The Lady of Shalott

“There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colors gay.
She has heard a whisper say
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson’s image of “the faery lady of Shalott,” an obscure figure from Arthrian romance, seems to have haunted the imagination of a number of late nineteenth century artists. Many versions of the poem found their way into visual form.

There is something eerily familiar about this woman whose weird lot it is to sit night and day before a mirror experiencing life only through the reflections that pass across its crystal surface.

Not unlike one of the prisoners of Plato’s cave, she is perpetually confined to a shadow world where the threat of some unspecified punishment is always imminent for those who violate its inscrutable laws. In the poem, “half sick of shadows,” she follows an impulse to turn and look at the radiant knight, Sir Lancelot, who is riding past her tower. The great mirror cracks in half and she begins to wither like a hot house orchid. Loosing a boat from its mooring, she floats downriver toward Camelot, singing her death song in the twilight. A frightened population comes out to the waterfront to see her lifeless body floating past. No one seems to know exactly who she is.

There are layers of implication here. On one level she seems to embody those Victorian women who inhabited the “gilded cage,” existing in comfort, but somehow forbidden to live fully and directly. But there is something more ancient and essential here as well. In countless myths and fairy tales a woman before a mirror is linked to divination and sorcery. The forms passing across the mirror or scrying bowl an enchantress have a more primary reality than what takes place in the everyday realm. The practice of weaving, once considered a sacred art, has also long been associated with the creation of ‘the web of life.’

It seems significant that this strange woman, that everyone appears to have heard of, is nevertheless nameless and unfamiliar to the people who find her body floating past the wharves of Camelot.

She evokes in us a hint of vague recognition, like the fragment of a half remembered dream. She is like some inner personage of the soul-realm who remains nameless in our daylight world.