Getting it wrong in "The Lady of Shalott"

Victorian Poetry, Spring, 2009 by Erik Gray

In keeping with the other 1842 revisions, the new stanza softens the harsh ironies and contrasts of the original version. The irony that remains is a mournful situational irony, as Lancelot at last returns the Lady's appreciative gaze, but too late.

Critical opinion concerning Lancelot's response is divided. A slight majority of critics considers his words to be culpably superficial and reductive, while a dissenting minority defends his speech as being, under the circumstances, as sensitively reflective as could be expected. (25) I concur rather with the latter opinion, all the more because there occurs an important echo of Lancelot's words in a later poem of Tennyson's. In 1851 Alfred and Emily Tennyson's first child, a son, was stillborn. Tennyson wrote, but did not publish, a short poem on the occasion, "Little bosom not yet cold," which concludes with these lines:

   Whate'er thou wert, whate'er thou art,
   Whose life was ended ere thy breath begun,
   Thou nine-months neighbour of my dear one's heart,
   And howsoe'er thou liest blind and mute,
   Thou lookest bold and resolute,
   God bless thee dearest son. (ll. 8-13)

Tennyson finds himself in the unexpected position of addressing a stranger who is not wholly a stranger, whom he encounters, after much expectation, only when it is too late. His final two lines adhere almost exactly to Lancelot's formula. He praises the child's appearance--the only aspect of the stranger to which he has access--and then, like Lancelot, follows with a blessing and a concluding address ("dearest son"). There is no reason to think that Tennyson was conscious of the parallel. But the echo nevertheless suggests that Tennyson was not inclined to be critical of Lancelot's closing words. To the contrary, he seems to imply that, on this occasion at least, he got it right.

Notes

(1) Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.20-21.

(2) "The Lady of Shalott," ll.109-113, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987). all quotations from Tennyson's poetry are from this edition.

(3) Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), p. 114.

(4) On the traditional reading of "The Lady of Shalott" as an allegory of the conflict between art and reality, see below, note 11. More recent, more self-conscious allegorizations have made use of the poem to describe the workings and developments of Tennyson's poetry, and of Victorian poetry more generally; see Gerhard Joseph, Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver's Shuttle (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 102-123, and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, "'The Lady of Shalott' and the Critical Fortunes of Victorian Poetry," in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 25-45. On the complex place of agency in Tennyson's poetry--what Joseph calls the "hovering state between the fatality of suffering victim and the agency of the striving, seeking, unyielding hero" (p. 172)--see William Brashear, The Living Will: A Study of Tennyson and Nineteenth-Century Subjectivism (The Hague: Mouton, 1969).