If you enjoyed this short analysis of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, we’ve put together some interesting Tennyson facts here. However, William Holman Hunt also painted a scene from the poem – namely the crucial moment when the Lady of Shalott turns away from her mirror and looks out of her window down at Lancelot (and, in doing so, bringing down the mysterious ‘curse’ upon herself). The most famous of these is by John William Waterhouse, and depicts the scene near the end of the poem where the Lady of Shalott, in her boat, is floating along the river towards Camelot. Tennyson’s poem inspired several paintings, and a number of artists who formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood later in the 1840s would go on to paint scenes from ‘The Lady of Shalott’. It’s a nice idea, but even if we acknowledge that the word spinster is an undercurrent to the poem, is that really all it is about? Croker, saw the whole poem as constituting an extended pun on the word ‘spinster’: the Lady of Shalott weaves or spins all day, because she is unmarried and locked away from the rest of the world, including the world of love embodied by Camelot and Lancelot.

Such an interpretation, in turn, folds into another analysis of the poem, which focuses on the fact that the Lady of Shalott is just that, a lady. Love is about taking risks: we are not fully alive without it, but we know that it has the power to destroy us, too. Or, as Tennyson put it more famously in his long poem In Memoriam in 1850, ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’Īfter all, it is Lancelot, that dashing knight and adulterer, the queen’s paramour in Arthurian legend, who inspires the Lady of Shalott to leave the safety of her tower and descend into the ‘real’ world. Love may be dangerous and may destroy us, but it’s better to take that risk than to pine away, hiding yourself from the world. As Hutton wrote, the poem ‘has for its subject the emptiness of the life of fancy, however rich and brilliant’.īut such an analysis, of course, could easily sit alongside another interpretation of the poem, namely one which sees ‘The Lady of Shalott’ as essentially being about love.

Hutton (1826-97) argued that the poem’s meaning (if it can be said to have a ‘meaning’ in the straightforward sense) is that we must turn away from the world of illusion, however comforting that world may be, in favour of the real world – even if it ends up destroying you. ‘The Lady of Shalott’, on one level, is about growing up and exchanging the world of illusion for the (potentially damaging) world of reality – at least, in one interpretation. The broad stream in his banks complaining,

The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennyson