Elven Magic and Arthurian Romance Revisited

Mr Pearce looks at Tennyson's  'The Lady of Shalott' comparing it with Keat's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Revisiting the elven magic and Arthurian romance of nineteenth century neo-medievalism, which was the focus of last week’s essay on John Keats’ poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, we can see the same magic and romance at work in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott”, which, like Keats’ earlier poem, would inspire some fine works of art.

Taking the Arthurian legends as his inspiration, especially the story of Elaine of Astolat who dies of her unrequited love for Sir Lancelot, Tennyson places the eponymous heroine in an isolated tower, in which she lives without any evident human contact. The tower is on an island in the river that flows to “many tower’d Camelot”. There is something magical about the mysterious lady, who is heard singing like an angel but is never seen. Hearing her voice, the reaper in the field is enchanted. “’Tis the fairy, Lady of Shalott,” he whispers.

In Part II of the poem we learn that the Lady is living under a spell or a curse. She is doomed to spend her life weaving a “charmed web” and is forbidden to look at the city of Camelot downstream from her prison. The only contact she has with the world beyond her walls, is the reflection of the road to Camelot that she can see in the mirror. These reflected images supply the inspiration for what she weaves in her endlessly woven web, firing her imagination. She sees the “red cloaks of market girls” on the way to the city that she is forbidden to see and the seed of longing begins to take root in her heart:

And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true.
The Lady of Shalott.

The music that she hears, floating upstream from Camelot, deepens her sense of longing and isolation, exerting a power of enchantment that rivals the enchantment of the curse.

Or when the moon was overhead

Came two young lovers lately wed,

“I am half sick of shadows,” said,

The Lady of Shalott.

The Lady meets her doom in Part III with the passing of “bold Sir Lancelot”, who would prove to be her nemesis:

From the bank and from the river

He flash’d into the crystal mirror,

“Tirr lirra, irra lirra”:

Sang Sir Lancelot.

Catching a glimpse of the handsome knight, clad in gleaming armour, astride his charger, the Lady abandons her weaving and steps across the room to gaze on the figure of beauty and, in doing so, sees also the towers of 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.

Embracing her doom, she leaves the tower and lays herself down in a shallow boat, destined to be her coffin. Untying it and letting it drift downstream towards Camelot, she chants her swansong, “a longdrawn carol, mournful, holy”, dying before she reaches the forbidden town.

Under tower and balcony,

By garden wall and gallery,

A pale, pale corpse she floated by,

Deadcold, between the houses high,

Dead into tower’d Camelot.

The townsfolk, knights, minstrels, monks, squires, lords and ladies, come to the waterside, crossing themselves as the beautiful and mysterious corpse drifts past in her floating tomb.

In some sense, the Lady of Shalott and Sir Lancelot in Tennyson’s poem reverse the roles played by the elven maiden and the knight in Keats’ poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. Whereas the knight in Keats’ poem is cursed because he succumbs to an insatiable longing for the beauty of the elven maiden, in Tennyson’s poem the elven maiden is cursed because she succumbs to an insatiable longing for the beauty of the knight. The crucial difference is that Sir Lancelot is guiltless, oblivious of the part he has played in the Lady’s doom, whereas the merciless Lady in Keats’ poem is fully aware of the part she plays as the femme fatale, casting her spell on those she seduces with her charms.

It is tempting to draw an analogy between Tennyson’s poem and Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. In both cases, the protagonists can only view reality via a reflection, not seeing it directly or face to face. Such an analogy only works in a negative or perverse sense, however, because it subverts Plato’s meaning and perverts Tennyson’s story. Whereas Plato endeavours to lead us beyond the shadowlands of physics to the more ultimately substantial metaphysical realities, Tennyson’s poem suggests that any endeavour to escape the cave is deadly. The former suggests a progress from a lesser to a greater reality, signifying enlightenment, the latter appears to do the opposite, signifying only death and oblivion. Such a philosophical misreading of the poem violates Tennyson’s intention, perverting its spirit and meaning. It reduces the “magic” of the story to the level of a mere metaphor, breaking the spell that the poet casts and dispelling any sense of enchantment. It is, in fact, the act of murdering to dissect, as Wordsworth would say.

“The Lady of Shalott” has proved enduringly popular, being voted second only to Kipling’s “If” in a nationwide poll of Britain’s “favourite poems” conducted by the BBC in the 1990s. It has also inspired some of the greatest art of the past two centuries. Walter Crane and John Atkinson Grimshaw show the Lady, lifeless in her floating coffin, whereas William Maw Egley and William Holman Hunt depict her in the tower, the latter of whom shows her at the moment of her doom, the mirror cracked and the tapestry unravelling around her. In Holman Hunt’s painting, the Lady’s posture suggests pride or, in any event, culpability as though she were a practitioner of the pagan magic and not a victim of it. This seems to contradict Tennyson’s poem, in which the Lady is not weaving the magic as a conscious protagonist but is enmeshed by it. She is a prisoner or a victim of whatever elven magic is at work. This is why she gains our sympathy and the sympathy of the people of Camelot as they see her lifeless body floating downstream.

The best representation of Tennyson’s Lady, at least in the considered judgment of the present author, is that by John William Waterhouse. Using poetic license, Waterhouse shows the Lady sitting upright in the small boat which will soon become her coffin. She has not yet laid herself down. She is alive but aware of her impending death. This, in itself, brings Waterhouse’s painting to life in a way that is lost in Crane’s and Grimshaw’s depictions of her corpse. We catch the doomed maiden in the midst of her fatal drama. It is ending but it is not yet ended. As one who is about to die, she evokes and commands the viewer’s sympathy in a way that surpasses the sympathy with one who has already died. There is, moreover, a real sense of the elven magic and Arthurian romance in Waterhouse’s painting which unites it aesthetically with Tennyson’s poem. It is other-worldly, suggestive of other-worlds beyond the merely mundane. It takes us out of ourselves to a realm beyond the confines of the ego. Such is the power of great art, uniting it with the power of prayer.