Part I 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; And up and down the people go, Gazing where the lilies blow Round an island there below, The island of Shalott. Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Little breezes dusk and shiver Thro’ the wave that runs for ever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot. Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott. By the margin, willow veil’d, Slide the heavy barges trail’d By slow horses; and unhail’d The shallop flitteth silken-sail’d Skimming down to Camelot: But who hath seen her wave her hand? Or at the casement seen her stand? Or is she known in all the land, The Lady of Shalott? Only reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly, Down to tower’d Camelot: And by the moon the reaper weary, Piling sheaves in uplands airy, Listening, whispers “ ’Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott.” Part II There she weaves by night and day A magic web with colours 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. 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: There the river eddy whirls, And there the surly village-churls, And the red cloaks of market girls, Pass onward from Shalott. Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, An abbot on an ambling pad, Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad, Or long-hair’d page in crimson clad, Goes by to tower’d Camelot; And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue The knights come riding two and two: She hath no loyal knight and true, The Lady of Shalott. But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror’s magic sights, For often thro’ the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot: Or when the moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed: “I am half sick of shadows,” said The Lady of Shalott. Part III A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, He rode between the barley-sheaves, The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves, And flamed upon the brazen greaves Of bold Sir Lancelot. A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d To a lady in his shield, That sparkled on the yellow field, Beside remote Shalott. The gemmy bridle glitter’d free, Like to some branch of stars we see Hung in the golden Galaxy. The bridle bells rang merrily As he rode down to Camelot: And from his blazon’d baldric slung A mighty silver bugle hung, And as he rode his armour rung, Beside remote Shalott. All in the blue unclouded weather Thick-jewell’d shone the saddle-leather, The helmet and the helmet-feather Burn’d like one burning flame together, As he rode down to Camelot. As often thro’ the purple night, Below the starry clusters bright, Some bearded meteor, trailing light, Moves over still Shalott. His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d; On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode; From underneath his helmet flow’d His coal-black curls as on he rode, As he rode down to Camelot. From the bank and from the river He flash’d into the crystal mirror, “Tirra lirra,” by the river Sang Sir Lancelot. She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro’ the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look’d down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; “The curse is come upon me,” cried The Lady of Shalott. Part IV In the stormy east-wind straining, The pale yellow woods were waning, The broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Over tower’d Camelot; Down she came and found a boat Beneath a willow left afloat, And round about the prow she wrote The Lady of Shalott. And down the river’s dim expanse Like some bold seër in a trance, Seeing all his own mischance— With a glassy countenance Did she look to Camelot. And at the closing of the day She loosed the chain, and down she lay; The broad stream bore her far away, The Lady of Shalott. Lying, robed in snowy white That loosely flew to left and right— The leaves upon her falling light— Thro’ the noises of the night She floated down to Camelot: And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The Lady of Shalott. Heard a carol, mournful, holy, Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darken’d wholly, Turn’d to tower’d Camelot. For ere she reach’d upon the tide The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott. Under tower and balcony, By garden-wall and gallery, A gleaming shape she floated by, Dead-pale between the houses high, Silent into Camelot. Out upon the wharfs they came, Knight and burgher, lord and dame, And round the prow they read her name, The Lady of Shalott. Who is this? and what is here? And in the lighted palace near Died the sound of royal cheer; And they cross’d themselves for fear, All the knights at Camelot: But Lancelot mused a little space; He said, “She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.”
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
A woman lives alone in a tower on an island in the river above Camelot. She is under a curse she does not understand: she may not look directly at the world, only at its reflection in a mirror, and she spends her days weaving what she sees there into a tapestry. People pass on the road below, but no one has ever seen her. One day Sir Lancelot rides by, flashing in the sun, and she turns from the mirror to look at him through the window. The mirror cracks, the curse takes hold, and she leaves the tower, finds a boat, writes her name on it, and floats downriver toward Camelot, singing, until she dies on the way. The people of Camelot crowd the docks to read the name on the boat. Lancelot, the man she died for, glances at her body and remarks that she has a lovely face.
Background
Tennyson wrote the poem in 1832 and rewrote it heavily for his 1842 Poems, the volume that rescued his reputation after the 1832 book was savaged by reviewers. The version everyone reads is the 1842 one, and the difference between the two is the most important fact about the poem. The 1832 ending had the Lady leave a written note in the boat, a parchment explaining who she was and why she died, and gave Lancelot a longer, more thoughtful reaction. Tennyson cut all of it. In the version we have, she explains nothing, and Lancelot says four lines about her face. The revision is not a polish; it is the meaning. Tennyson took a poem that told you what it meant and turned it into one that refuses to.
The source is an Italian novella, La Donna di Scalotta, and the figure behind the Lady is Elaine of Astolat, who in Malory dies of unrequited love for Lancelot. Tennyson returned to that material decades later in Lancelot and Elaine, part of the Idylls of the King, where he told the story straight. “The Lady of Shalott” is the strange early version, half medieval romance and half something he could not quite name, and it is far better than the explained retelling that came after. The Pre-Raphaelites understood this immediately: Waterhouse, Hunt, and Rossetti painted the Lady again and again, drawn to exactly the parts Tennyson left unexplained.
Analysis and Themes
The standard reading is that the Lady is the artist, sealed off from life, weaving reflections instead of living, and destroyed the moment she tries to join the world. That reading is real and the poem supports it. But it is also the reading Tennyson worked hardest to complicate when he revised, and taking it as the whole story flattens a poem built on what it withholds: the curse it will not define, the death it will not justify, and the man who never grasps any of it.
The Curse Tennyson Refuses to Explain
We are told there is a curse, that the Lady may not look toward Camelot, and that she does not know what it is. The poem never tells us either. There is no enchanter, no origin, no rule of release: only “She knows not what the curse may be, / And so she weaveth steadily.” This is a deliberate refusal. Most curses in romance come with terms you could in principle satisfy. This one is pure prohibition without explanation, which makes it less like a fairy-tale device and more like a condition of being. The 1832 version moved toward tidying this up at the end; the 1842 version leaves it raw. Whatever the curse is, it works exactly once, the instant she chooses to look, and the poem treats the looking as both her single free act and her death warrant without ever resolving which it values more.
Shadows Against the Loom
The mirror is the poem’s central machine. The Lady sees only “Shadows of the world” in it and weaves them into her web, which means she lives at two removes from everything: the world becomes reflection, the reflection becomes tapestry. For a long time this contents her, until two small images break it open. A funeral and, worse, “two young lovers lately wed” pass through the glass, and she says the line the whole poem turns on: “I am half sick of shadows.” Not sick, half sick. She is not renouncing art; she is registering that reflection is not enough, that something in her wants the thing itself. When Lancelot arrives he does not appear in the mirror as a manageable shadow. He floods it: “He flash’d into the crystal mirror.” And the instant she turns to the window, the apparatus of mediated life shatters. “The mirror crack’d from side to side” is not punishment arriving from outside so much as the structure of her existence failing the moment she steps out of it.
Lancelot’s Three Lines
The cruelest move in the poem is its ending, and it is cruel by design. From the first stanza the poem is obsessed with being seen: “But who hath seen her wave her hand? / Or at the casement seen her stand?” No one ever has. She dies to be seen, and she finally is, as a corpse drifting into Camelot with her name on the prow. The whole court reacts with superstitious fear, crossing themselves. Then Lancelot, the cause of all of it, “mused a little space” and delivered the poem’s last word on her: “She has a lovely face; / God in his mercy lend her grace.” That is the entire register of her recognition. An interior life intense enough to break a curse and end a life is received by the world as a pretty corpse and a polite blessing. The tragedy of the poem is not that art and life are incompatible. It is that the gap between what she felt and what anyone could see was total, and that she crossed it anyway.
Form and Technique
The poem is a ballad in nine-line stanzas, mostly iambic tetrameter, and its sound is the source of its spell. The thing to notice is the rhyme scheme, which runs aaaabcccb: four lines on one rhyme, a fifth line, three lines on a second rhyme, then a ninth line that returns to the fifth. What makes this hypnotic rather than merely intricate is that the recurring rhyme is locked, in every single stanza across all four parts, to two words: Camelot and Shalott. Nineteen stanzas, and the poem cannot get away from those two place-names. Every stanza is pulled back to them like a tide. The form does to the reader what the curse does to the Lady: it confines everything to an axis between her island and the city she is forbidden to reach.
The shortened ninth line of each stanza, dropping from four beats to three, lands like a held breath or a refrain in a song, and Tennyson uses it to toll the two names over and over. Within that fixed frame he varies the texture sharply. Parts I and II move in soft, repetitive, lulling sounds (“Willows whiten, aspens quiver”); Part III erupts into hard light and metal the moment Lancelot appears, all flame and brass and glitter; Part IV slows and darkens into the long dying fall of the funeral journey. The poem is structured like a piece of music that builds to a single blinding chord (Lancelot) and then decays. It is one of the most purely sonic poems in English, and you can feel its meaning before you have parsed a line of it.
Notable Lines
Three moments carry the poem’s turn from confinement to ruin to the world’s indifference.
“I am half sick of shadows,” said
Lines 71–72
The Lady of Shalott.
The hinge of the whole poem, and the word doing the work is half. She is not finished with her art; she is admitting that reflection has stopped being enough. Everything after this follows from that small, exact restlessness.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
Lines 114–115
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
The instant of catastrophe, and notice it happens to the objects, not to her: the web flies out, the mirror breaks. The life she had built out of weaving and reflection comes apart in a single line the moment she looks at the real thing.
But Lancelot mused a little space;
Lines 168–171
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”
The ending, and one of the most quietly devastating closes in Victorian poetry. After everything, the man at the center of her death pauses briefly and offers a compliment to a stranger’s corpse. The poem gives him the last word on purpose, so that the gulf between her experience and his perception is the final thing you feel.
Glossary
The poem leans on archaic and medieval vocabulary to build its romance world. The terms worth knowing:
- wold (line 3) — an area of open, rolling upland country.
- imbowers (line 17) — encloses or shelters, as within a bower.
- shallop (line 22) — a small open boat.
- casement (line 25) — a window that opens on hinges.
- churls (line 52) — peasants or common country folk.
- greaves (line 76) — armour protecting the shins.
- baldric (line 87) — a belt worn over one shoulder to carry a weapon or, here, a bugle.
- blazon’d (line 87) — decorated with heraldic designs.
- seër (line 128) — a prophet or visionary; one who sees what is to come.
- burgher (line 160) — a citizen or townsman.
- Tirra lirra (line 107) — a carefree musical cry; borrowed from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale to signal Lancelot’s lightheartedness.
Related Poems
If this poem speaks to you, these three sit close to it in mood, method, or subject.
- Mariana by Alfred, Lord Tennyson — from the same 1842 volume, another woman shut away and waiting, where Tennyson again makes isolation almost unbearable through sound and repetition rather than plot.
- La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats — a medieval ballad of enchantment and doom, with the same haunted, song-like surface and the same sense of a curse that cannot be reasoned with.
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge — the great English poem of a curse, water, and a journey that has to be completed; its hypnotic ballad music is the tradition “The Lady of Shalott” is working in.