Or when the moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed; "I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott.
Canon Ainger in his Tennyson for the Young quotes the following interpretation, given him by my father: The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities.
The idea of "Mariana in the South" came to my father as he was travelling between Narbonne and Perpignan 1, and foreign critics have found out and have appreciated this representation of southern France. The first original manuscript verse of "The Miller's Daughter," which he altered both before and after publi- cation, seemed to Fitzgerald too good to be lost: I met in all the close green ways, While walking with my rod and line, The miller with his mealy face, And long'd to take his hand in mine. He look'd so jolly and so good -- While fishing in the milldam-water, I laugh'd to see him as he stood, And dreamt not of the miller's daughter.
"This poem," Fitzgerald writes, "as may be seen, is much altered and enlarged from the first edition of 1832; in some respects, I think, not for the better; losing somewhat of the easy character of 'talk across the walnuts and the wine.'" It shows the poet's especial love of setting his human beings in a landscape which is strictly in harmony with the subject of the poem. "The mill was no particular mill," my father writes; "if ____________________ | 1 | See letter from Arthur Hallam on "Mariana in the South" in Appendix, p. 500. | -117- |