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.

“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.