Ven. Akshay Kamble

The Victorian Age : Topics : 21 - The Painterly Image in Poetry : Texts and Contexts : Moxon's Illustrated Tennyson : In 1857, the publisher Edward Moxon put together an illustrated collection of Tennyson's poetry for which a number of the Pre-Raphaelite artists drew illustrations. William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti created the two illustrations below for The Lady of Shalott (NAEL 8, 2.1114). Hunt's engraving illustrates the following lines: Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror cracked from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried       The Lady of Shalott. Hunt shows the Lady imprisoned by the tapestry she has been weaving and entangled in its threads. Lancelot, whose riding by has led her to look directly at the world outside and bring the curse upon herself, is pictured in the broken mirror behind her. Tennyson objected to this feature of Hunt's illustration when it was published because his lines do not have the Lady e...

A Lovers Complaint by William Shakespeare FROM off a hill whose concave womb reworded A plaintful story from a sistering vale, My spirits to attend this double voice accorded, And down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale; Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale, Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain, Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain. Upon her head a platted hive of straw, Which fortified her visage from the sun, Whereon the thought might think sometime it saw The carcass of beauty spent and done: Time had not scythed all that youth begun, Nor youth all quit; but, spite of heaven's fell rage, Some beauty peep'd through lattice of sear'd age. Oft did she heave her napkin to her eyne, Which on it had conceited characters, Laundering the silken figures in the brine That season'd woe had pelleted in tears, And often reading what contents it bears; As often shrieking undistinguish'd woe, In clamours of all size, both high and low. Sometimes her le...