The Lady of Shalott Analysis

Let'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 help to think of these like acts in a play ̵...

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...

Tennyson 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. Still, he never got tried of big, dramatic, e...

"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 little sweat t...

We 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 of...

Camelot: 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 about Arthur, writte...