Our June 2012 meeting: the Lady of Shallot

June seems a distant memory now, but we decided to give ourselves the luxury of concentrating on just one poem for our meeting:  Alfred, Lord Tennyson's gorgeous work, The Lady of Shallot (first published in 1833, we used the 1842 revised text).  As well as reading the poem and talking about its fabulous imagery, we spent some time looking at some of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the time.  References to the poem and the beautiful works of art that we looked at keep cropping up in magazines, in newspapers or on television and so it stays fresh in the memory! 

 

This is one of those wonderful Victorian poems that is so evocative of England's distant pastoral and chivalric age: even if you've never read it you immediately think of all the glorious Pre-Raphaelite paintings that it inspired.  The verses are redolent with jewel-like colours, Arthurian references and a sense of romantic foreboding as the cursed Lady of Shallot sits in her tower, looking into her mirror as she weaves her tapestry, and eventually being so overcome by the sight of Sir Lancelot riding along the river bank (singing 'tirra lirra') that she turns to gaze at him.  In perhaps the most famous lines in the poem, we learn of the consequences:

 

'The mirror crack'd from side to side,

"The curse is come upon me", cried the Lady of Shallot.'

 

We shall be looking forward to a visit to Tate Britain in November, to see the fantastic new exhibition: Pre Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde.