I am half sick of shadows
something that has been on my mind after rereading Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott".
In the preface of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion mentions some lines of Yeats’s poem as “points of reference” through which she built patterns in different moments in life. I have a similar poetic relationship since, every once in a while, I find myself returning to Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” a poem influenced by an Italian novella and an Arthurian legend about the curse and untimely demise of Lady Elaine of Astolat. Both the poem’s story and language – with its short verses and repetitions that sound like an incantation, very appropriate for this somewhat fantastical setting – have always fascinated me deeply. Now, years after encountering Lady Elaine and after re-reading it for the tenth time, I think I have truly understood what is buried beneath the beautiful and perplexing images created by Tennyson.
What I mean by “image” is not just descriptions of an object, but the poetic equivalent that tries to accurately align “the written with the unwritten, the totality of the describable with the indescribable”, as Calvino would say. The relationship between what Tennyson created on the page and the sentiment behind it is mysterious, ambiguous even, once you consider the poem beyond a mediaeval tale of a damsel in a tower and try to understand how abstract – and therefore endowed with interpretative plasticity – is the experience described. The abundance of interpretations in the scholarly field, noticeably the ones which analyse the conflict between the artist’s commitment and social expectations, is a testimony to the poem's desire to escape a restrictive definition in favour of expansion.
As I was reading an article for class this week that mentioned semiotics, I started thinking about the poem’s imagery as “a representation of a representation” of reality, due to the marked presence of doubleness and reflections that become evident in these three interesting elements: a mirror, a window, and a tapestry – all of which constitute a layer or a filter to the reality outside the tower, and this well-crafted linguistic veil conceals deeper emotions and even philosophies. But as much as I admire the poem’s form, I want to focus on the poem’s feeling since it was this aspect that first caught my attention and lured me back through the years.
I always felt a kind of connection between me and the Lady of Shalott. It’s not a matter of melancholy or feminine helplessness but a fascination (or obsession) with one’s own imagination. Perhaps the greatest verse of the poem is “I am half sick of shadows”, which offers us an insight into her mind: the Lady is cursed to live confined in a tower, without ever being able to leave or even look out of the window and see the world. Her only contact with outer life is through a large mirror that faces the window, and looking at this limited portal she spends her days weaving reflections; she is only allowed to engage with real life through shadows, namely, the reflections that feed her imagination.
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.
Being a prisoner in a tower seems like a dreadful fate, yet the Lady appears content, at first, and even finds delight in her cage. At the beginning of her story, she seems to have an unquestioning acceptance of her mysterious curse, and what’s more impressive: she’s able to use her imagination to transform her limited experience into an intricate tapestry. According to Lionel Stevenson, “The Lady of Shalott is an artist, weaving beautiful pictures which are supposed to reproduce real life but which are derived entirely at second hand through the mirror. [...] As soon as emotion touches her personally through her interest in Lancelot, she defies the curse, and enjoys her brief hours of genuine life, even though she knows it will be her last.”
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.
The Lady is trapped both physically and mentally. She cannot escape either her tower or her mind and, as a coping mechanism, she turns inwards to her shadows and her weaving. Morse Peckham has an essay about romantic perspectivism, describing it as something that “looked at itself from right angles; saw itself creating a world-view” which "told the mind nothing about the world, but merely told it something about the mind” – we are inevitably subordinated by the filter of our minds, but the Lady takes it further due to her condition and comes to live only in her imagination. Such romantic subtext is likely intentional, since Tennyson, as Arthur J. Carr argues, explored “the premises of romantic art, following Byron, then Keats and Coleridge, and even Shelley, in employing egocentric melancholy and the sensuous and supersensuous imagery of dream, and in debating the role of the artist in society.”
In the third part, her fragile prison collapses as she finally surrenders to her desire for more life. Carr explains that “The Lady of Shalott sketches the predicament of a mind trying to free itself from a web of fantasy. When the Lady, moved by desire, looks away from the deep subjective mirror in which she reads the shadows of the world, the mirror cracks from side to side. She accepts her destiny and dies as she drifts down to Camelot.”
Yet, I was always intrigued by her abruptness – she tolerated her enclosure somewhat peacefully for so long, and all it took was a violent passion for Lancelot for her to risk it all, even her safety. What lies behind this impetuous catharsis, what drove her to burst her world into flames is, for me, as mesmerising as it is relatable. Some explanation for this was offered by the author himself, who wrote about the Lady of Shalott’s feelings as “the new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities”
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.
When she says “I am half sick of shadows”, she is expressing frustration with this farfetched, vicarious experience of living. As Helen of Troy did with the events of The Iliad, she weaves the images of her life reflected in the mirror and, if we consider weaving as a particular form of women’s writing, her tapestry is a creative product of the shadows – an embodiment of her unlived life. If we can conjecture about her imprisonment, we may think of her comfortably yearning in her cocoon of visions, not having to deal directly with actions and consequences – until she falls in love with the reflection of Lancelot, and because of him – or rather, her idea of him shown in the mirror – she is willing to give up her sheltered life and take a risk with the curse. Looking from such an angle, I see this as an act of great courage even though the doomed ending is clear from the beginning; as her last deed, she contradicts her own history with a life-affirming and non-conforming act. She decides that life, even an idealised one, is worth dying for – which is as bleak as it is true.
Read it again: I am half sick of shadows. The “half” always left me bewildered. Why not completely, utterly, and absolutely sick of it? Because there’s something incredibly seductive about the projections of one’s own mind. If you have enough imagination (and I have a lot) you can transform everything around you. It’s as Hamlet said: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” I too am only half sick of my shadows, as I often end up preferring to avoid certain experiences so as not to spoil my fantasies.
The Lady spent her whole life afraid of a vague punishment, and she took all she could get from the shadows – even though they’re not real they’re still very alluring, and can satisfy to a certain point because the safety of a vicarious experience almost pays off the artificiality of the half-experience. Yet a moment will come when it’s simply not enough: at that point, you have to decide if certain sacrifices are worth it; to the Lady of Shalott, it was. Her decision to rebel was so modern but also very ancient – indeed, the Lady’s shadows remind us of Plato’s cave as it represents the idea of people being confined to farfetched realities, which makes them unable to see the real thing and be “awakened” to the truth, something human beings have always struggled with. As Susan Sontag said, “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age‑old habit, in mere images of the truth.”
With social media et. al, it gets harder every day to have real experiences since it’s so easy to be caught in the vicarious mode of living through your phone. I recognize my discontent as much as the Lady did, but I’m still not over the shadows, I still find comfort in the tower or Plato’s cave, which is ironic and difficult – at the same time I have an eagerness to abandon my current life and meet new people and places, I also have the feeling that none of those “real” experiences can ever be as satisfying as the romantic illusions I created – so far, nothing has ever been as good as my imagined scenarios or tempted me to “left the web” for good.
How can one muster Lady Elaine’s courage to break off her weaving and get out in the world, and be brave enough to face the collapse of change? It takes faith, and I think nowadays it takes more courage than ever because everything is constructed in a way for us to be “not sick” of the shadows. Despite Lady Elaine’s tragic destiny, I see her as some sort of inspiration, or even a romantic hero because she decided, against all odds, that life was worth the risk.