I'm half sick of shadows . . .

There is synchronicity in the threads at any rate. When I opened the Blog and saw Waterhouse I could only smile a very tired smile. It hardly seems anything more than expected now days. Tonight I had Loreena McKennitt’s “The Visit” on in the car and when I got home I went back to the car for the CD so that I could dance to The Lady of Shalott ~ and Tango to Evora. There is rather elaborate knee wrap and spin that happens in The Lady of Shalott, it sort of makes me crazy when I can’t do it, but it hampers my driving when I try. After I finished in the kitchen, I took the CD out and brought it in the office. I’ve been listening to it all evening.

I read this poem, and had it read to me, many, many times before I heard Loreena sing it, yet now it is hard to imagine it without the music.

Tennyson was a master. He wove much, much more than merely a tale of Camelot into ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ For, though our situations are very different, I was deep into Shalott tonight as well.

For often through 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.

Tennyson’s son Hallam wrote that these lines were the crux of the poem. “The key to this tale of magic symbolism is of deep human significance and is to be found in the lines:

Or when the Moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
"I am half sick of shadows," said
The Lady of Shalott.

I most definitely agree. There is much thought that Tennyson wrote about himself in ‘The Lady of Shalott.” Is the poem some kind of allegory for the life of an artist-writer? Of course it is. She looks at the world, but only through the mirror and what does she do then? She translates what she sees into art. Isolated? Living in shadows? What happens when she boldly looks right out the window, directly at life?

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.

And what does she get in the end? After being slapped with a mirror shattering curse, after the singular, stark experience of voluntarily giving up everything and letting the river take all, after literally singing herself to death with no one to hear her song, alone, all alone, always alone ~ till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darkened wholly ~ what does she get? She gets beautiful, shallow, superficial Lancelot . . . the only glimpse she has ever had of reality, of fact rather than semblance, her valiant three seconds of warmth and passion . . . she gets fucking Lancelot idly musing that she had a lovely face.

Yet 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?

What work did she leave undone on the loom in that tower? What ‘magic web with colours gay’ was never finished because the Lady, the Lady who has no name, had the presumption, the gall to lay down her art and look out the window at the real world?