For ere she reached upon the tide
The first house by the waterside,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.
6. In the 1832 version this line read: 'And her smooth face sharpened slowly.' George Eliot informed Tennyson that she preferred the earlier version.
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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
This 1857 engraving, created by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for publisher Edward Moxon's illustrated collection of Tennyson's poetry, shows Lancelot musing 'a little space' on the Lady of Shalott in her boat.
Under tower and balcony,
155 By garden wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high,
Silent into Camelot.
Out upon the wharfs they came,
160 Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
And round the prow they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.
Who is this? and what is here?
And in the lighted palace near
165 Died the sound of royal cheer;
And they crossed themselves for fear,
All the knights at Camelot:
But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, 'She has a lovely face;
170 God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.'
1831-32 1832, 1842
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THE LOTOS-EATERS / 1119
The Lotos-Eaters1
'Courage!' he2 said, and pointed toward the land, 'This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.' In the afternoon they came unto a land3 In which it seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; And, like a downward smoke, the slender stream Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn,0 did go; fine thin linen And some through wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. They saw the gleaming river seaward flow From the inner land; far off, three mountaintops Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, Stood sunset-flushed; and, dewed with showery drops, Up-clomb? the shadowy pine above the woven copse. climbed up
The charmed sunset lingered low adown In the red West; through mountain clefts the dale Was seen far inland, and the yellow down4 Bordered with palm, and many a winding vale And meadow, set with slender galingale;5 A land where all things always seemed the same! And round about the keel with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
Branches they bore of that enchanted stem, Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave To each, but whoso did receive of them And taste, to him the gushing of the wave Far far away did seem to mourn and rave On alien shores; and if his fellow spake, His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
1. Based on a short episode from the Odyssey rest and death. The descriptions in the first stanzas (9.82?97) in which the weary Greek veterans of are similar to Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1 590) the Trojan War are tempted by a desire to abandon 2.6 and employ the same stanza form. The final their long voyage homeward. As Odysseus later section derives, in part, from Lucretius's concepreported: 'On the tenth day we set foot on the land tion of the gods in De Rerum Natura (ca. 55 B.C.E.). of the lotos-eaters who eat a flowering food. .. . I 2. Odysseus (or Ulysses). sent forth certain of my company [who] . . . mixed 3. The repetition of 'land' from line 1 was delibwith the men of the lotos-eaters who gave . . . them erate; Tennyson said that this 'no rhyme' was of the lotos to taste. Now whosoever of them did 'lazier' in its effect. This technique of repeating eat the honey-sweet fruit of the lotos had no more words, phrases, and sounds continues; cf. 'afterwish to bring tidings nor to come back, but there noon' (lines 3?4) and the rhyming of 'adown' and he chose to abide . . . forgetful of his homeward 'down' (lines 19 and 21). way.' 4. An open plain on high ground. Tennyson expands Homer's brief account into 5. A plant resembling tall coarse grass. an elaborate picture of weariness and the desire for
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