The Princess Part I - Analysis

A fairy-tale prince haunted by unreality

The opening makes the speaker sound like a storybook hero and like a problem: blue-eyed, and fair, with yellow ringlet like a girl. That almost-androgynous beauty isn’t just decoration; it sets up the poem’s central claim that this prince’s life will be a test of what counts as real—man or woman, promise or choice, substance or show. Even the blessing on his cradle, the Northern star, feels like fate pressing down, as if he’s marked out for something he didn’t choose.

That pressure becomes explicit in the house-legend: a burned sorcerer (notably, one who cast no shadow) predicts the family will never know / The shadow from the substance. The poem treats this less like superstition than like a hereditary mental weather. The prince describes episodes in which he moves among a world of ghosts and feels himself the shadow of a dream. So the romance plot is immediately doubled by a psychological plot: he is trying to marry into certainty, but his own mind keeps turning certainty into mirage.

Two parents, two theories of power

The household splits into two kinds of authority. The mother responds to his “weird seizures” with prayers and tenderness, as mild as any saint. The father responds by treating kingship as enforcement: he holds his sceptre like a pedant’s wand and physically picked offenders from the mass for judgment. This difference matters because the poem’s conflict over marriage isn’t only personal; it’s about whether relationships are governed by coercion or consent. The mother’s softness doesn’t cure the prince, but it at least admits mystery. The father’s hardness refuses mystery—and so, ironically, creates it.

The betrothal: love as relic, love as contract

The prince’s attachment to the Princess begins as a sweet, almost devotional collecting of tokens: he wears her picture and one dark tress by his heart, and his thoughts swarm as bees about their queen. But that tenderness sits on top of a bizarre mechanism of power: she was proxy-wedded with a bootless calf at eight years old. The detail is comic and unsettling at once—it turns marriage into ritual theater, a wedding without a person. In other words, it is already a “shadow” of marriage, and the poem quietly suggests the future crisis is built into the original arrangement.

When the ambassadors return, the Princess’s refusal arrives in two symbolic objects: the loom-work present and the answer vague as wind. The loom implies patient female labor and design; the vagueness implies a new kind of power, one that won’t justify itself in the old legal language. The father’s response—tearing the letter and ripping the wonder of the loom through warp and woof—is telling: he doesn’t just reject her message, he destroys the medium associated with women’s making. His threat to crush her pretty maiden fancies dead / In iron gauntlets exposes the ugly fantasy beneath his “king a king” attitude: he wants to convert a woman’s will back into an object.

The hinge: a private doubt answered by an irrational command

The poem turns when the prince leaves the council and goes into the wild woods to lay her likeness on flowers and stare at it in the green gleam of dewy trees. For once, his question is not political but bewildered: What were those fancies? The scene frames him as someone trying to think without his father’s roar in his ears. But the answer he receives is not rational clarity—it’s a gust and a command. A wind rushed upon the South, shaking the woods into a single noise, and a Voice says, Follow, follow, thou shalt win. This is the poem’s most important contradiction: he is haunted by uncertainty, yet propelled by a prophecy-like certainty that doesn’t actually explain anything. He “follows” not because he understands, but because he cannot bear not to act.

Disguise as a literal lesson in shadow and substance

The prince’s solution is to become a shadow on purpose. He and his friends—Cyril, the impulsive reveler, and Florian, almost my half-self—dress in female gear and cross into the Princess’s “liberties.” This isn’t just a plot device; it’s the family curse enacted in cloth. The prince cannot reach the truth in his own “substance” (as prince, as man), so he reaches it by performance—by passing as what he is not. And he does it using skills learned in court pageantry, remembering how they once presented Maid / Or Nymph, or Goddess. The poem quietly implies that gender roles at court were already theatrical; the University simply makes that theatricality politically serious.

The women’s domain he enters feels intoxicating and perilous at once. The college lights glitter firefly-like; clocks and chimes fall like silver hammers on silver anvils; fountains splash through jasmine and the rose. It is a world of beauty, order, and incessant measurement—time literally ringing in the air. Over the arch is a winged woman statue with four winged horses, a triumphant emblem, yet the inscription is deep in shadow. That last phrase is almost a signature for this poem: even the manifesto of the new world can’t quite be read from where the prince stands.

Inside, the sign is Pallas—wisdom—lit by two globe lamps marked Heaven and Earth, suggesting the University’s ambition to remake the whole map of knowledge. And yet the prince enters by a lie, claiming to be one of Lady Psyche’s pupils, writing in a hand compared to a field of corn bowed by the roaring East. Even his handwriting becomes weather-driven, bent by forces outside him. The seal on the letter—Cupid and Uranian Venus lifting the blindfold—compresses the poem’s argument into an emblem: love wants to see, but it keeps needing someone else to raise the bandage.

The Princess’s “theories,” and the men who can’t hear them

When King Gama explains his daughter’s escape, the poem lets us hear the male establishment’s baffled irritation. He calls Psyche and Blanche “widows” who fed her theories, and he repeats, almost whining, that the house rang with one idea: knowledge, and women’s equality in husbandry and worth. He claims he wanted peace, No critic I, but the women’s songs mastered him—an inadvertent confession that the threat is not violence but persuasion. Still, he trivializes his daughter’s writing as awful odes and dismal lyrics, as if intensity were proof of irrationality. The prince, for his part, is nettled by Gama’s oily courtesies—another kind of performance—yet he is also chafing with desire to “find my bride.” Everyone is acting, and everyone is accusing someone else of acting.

A sudden song: reconciliation shadowed by loss

The ending yanks us into a different voice and time: my wife and I walking at eve, quarreling, then kissed again with tears. On the surface, it’s a homely lyric blessing the way lovers fight and make up. But it darkens sharply when the couple arrives at the little grave of the child / We lost. That loss reframes the earlier comedy of disguises and courtship as something more fragile. The poem that began with a family unable to tell shadow from substance ends with the most brutal distinction of all: a child who is not merely absent or misunderstood, but dead.

This shift doesn’t cancel the main narrative; it complicates it. If the “Princess” story is partly about whether love can survive a battle of wills, the final song suggests love may survive—but not untouched. Reconciliation is real, yet it happens under the sign of grief, as if the price of learning how to live with another person is realizing what can never be repaired.

The poem’s sharpest question

If the prince is driven by a Voice that promises thou shalt win, what exactly counts as winning in a world where marriages can be staged with a calf, identities can be put on like costumes, and the most permanent “substance” the poem gives us is a little grave? The poem keeps daring us to notice how often the characters demand certainty—and how often certainty arrives as force, not truth.