Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
(The Lady of Shalott – Alfred Tennyson)
The Lady of Shalott, oil-on-canvas painting, John William Waterhouse
I’ve alluded to the myriad of symbols and portents signalling the great disruption of our family’s universe, the passing of my dear Dad. The poem by English poet Alfred Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott, provided yet another motif over the past six months.
It began around March/April, when Dad asked for my Enya and Loreena McKennitt CDs. He’d heard them in passing, but wished to revisit them more deeply. We had been blessed to encounter her several times at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival over the years. We reminisced over hearing her magical harp echo over the hill of glimmering candles with the Edmonton skyline lit up behind the stage under the starry sky.
He was particulary struck revisiting Loreena’s The Visit album, and took special note of her painstaking and haunting rendition of The Lady of Shalott, true to the poem’s spirit and form. (Canadian Juno Awards version of song performed by her here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z77PR0JA0gU)
Later in the Grey Nuns Hospital, during the period of time where our pure purpose was to either head to, be at, or come from, the hospital, while passing time as we often did, Mom impressed Dad by suddenly and unexpectedly quoting the above lines of the poem.
A few days afterward a large tarp covering a sandbox and well-secured with a substantial bag of dirt went missing one night from Mom and Dad’s yard. Mom found the sandbox exposed; dirt bag on lawn; the tarp was never seen again. She made the connection immediately, there was no hesitation, automatically reciting “Out flew the web and floated wide“.
Later that day after the Breaking of my world on July 29 – oh, how those hellish days and nights and how they blurred into one continuous amorphous horror – I looked down at my phone with finally seeing eyes and was startled to see my own shattered reflection looking back at me-
my mirror had cracked from side to side.