Comparison & Contrast in Atmosphere of Poems
There are many ways in which the atmosphere in Tennyson’s poems Morte d’Arthur and The Lady of Shalott is defined. It is shown throughout the poems using landscape, weather, pathos, isolation, sound and colour. Although there are many similarities in the atmosphere of both poems there are also some stark differences.
Landscape plays a big part in portraying the atmosphere of any poem in particular The Lady of Shalott and Morte d’Arthur. The second line of The Lady of Shalott straight away helps you to sense the atmosphere of the poem, ‘Long fields of barley and rye’ gives you a vision of where the poem is set and of what type of poem it is; in contrast to that Morte d’Arthur has the second line; ‘Among the mountains by the winter sea’. You can see from this that the landscape of the poems is very different and this is not the only time that the contrast in landscape can be seen. In the second stanza of part one in The Lady of Shalott there is a line that when compared with a line in stanza two of part one in Morte d’Arthur you really begin to see the contrast; ‘Overlook a space of flowers’ is the line from The Lady of Shalott whereas in Morte d’Arthur lines such as ‘That stood on a dark strait of barren land’ are being used. These depictions of landscape show that Morte d’Arthur has a much darker atmosphere than The Lady of Shalott and this difference in the atmospheres can be seen not just from reading the first two stanzas of both the poems but throughout the whole of both poems. The landscape of the poems plays a big part in the depiction of the atmosphere as landscape can include other important indicators such as colour – ‘As often through the purple night’ is a line used in The Lady of Shalott and the mention of colour helps to really define the landscape which therefore helps to define the poem’s atmosphere.
