Literary Devices in The Lady of Shalott

This simile comparing the Lady of Shalott to a seer emphasizes the fact that she knows she is doomed. She has seen impending misfortune and is deciding what to do with her last moments of life. The two dots over the second “e” in “seer” is a dieresis, a mark used over a vowel to denote a syllabic break. While “seer” is often pronounced with one syllable, Tennyson splits it into two. This division fits the chosen meter of the line and subtly emphasizes the exact nature of the Lady’s misfortune: she abandoned the reflections of her mirror and looked out her window to the real world, and was cursed in the literal act of seeing.

In this stanza, Tennyson employs a technique called anaphora, by which each line begins with the same word or phrase. The presence of four successive lines beginning with “she” creates a driving rhythm and a sense of urgency, as though each event is happening in quick succession. Unlike the thorough descriptions of the landscape and Lancelot, there is no lingering on imagery in this stanza, only rapid action. This urgency gives readers the sense that time is no longer as stagnant as it has been throughout the rest of the poem, an intuition which is confirmed when the Lady realizes the curse is upon her.

Similarly to the way Lancelot breaks the “Camelot” refrain in the first stanza of this section, here he breaks the “Shalott” refrain that has ended each stanza. The breaking of the “Camelot” refrain foreshadowed him as a catalyst, while implying a thematic association with Camelot. This breaking of the “Shalott” refrain suggests that he has broken through the barrier sheltering the Lady in her tower. Lancelot has intruded upon what was formerly the sole domain of “Shalott,” revealing his power to counter its influence. This line is also the poem’s only instance of trochaic trimeter. This unexpected use of a stressed syllable to open the refrain emphasizes Lancelot’s action, and, by extension, his importance in the narrative.

While the island of Shalott has taken pride of place in the refrain before, it has only ever been for one stanza in a section. That the Lady of Shalott has been excluded from the refrains of the last three stanzas show just how irrelevant she is to the motion of the world around her island.

Sir Lancelot is one of the most famous knights from Arthurian legend. His affair with King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, became the focal point for much of the later medieval Arthurian tradition, in which the emphasis shifted from stories of adventure to stories of the court. The replacement of the “Camelot” refrain with “Sir Lancelot” in this stanza emphasizes Lancelot’s importance to the narrative and marks his intrusion into the steady, albeit distant, relationship between the Lady and the outside world.

Tennyson’s rhetorical questions reinforce the Lady’s isolation. She is surrounded on all sides by a bustling river and the castle of Camelot, but she does not interact with the people who pass her and most of them do not even know she exists. In Tennyson’s time, Victorian women, especially those of the upper classes, were expected to remain chaste and avoid any behaviors that might result in rumors of impropriety. This meant that they were relatively isolated within their family circles and were often excluded from public life, which was seen as the domain of men.

A refrain is poetic device by which a word, line, or group of lines is repeated throughout a poem. “The Lady of Shalott” has two refrains: “Camelot” at the end of the 5th line of each stanza and “Shalott” at the end of the 9th line. Refrains can serve a variety of functions but are often employed as a way of emphasizing important ideas through repetition. In this case, “Camelot” and “Shalott” are contrasting symbols, with Shalott representing the Lady’s isolation and Camelot representing broader society. The refrains also add a musicality to the poem by creating repetition and a consistent structure for rhyme and meter from stanza to stanza.

“The Lady of Shalott” contains minimal enjambment, or the continuation of a phrase or sentence across lines of a poem without end-stop punctuation. Tennyson also typically ends lines on nouns, verbs, or adjectives rather than prepositions or other parts of speech that imply phrasal continuity. The self-contained nature of each line ensures there is a natural pause at the end of each phrase, highlighting the rhymes and increasing the musicality.

This is a literary device called synecdoche, where a part of something is used to symbolize the thing’s entirety. Here, the dashing Lancelot, whom Tennyson took four full stanzas to describe, is reduced to a symbol of his knighthood: “helmet and the plume.” When the Lady finally does look away from her mirror, she glances only briefly at Lancelot before shifting her gaze to Camelot. In fact, Lancelot is not mentioned again until the end of the poem, after the Lady is dead. Lancelot’s omission here highlights the ambiguity in the Lady’s motivation. While the content of the previous stanza would imply that Lancelot is the cause for her departure from her weaving, here he is reduced to merely an object, seen after the water-lily and before Camelot itself. The degree to which he impacts the Lady, and the nature of her relationship to or interest in him, are never made textually explicit, allowing the poem to be read on a number of thematic levels.

This section is devoted almost entirely to a physical description of Sir Lancelot. It employs extensive alliteration and parallelism, beginning with the very first line, “A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,” and seen here in the alliterations of “golden Galaxy,” “bridle bells,” and “blazoned baldric.” The continued repetition of consonants, syntactic constructions, and even entire words throughout this section gives it a deeply musical quality, surpassing that of the rest of the poem.

While the curse condemning the Lady to weave without pause is arguably the inciting incident in the poem’s narrative, its source is vague. The repetition of “whispers” plays off the whisper of the reaper in the previous stanza, expanding the theme of supernatural influences on the Lady. However, it also introduces an element of uncertainty. The reaper’s description of the Lady as a fairy is implied to be a result of her isolation, rather than any innate otherworldliness on her part. This potential for misinterpretation is carried into the curse itself, which is subject to similar misconceptions.