Love is about taking risks: we are not fully alive without it, but we know that it has the power to destroy us, too. Or, as Tennyson put it more famously in his long poem In Memoriam in 1850, ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’Īfter all, it is Lancelot, that dashing knight and adulterer, the queen’s paramour in Arthurian legend, who inspires the Lady of Shalott to leave the safety of her tower and descend into the ‘real’ world. Love may be dangerous and may destroy us, but it’s better to take that risk than to pine away, hiding yourself from the world. As Hutton wrote, the poem ‘has for its subject the emptiness of the life of fancy, however rich and brilliant’.īut such an analysis, of course, could easily sit alongside another interpretation of the poem, namely one which sees ‘The Lady of Shalott’ as essentially being about love. Hutton (1826-97) argued that the poem’s meaning (if it can be said to have a ‘meaning’ in the straightforward sense) is that we must turn away from the world of illusion, however comforting that world may be, in favour of the real world – even if it ends up destroying you. ‘The Lady of Shalott’, on one level, is about growing up and exchanging the world of illusion for the (potentially damaging) world of reality – at least, in one interpretation.
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
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