She should have just gotten a cleric. ('The Lady of Shalott')

Hello again, you few people who actually read my blog. For my first post, as you remember, I reviewed the opium-inspired poem 'Kubla Khan' by Coleridge. Today, in order to get my blog down to a PG rating, I've decided that a poem less rooted in drug use - namely, Tennison's 'The Lady of Shalott'. Great poem if you ask me, as long as you ignore the more practical 'real world' issues that would come up in the poem. To set the tone for my review, I'll start by giving you the first four lines:

        On either side the river lie
        Long fields of barley and of rye,
        That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
        And thro' the field the road runs by
                To many-tower'd Camelot;

Pretty good, don't you think? Every line runs with just about the same rhyme scheme, unlike the wildly shifting Kubla Khan. It ends each stanza with a rhyme of 'Shalott' and is about a beautiful noblewoman forever trapped in a tower by a curse. She can see the world through a mirror in the room of her tower, but she will be cursed if she turns to look at Camelot with her own eyes. Or, to use the better-written words from the poem itself:

        And moving thro' a mirror clear
        That hangs before her all the year,
        Shadows of the world appear.
        There she sees the highway near
                Winding down to Camelot:

Trapped up in her tower, she weaves 'a magic web with colours gay' to pass the time. Or maybe it isn't just to pass the time, maybe it's symbolic or part of the curse.

A very old painting of the Lady of Shalott in her tower

Either way, she apparently does it all night and day, which raises some practical questions. If nobody can come into her mysterious tower and she can never stop weaving, how does she eat or drink? And if she can never get up to use the bathroom or even (as a last resort) change into fresh clothes, I imagine that her dress would get pretty nasty after a month or so. But maybe it's time to leave the gaping holes in logic aside and just let all the beautiful things about this poem shine through. 

A more modern, steampunk painting of our dear Miss Shalott

There were two things I truly loved about the poem, logic aside: the story it told and the descriptive language it used. The story is really touching - the Lady of Shalott spends years in her tower weaving endlessly to make her magic colour web while Camelot shimmers beneath her, near but out of her reach. Then Lancelot comes by, leading to four whole stanzas talking about how handsome he is. What is it with this Lancelot guy anyways? Nobody ever wrote four stanzas about me. Anyways, the Lady of Shalott finds his plumes and crests and shining armour unbelievably sexy, and turns from her loom and looks at Camelot. At this, the mirror breaks, she fails her saving throw against curses, and the curse comes upon her -  her eyes darken, her smooth face slowly sharpens, and she sings her deathsong for everybody to hear. Then she dies, and Lancelot remarks that she had a pretty face. It seems like a small reward to die over, but it was the Middle Ages after all. People died like that all the time, and dying of a broken heart was probably slightly preferable to dying in childbirth or of bubonic plague. 

Well, I hope you enjoyed reading my review! See you next time with another one. Feel free to write stanzas about my good looks if you want to. 

-Paddywagon Man