Alfred tennyson’S “The lady of shalott”: A stylistic analysis.

Stylistics is not a literary theory but a method and a technique. Stylistics is the study of literary discourse that has a linguistic orientation. It is the bridge between literary criticism and linguistics. This paper presents a stylistics analysis of Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott”. It analyses the poem using the tools of linguistics to find out new interpretations and to explore Tennyson’s genius as a craftsman and as a metrical artist. Tennyson is not only the glass of fashion and the mould of form of the Victorian period, his architectonics is also awe-inspiring. The poem has been dissected from different levels of stylistics analysis such as Graphological, Phonological, Lexical and Grammatical level. This study shows that the whole poem flows like a river, sometimes speeding up, again rushing down and crashing, and then slowing down again. The short refrain the Lady of Shalott at the end of most stanzas, is like the bubble in the flow of the river. This stylistics analysis may lead a reader easily to the characteristic features of Tennyson’s poem, even if the reader does not have prior knowledge about the literary works of Tennyson. Naturally, based on linguistic data, the stylistic analysis contains several new interpretations which open up new vistas for further studies.