Poems Critical Essays

This volume of Tennyson’s poetry contains, with the exception of the songs of THE PRINCESS and certain lyrics of IN MEMORIAM, some of the best poetry he ever wrote. In this 1842 volume is reprinted, often with considerable revision, the earlier poetry of 1830 and 1832 publications which critics had treated, with some justice, harshly. These revisions may be studied with some profit, for they illustrate how Tennyson was developing artistic consciousness during the famous “ten years silence” which followed the death of his best friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, in 1833. In this period Tennyson published few poems but worked steadily revising his early poems and wrote much of IN MEMORIAM as well as the new poems, first published in 1842. Since these new poems were composed after Hallam’s death, many reflect the various moods the poet experienced as a result of his loss.

Of the poems revised and republished, perhaps of all of Tennyson’s poems, “The Lady of Shalott” is best known. In this poem we see the characteristic Tennysonian landscape and the portrait of the isolated lady, as well as the handling of meter and special attention to the sounds of words for which the poet is known. Although landscapes may vary with the mood the poems portray in other Tennyson poems, nature usually harmonizes with and conveys the subject’s psychological state, as in IN MEMORIAM. Here, however, nature and human activity in the real world from which the lady is withdrawn contrast with the isolation; the lady of the poem finds herself drawn out of her contemplative life into the real world. Ordinarily in a Tennyson poem the landscape echoes the melancholy isolation and spiritual vacuum of the person, but in “The Lady of Shalott” the Keatsian richness of the sensuous detail emphasizes the variety and motion of the world outside the tower where the lady weaves secondhand images of that reality in her “magic web.”

It is the movement, the progress of daily life, of barges passing by on the river and people traveling to Camelot, that the lady perceives as a “shadow,” a reflection of life in her magic mirror. Knowing she cannot look upon real life because she suffers under a mysterious curse, she abandons herself to isolation until she grows tired of mere “shadow” and looks out upon “bold Sir Lancelot.” Dying, she floats down the river to Camelot, where her arrival mystifies the citizens.

Another characteristic poem is “Mariana in the South.” As in “The Lady of Shalott,” a natural landscape serves as background for a dramatically conceived feminine portrait, but in “Mariana in the South” nature corresponds to the person’s mood; we understand Mariana’s psychological state through her responses to nature. Her spiritual condition seems to reflect the barren dryness of the “empty-river bed” and of “shallows on a distant shore” and in the blinding light and oppressive heat of the southern landscape. Alone she worships her beauty at her “secret shrine,” the mirror; deserted by her lover she lives “forgotten, and love forlorn.” She...