Selected Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

‘She knows not what the curse may be,’ – a further indication of the uncertainty of her fate. The fluency of rhythm and rhyme and the fairy-tale context allows Tennyson to deal with some quite ambiguous and unsettling concepts. Does, for example, the Lady stand for a creative personality so sensitive that it must be isolated from real desire and love, the force of which could be fatal?

‘And so she weaveth steadily,’ – Her world is defined by the unchanging rhythms of her work. Protected and ‘imbowered,’ she is able to concentrate all her powers upon her creativity.

‘And little other care hath she,’ – the ‘little’ may be the irony of understatement in view of what follows, but it also indicates that she is able – to a great degree – to live through her creative imagination, even though totally isolated from the real world.

‘And moving through a mirror clear’ – Art holds up ‘a mirror to nature’ in the classic definition of Sir Philip Sidney. The Lady can only experience reality as a reflection. Weavers kept a mirror facing their looms so as to see what they were weaving. The Lady’s mirror is apparently a magical one, and does not simply reflects the view from a window in the castle.

‘Shadows of the world appear.’ – These would actually be reflections or images, but the word ‘Shadows’ seems to suggest Plato’s metaphor of the cave. If this is the case, then Tennyson’s version of the famous allegory would have the artist living in the shadow world of the cave until such a time as he or she emerged into the light of reality.

‘There the river eddy whirls,’ – That is, ‘the eddy, in the river, whirls;’ an eddy is a tiny vortex.

‘And there the surly village churls,’ = peasants. Note the assonance on the stressed syllables of the line.

‘An abbot on an ambling pad,’= an old, slow horse.

‘And sometimes through the mirror blue’ – While the outside world is often red and bright (‘red cloaks’, ‘crimson clad’), the Lady is associated with blues and whites (perhaps suggesting her virginity).

‘She hath no loyal Knight and true,’ – begins to reveal the Lady as a portrait of emotional and sexual isolation, similar to Mariana.