I enjoyed doing the annotations on content and craft last week, but I felt as though doing them for “The Lady of Shalott” proved to be very helpful. I often struggle to understand poetry, therefore it was helpful to have the opportunity to take a close look into the text. I also enjoyed listening to what my group members had to say, but also being able to see what other students wrote for the parts we were not assigned to. We were assigned the first image by WHH, therefore there were a lot of details that I did not notice. Her hair was very unruly and took up a large portion of the page, but when I first saw the image I thought that was a ceiling design which altered the feel of the image a little. 

Learning about the context of the time period was helpful in understanding the message that might have been trying to come through. I think women’s issues were very significant during this time, therefore I do believe it is important to keep this in mind when engaging with the text and images. I also found it very interesting that the poem was originally published about 20 years before illustrations were added and it was put in the Moxon Tennyson. Therefore, it leaves a lot of room for people to build their own interpretation on what the text really implies.