I saw her in Toronto—framed not in myth or metaphor but in wood and glass. I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, said the card beside the canvas. Waterhouse painted her in 1915, his third and final rendition of Tennyson’s doomed weaver. But it’s this one—this quiet moment of stillness, of almost-breaking—that feels the most human. The most familiar.
She leans back from the loom, arms behind her head, thread trailing at her feet. Her gaze does not rest on the tapestry, nor on the mirror behind her. She looks forward—perhaps beyond the painting itself. And in her face, I saw a look I know too well: not despair, not quite longing. A kind of wearied vigilance. As if she’s tired not just of weaving, but of watching life happen elsewhere.
“I am half-sick of shadows,” she says in the poem. Not sick of silence. Not sick of solitude. Sick of substitution. Sick of watching and not living. Of crafting beauty out of reflections while never tasting the light herself.
The Lady of Shalott lives in the in-between. Cursed to witness life only through a mirror, she weaves the moving world into art. She makes meaning of fragments. And in this, she is both artist and prisoner.
When I stood before Waterhouse’s painting, that paradox burned. Because haven’t I too spent seasons weaving shadows? Observing. Creating. Reflecting. Teaching. Writing. Always interpreting life, never quite touching it. The loom may look different—a desk, a laptop, a classroom—but the tension remains.
Regina Spektor’s “All the Rowboats” came to mind as I stood in that gallery. It’s not about the Lady of Shalott directly, but it hums with the same ghost-light. “All the rowboats / in the paintings / they keep trying to row away,” she sings, her voice teetering between childlike and haunted. “All the galleries / the galleries / have locked them up so they can’t steal nothing.”
It’s a song about art as captivity. About movement trapped in stillness. About how the rowboats—meant to glide across water—sit frozen behind glass. Longing, straining, yearning for their purpose.
Like the Lady.
Like so many of us.
“All the little boats,” Spektor sings, “that are painting pictures of the rowboats.”
A mirror of a mirror of a mirror. Art about art about art.
And somewhere deep inside it, a beating heart—trying to get out.
In Tennyson’s poem, the Lady eventually breaks the spell. She looks directly at Lancelot, directly at life. And the mirror cracks. The tapestry flies out the window. She leaves the tower. She climbs into a boat. She writes her name on the prow—not in metaphor, but in ink—and floats downstream, toward Camelot. Toward the world she was always told she couldn’t have.
And she dies.
But what choice did she have? To remain in the tower was to starve slowly. To leave was to risk everything. She chose movement over mirrors. Death, perhaps—but a death that tasted of freedom. A final act of authorship. A woman naming herself.
Waterhouse paints the moment before. The tension. The pause. And that is what struck me most today: she has not yet moved, but she is no longer at peace with staying. She is half-sick. She is halfway gone.
And so am I, sometimes.
I think of Spektor again: “First there’s lights out, then there’s lock-up / Masterpieces serving maximum sentences.”
We treat great art as sacred. We protect it. Preserve it. Frame it. But sometimes we forget that much of it was born of longing. Of confinement. Of souls pressing against their boundaries. The Lady of Shalott wasn’t cursed to weave—she was cursed to weave without ever living what she saw.
So much of my life has been built on reflection—on watching, noticing, naming. And there is beauty in that. But there is also danger. Because it is easy to mistake understanding for experience. To believe that turning life into language is enough.
It isn’t.
Sometimes, we must leave the loom.
Sometimes, we must shatter the mirror.
Sometimes, we must row.
When I left the gallery, I walked down toward the harbor. I thought about the boats in Spektor’s song, the Lady’s skiff, the river winding past Camelot. I thought about all the days I’ve spent behind windows, trying to make sense of the world instead of joining it. And I thought about that face—the one Waterhouse gave her. The one I’ve worn. The one that looks not outward or inward, but forward. To what’s next. To what’s possible.
I don’t know if I’m ready to leave my tower.
But I am half-sick of shadows.
And sometimes, that’s how all great journeys begin.
***
Link to All the Rowboats:
https://open.spotify.com/track/5rSlEtSKiOYivDFChX3FRW?si=3lnmCABAQYaRb6zmlkW8XA