Allusions to, and outright quotes of, this line of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallott” in two novels I’ve read recently sent me back to the poem. I haven’t read it in over a decade and found it an entirely new experience this time.
I remember reading it in Brit Lit as sophomore in college (while I should have been focused on “In Memorium”) and wondering at its silliness. This woman fell in love with a man she’d seen in a mirror, who had never seen her, and this love killed her? It seemed wildly fantastic, overly romantic.
I’ve looked away from my own mirror and found my own curse come upon me now. I think I understand Tennyson here better because of it. The curse did not come upon the Lady when she looked toward Camelot. The curse came upon her when she began to watch life in a mirror. The entire design of the system gave her a backwards understanding of what she saw. Just as Plato’s cavedwellers mistook the shadows on the wall for reality, the Lady faultily believed that the mirror would save her from a veiled threat. Instead the veil was the threat and when her eyes were opened to what she had lost (for who knows what might have happened if she had met Lancelot; he was drawn enough to her in death to pray for her soul), she could not bear the loss of it. The web she wove herself “floated wide, the mirror cracked from side to side.”
She could not return to her retreat; her world view had reoriented itself just as if True North had shifted. She could not navigate this new world, the real world. Broken free of the illusion in the mirror, but still entangled in the web of her old understanding, she drifted between those worlds, the mirror in Shallott and the love in Camelot, until “her eyes were darkened wholly” — a picture of inward spiraling depression working at quenching the light of a life until it seizes the life itself.
On the edge of Camelot, on the edge of her love, she dies “singing in her song,” not “having sung her song,” but still in the act of it, she becomes an object of fear and pity.
RootsRewound 