The Lady Of Shalott

2 Pages 395 Words

Tennyson wrote The Lady of Shalott in 1832. An example of Arthurian literature, it tells the story of a woman who lives in isolation in a tower on an island called Shalott. In this poem, Tennyson is very much the Romantic poet he admired in Keats and Shelley. The Lady, who could not be more unattainable, perfectly embodies the Victorian image of the ideal woman, virginal, mysterious and dedicated to her womanly tasks. A curse has been put upon her meaning that she must stay in the tower and not look down to the nearby town of Camelot. The Lady of Shalott contains various different themes and ideas, which I feel that Tennyson conveys to the reader through the vivid descriptions and images that he uses. His keen interest in narrative is displayed in his poems, which tend to be romantic and provide an escape to a simpler, happier world. The Lady of Shalott and the poems within Idylls of the King take place in medieval England and capture a world of knights in shining armour and their damsels in distress.
The Lady of Shalott is a 180 line narrative poem divided into four sections of nine-line stanzas. The four sections separate the important developments of the narrative making it easier to understand because it is set out more like chapters of a story. The rhyme scheme of the poem is aaaabcccb. It is almost entirely composed in iambic tetrameter, except for the last line of each stanza, which is written in iambic trimeter. The fifth and ninth lines of almost every stanza end with Camelot and Shalott respectively. This constant repetition helps to establish the monotony of the Lady's weaving. This repetition is only interrupted twice by the word Lancelot (in the fifth line of the ninth stanza and the ninth line of the twelfth stanza). I feel that this is meant to symbolise how the Lady's new-found love for him brings to an end her task and allows her to escape the tower. I will now go on to discuss the themes within the poem and how the...