, Elaine declares her love for him. Lancelot, of course, loves Guinevere. Lancelot tells Elaine he will give a thousand pounds to her and her heirs when she finds another knight to marry. Elaine was distraught and fainted. Ten days later, she died of heartbreak, having eaten nothing, and was sent down the river, clutching a lily, to Camelot—with a letter that told her story. Lancelot is appalled, and pays for a rich burial.
As well as The Lady of Shalott, Tennyson wrote this story in the Idylls as ‘Elaine and Lancelot.’ There are some lovely passages in that poem, such as Lancelot’s explanation to Guinevere of what he told Elaine:
I told her that her love
Was but the flash of youth, would darken down
To rise hereafter in a stiller flame
Toward one more worthy of her
But it was the original poem that endured, with its mythic qualities, and its ability to hold several interpretations. ‘Elaine and Lancelot’ is Arthurian narrative. The Lady of Shalott is a symbol of the age.
A metaphor for art
One classic reading of this poem is that the lady is a metaphor for the artist. Poets and other artists, by necessity, are shut off from life. They do not experience the world directly. Christopher Ricks points out that the mirror is there so the lady can see the tapestry she is weaving—her view in it of the outside world is incidental. And ultimately being able to see the world destroys her and her art.
This idea was not just the Romantic image of an artists in a garret. In an 1833 essay, John Stuart Mill wrote,
Great poets are often proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has come by observation of themselves: they have found within them one, highly, delicate and sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the laws of emotion are written in large characters
To create this sort of real poetry—which Mill distinguishes from narrative, description, and eloquence—the poet must work in some sort of isolation. Poetry is “the natural fruit of solitude and meditation.” Mill said,
Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind.
Harold Bloom could have written that (I would bet the farm on the fact that he was strongly influenced by Mill’s essay).
This is all very Wordsworth (a major influence on Mill) and you can see how The Lady of Shalott became archetypal of this sort of poet and art. She is a symbol of the isolated artists. Tennyson himself preferred to live in “solitude and meditation”. In this reading, the delicate art of poetry is shattered—the artist’s mirror cracks—when you become too much a part of the world.
This image recurs later on in George Eliot’s 1859 novel Adam Bede:
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.
But let us descend to the world of real things, as Eliot does. There is more to say about Tennyson. His poem is more than a metaphor for art. As the lady of Shalott floated through the nineteenth century she became more and more a symbol of idealised femininity. In this, she was quite different from the biggest contemporary influence on Tennyson, John Keats.
Keats and Tennyson: autumnal poetry
Reviewing Tennyson’s Poems 1842—the perennial seller that built his audience, and brought him fame—Lockhart said Tennyson was, “a new prodigy of genius, another and brighter star of that galaxy or milky way of poetry of which the lamented Keats was the harbinger.” That was how some people use to write their book reviews. Still, he’s got the basic point right. Tennyson was Keatsian.
Felix Grendon noted many similarities of technique. Like Keats, Tennyson repeats words like bell, dew, moon, silver, gold, moss, nest, oak, thicket, grot, bee, and sunbeam. Keats is known for his compound words: “sweet-lipp’d ladies”, “hemlock-breeding moistures”, “dew-dabbled poppies”, and so on. Tennyson uses these too: “light-glooming brow”, “sudden-curved frown”.
More specifically, we can compare The Lady of Shallot to Keats’s ode To Autumn. Both are set in harvest time. Keats’s poem has “vines that round the thatch-eves run”. Tennyson’s isle is “inrail’d/With a rose-fence, and overtrail’d/With roses.” In both, the reaper walks the fields. The reaper is more implied in Keats, where the goddess Autumn is found on “on a half-reap’d furrow” or in a “winnowing wind.” Haunting images, but subtle.
In Tennyson’s third stanza, the message is much clearer:
Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early,
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel, singing clearly,
O’er the stream of Camelot.
That’s the stream she will float away on at the end of the poem, dead of heartbreak. The reaper, become metaphor, will put an end to her song. The refrain of the stream becomes more and more deathly. This is not just beautiful description; these are, as Mill said, “not mere pictures, but states of emotion, embodied in sensuous imagery.”
There are many other aspects of Keats that Tennyson transforms. Keats asks,
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too
That is what the lady sings, the music of autumn. There’s a stream in Keats, too:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook
That describes the goddess Autumn as a hanging bough over a brook, a gleaner being someone who goes into the field and collects whatever remains after the reaper has done their work. Their hair was often full of wheat from their work. The idea of the stream running toward death, of a song that turns to (or resists) winter, recurs in Keats’ final stanza.
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
Death is everywhere implied, but the picture is of “warm days” that “will never cease.” Tennyson, as he always does, brings death to the front of the frame. Lancelot arrives in “blue unclouded weather” but once the lady looks out and breaks the mirror, bringing the curse upon herself, the weather changes.
In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower’d Camelot;
And so the lady gets in the boat to carry her away “chanting her deathsong”. “A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy,’ She chanted loudly, chanted lowly.” This is like Keats’s “wailful choir”. His poem, too, ends with a second chorus, of bleating lambs, singing hedge-crickets,—“and now with treble soft/The red-breast whistles.” Keats allowed you to wallow in the autumnal beauty, knowing what would come, but not dwelling on it. Tennyson makes a steady drum beat of death.
To Autumn is a contrast to La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a post-harvest poem, in which “The sedge has withered from the lake,/And no birds sing.” In that poem, a faery woman seduces the knight and traps him with all the other princes and knights she has seduced. (The reaper calls the Lady of Shalott a “fairy”.)
At the end of The Lady of Shalott a group comes out of Camelot to see the dead woman, “Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest”—a clear contrast to the prisoners of La Belle Dame.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!”
Both Keats and Tennyson talk about the progress of the seasons as a symbol for the way love leads on to death. Keats wallows in the present, Tennyson in the future. Keats resists death: Tennyson anticipates it from the first stanza, with the stream running to Camelot.
In Keats’s vision, the knight is the tragic figure. In Tennyson, it is the lady. Once he has broken her heart, Lancelot leaves the poem. La Belle Dame is a Circe. Tennyson’s lady is a Penelope. Tennyson has swapped the Romantic interest in powerful witchy women for isolated idealised maidens.
The angel in the house
In The Lady of Shalott Tennyson created what Jennifer Gribble called “an emblematic lady of romantic heritage.” The lady is an emblem both of the Arthurian world, but also of something in the Victorian mood. This poem had such an impact because it caught a symbol of the past and of the present.
The pre-Raphaelites painted the lady of Shalott again and again and again. Their mediaeval fantasy was perfectly captured in her melancholy, her mystery, and her wide-eyed docile femininity. Gribble points out that the lady recurs throughout Victorian fiction: Dorothea trapped in her boudoir, Miss Havisham in her wedding feast. From Charlotte Bronte to Henry James the Victorian heroine is so often imbowered like the Lady of Shalott. Think of Esther in Bleak House or The Portrait of a Lady.
This was a broader part of Victorian culture. Think of the angel in the house. Think of the way that Victorian woman could be influential and intellectual—but in private. They were excluded from the public sphere. And if they broke the rules, the mirror cracked from side to side. The first Married Women’s Property Act wasn’t passed until 1870.
This happened in America, too, but in a much more distorted manner. James W. Hood has shown how antebellum plantation patriarchs in the Southern USA misread Tennyson’s early poems about women to make them correspond with their own ideas of female obedience. Tennyson’s subtlety was stripped away. They took what they wanted, what accorded with their ideas. In his early poem Isabel, Tennyson idealises his character, who is probably a portrait of his mother, as “pure” and “perfect”. But she also has “fortitude” and “intellect”. When Isabel was imitated in the antebellum South they kept the pure and they dropped the fortitude.
The moon recurs throughout The Lady of Shalott—but only for her. Lancelot stands in the sun, the lady is seen by moonlight: classic masculine/feminine imagery. This is not Jane Eyre, escaping under the watchful eye of the goddess of virginity to grasp her autonomy. The lady of Shalott was killed by her unrequited love for Lancelot. There is no sense that she can recover. Without the love of Lancelot, life is unavailable to her. She is all purity, no fortitude. The metaphor of the delicate artists all too easily becomes an image of the helpless female.
Reviewing Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in 1830, Arthur Henry Hallam compared Tennyson to Shelley and Keats, saying of the great romantics: “they lived in a world of images; for the most important and extensive portion of their life consisted in those emotions which are immediately conversant with sensation.” This is the idea that a poem should not be true to nature, as M.H. Abrams said, but true to itself. That leads us to the interpretation that the lady represents the artist. But the sensation that Tennyson captured was not just that of Arthurian legend, nor just a metaphor for art, but of the idealised lady of Victorian England.
Tennyson transformed romanticism into Victorianism and (perhaps inadvertently) gave his century an archetype of women that was debated and reworked for several decades. Mill said that, to make his poems symbolic of spiritual truth, rather than just full of sensuous feelings, Tennyson “must cultivate, and with no half devotion, philosophy as well as poetry.” But Tennyson’s sensuous poem captured the Victorian imagination as much as any philosophy.
