I really enjoyed our discussion on the images in Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” this week. One thing my group talked about a lot that was particularly intriguing to me was how much the illustrations’ placement influences our reading of the text. I hadn’t looked at the images before reading the poem for the first time, and because of that, the first stanzas felt like an almost Rapunzel-like romanticization of the Lady of Shalott’s isolation. It wasn’t until the third section of the poem that I really got a taste of her madness. However, the wood-engraving by William Holman Hunt that precedes the text in the illustrated version depicts her madness before you even start reading the text, completely changing how I interpreted those beginning stanzas. Now that I had known the ending of the poem, I was finding all of these hints towards her madness in the first two parts of the poem that I hadn’t realized were there my first reading. I imagine if I had seen the images before my first reading, it would have made me look for these clues right from the beginning, changing my initial reaction to the first parts of the poem. It is really interesting to analyze how that image placement can completely change the reading of a piece of literature.