The Lady of Shalott Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

Rhyming Lines in Iambic and Trochaic TetrameterLet's start with the way Tennyson breaks up the lines in this poem. The most basic division in the poem is the four big chunks (Parts 1-4). It might h...

We never find out who put that curse on the Lady of Shalott. This made us a little bit curious. What if it turned out that it was the speaker of this poem? There are a lot of ways that you could pi...

The setting is like our world, only more so. Have you ever looked at something, and then put on a pair of sunglasses and looked again? You know how they can make something like a sunset seems more...

This poem is about a lady and a knight, for sure, but isn't it also about a river? Everything we see here – islands and trees and castle and fields – is stretched out along the river. I...

On the surface, this is a pretty easy one. The Lady of Shalott is the heroine of the poem and the heroine of the title. Tennyson focuses us right away on the importance of the Lady. For all the poe...

Dramatic Subjects in Very Organized PoemsTennyson had a long career (this is a pretty early poem), so he wrote a lot of different kinds of poetry after he finished with this King Arthur stuff. Stil...

(4) Base Camp"The Lady of Shalott" tells a really great, engaging story, so that should make this climb exciting. Still, there's some tough vocab, and it's a pretty long climb, so it might take a l...

Tennyson composed many of his poems in his head, partly because he was extremely nearsighted. (Source)Lancelot was a way bigger jerk in the traditional legends of King Arthur. In those stories, Ela...

PGWe think this poem's definitely got a romantic edge. Nothing too naughty, but if you didn't imagine the possibility of Lancelot and the Lady of Shalott getting together, you probably missed part...

Literary ReferencesCamelot: This one you've probably heard of; it's famous for being the castle where the legendary King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table lived. There are lots of legends a...