Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Lady of Shalott

“I was in my tower weaving nightmares”

Community readers hear Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott behind the image of weaving in a tower: the Lady is cursed to see the world only through a mirror as she weaves, and is undone the moment she looks at it directly. The tower, the weaving and the doom that follows clear sight map closely onto Cassandra's predicament.

The Lady of Shalott

“I sat alone in my tower”

The lone-in-the-tower image draws Tennyson's Lady of Shalott into the song's gallery of doomed women: the weaver shut in her tower who leaves her loom for the sight of a passing knight and dies on the river before she can reach him. The parallel sharpens the song's turn — here the speaker is drawn toward a man and survives, the ending the poem denied its lady.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

“But I howl like a wolf at the moon”

Uncle Jerry identifies the dactylic metre of 'I howl like a wolf at the moon' and connects it to Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, which uses the same rhythmic pattern to evoke galloping horses. He suggests that Taylor's dactylic line creates a similar sense of running headlong, in her case, into her 'disastrous life.'

Victorian-era poems with ABABCC rhyme scheme

Uncle Jerry cites Tennyson as one of the Victorian poets whose work uses the ABABCC rhyme scheme that Cold as You's chorus follows, placing the song within a tradition of 83 Victorian Periodical Review poems that share the pattern. Tennyson is named as Poet Laureate evidence for the pattern's classical pedigree, alongside George Meredith and Thomas Hardy.