21 Study Questions, Activities, and Resources
Study Questions and Activities
The Lady of Shalott: The original 1833 published version next to 1842 revised version http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/tennyson-shalott-comparison “The Man Behind the Lady.” An interesting exhibit about “The Lady of Shalott,” with several paintings on the subject. http://www.nines.org/exhibits/The_Man_Behind_The_Lady_?page=1
- After looking at both published versions of the poem, might you, as did George Eliot, express a preference for any of the original lines, published in 1833? If so, which ones would you wish Tennyson had not revised?
- What are features of the poem’s meter and diction? How do these add to the magical or eerie effect?
- What might the striking image of the tower symbolize? the mirror? What is significant about the lady’s being enclosed in a high tower?
- What was the result of Sir Lancelot’s adulterous relationship with King Arthur’s queen, Guinevere?
- What irony is associated with Lancelot?
- After looking at the link above—isolate some details that support the contention that the poem deals with “the Woman Question”; that is, the position of Victorian women?
- What details might support an allegorical interpretation pertaining to art versus life?
- Why do you think the Lady of Shalott became the subject of so many Victorian paintings (Hunt, Rossetti, Waterhouse)? First, see the link above: “The Man Behind the Lady.”
- Listen to Loreena McKennitt’s musical adaptation of “The Lady of Shalott,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0rVNQw1DQM
Short Essay Topics
- Houghton and Stange interpret the poem as an allegory about art versus life: that the artist must remain in aloof detachment, observing life only in the mirror of the imagination, not mixing in it directly. Once the artist attempts to lead the life of ordinary men, his poetic gift, it would seem, dies. Do you agree or disagree with this interpretation?
- Does “The Lady of Shalott” address the “Woman Question”? Does it uphold patriarchal assumptions about gender relationships as in, say, the words of the king in Tennyson’s The Princess: A Medley, published in 1847, five years after the appearance of the revised version of “The Lady of Shalott”?:
Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion. (“The Princess,” V, 427–31)
The Lotos-Eaters
- Are the first two lines meant to be a commentary on the rest of the poem?
- Who is the “he” of line 1?
- What is the dominant rhyme scheme in the many 9-line stanzas? Compare this pattern with that of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II, canto 6 (Phaedria’s Isle and Lake of Idleness.)
- Give examples of sibilance, onomatopoeia, repeated masculine end rhymes, sensuous imagery. What is their effect?
- Why do the Lotos-Eaters wish to resemble the gods? What aspects of divinity do they project onto these deities? How m