Ekphrastic Poetry
Poetry inspires Art / Art inspires Poetry
Tennyson wrote on Arthurian subjects all his life. We have noticed his early account of the Le Morte d’Arthur, and at Cambridge he composed some fragments on "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere," of which these beautiful lines were remembered by his college mates:
"Life of the Life within my blood,
Light of the Light within mine eyes,
The May begins to breathe and bud,
And softly blow the balmy skies;
Bathe with me in the fiery flood.
And mingle kisses, tears and sighs.
Life of the Life within my blood.
Light of the Light within mine eyes."
The Lady of Shalott is an easily recognized first sketch of the love of Elaine for Lancelot, and it prophesies the Idylls especially in their allegorical, mystic suggestion, which is peculiar to Tennyson's version of the Arthur story.
Here are some more interesting things to notice about "The Lady of Shalott":
The key line, "I am half-sick of shadows", says the Lady's mind, and probably the poet's mind, is divided about the right choice.
Funeral barges and dead bodies going down rivers are some sort of archetype. Ophelia, Buoconte di Montefeltro (Dante Purg. V), and Boromir ("Lord of the Rings") are three other favorites from classic literature.
Because the Lady of Shalott is an allegorical figure, she has no given name.
One of my correspondents (Catherine Mulligan) pointed out that at the start, there's no color, only shadows. Later, the lady chooses "the bright colors of reality". When she dies, we hear only of white, one of the hueless "colors" of death.
You can also look at what others have said about the old question of whether an artist or writer must be isolated from the ordinary world. Shakespeare and Chaucer were men of the world, who probably did not consider their writing to be their main professions. Lord Byron and Robert Burns embraced life and sexuality wholeheartedly. By contrast, Keats dropped out of medical school to become a full-time poet, Coleridge was a passive man who became dependent on the good will of others to be able to continue his work, and Emily Dickinson was a recluse. Bertoldt Brecht pretended to be a man of the working class, but he really had nothing to do with the people for whom he claimed to speak. You can supply many more examples.
Today, "The Lady of Shalott" invites us to think about:
What sacrifices must a person make to be a poet, artist, scientist, or scholar? We all have emotional needs. Can we really make these sacrifices? What happens when we fail?
Each of us lives partly in a world of make-believe, much of it inherited from our families and our cultures. What happens when it is challenged and/or we choose to discard it?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english_literature/poetrytennyson/1tennyson_chargesubjectact.shtml
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