The Princess Part II - Analysis

Lilac silk and the thrill of entering a sealed world

The poem sets up the women’s college as a kind of brilliant enclosure—beautiful, ordered, and deliberately separated from ordinary life. The Portress clothes the disguised men in Academic silks, lilac with gold, and the speaker likens them to moths from dusk cocoons, as if the costume gives them a new skin and a new social species. The court they enter is all classical polish—lucid marbles, classic frieze, great urns of flowers—with the Muses and Graces encircling a fountain. Even before anyone speaks, the place declares its mission: culture, beauty, and learning, arranged as a self-sufficient system.

But Tennyson keeps threading in signs that this enclosure is also a performance. Books and a lute lie around like props, and the men hastily we past them—already out of sync with the space’s intended rhythm. The tone here is dazzled, slightly breathless, but also watchful: the speaker is impressed by the surface, yet he’s moving through it like an intruder.

Ida’s radiance—and the leopards beside the throne

Princess Ida is introduced with near-science-fiction distance: some clear planet nearer the sun than earth. She feels not merely beautiful but unearthly, a figure of pure authority whose power runs to the tips of her hands and feet. And then the poem plants its first sharp contradiction at her side: two tame leopards couched by her throne. The leopards suggest controlled ferocity—violence domesticated into a symbol. Ida’s world aims at reason and reform, yet it guards itself with teeth.

That contradiction shows up immediately in dialogue. Cyril tries the old currency of courtly praise—calling the prince the climax of his age—and Ida cuts him down with contempt, naming compliment Light coin and tinsel. Her tone is austere, almost judicial. She insists the visitors must cast and fling the tricks that make women toys of men, and she frames education as moral renovation: not just learning, but a remaking of the self.

Statues of women who build, rule, and fight

Ida’s vision of freedom is built on exemplars: the hall’s statues are not Sleek Odalisques or fashion-oracles, but founders and strategists—Artemisia, Cornelia, Agrippina, the Palmyrene who fought Aurelian. This is not a soft separatism; it’s a counter-canon meant to re-train desire itself. Ida argues that looking at noble forms makes people noble through the sensuous organism—a startling claim, because she doesn’t deny the senses; she tries to recruit them.

And yet the poem won’t let us miss how coercive the project can sound. The statutes read like a quarantine: Not for three years to correspond with home, cross boundaries, or speak with men. Ida calls the newcomers green wood that must not warp, as if students are timber to be bent straight. Her dream of freedom is delivered in the language of discipline.

Psyche’s history lesson: emancipation as a long evolution

Lady Psyche’s lecture widens the poem’s horizon beyond Ida’s palace-bright authority. She begins with cosmogony—fluid haze of light turning into suns and planets—and then compresses human history into a brutal sequence: the monster, then the man, man crushing down his mate. It’s a narrative that makes women’s subordination feel ancient, almost geological, and therefore all the more urgent to resist.

Psyche’s tone warms from scholarly overview to prophecy. She lists cultures and laws that have limited women—laws Salique, little-footed China—and then pivots to the idea of a dawn, a beam falling on a land / Of promise. Her central insistence is practical: education is not ornament but capacity. The brain, she says, grew / With using. She names women across fields—Elizabeth in government, Joan in war, Sappho in grace—and imagines a future of paired equality: two beside the hearth, two in science sounding the abyss. The academy is framed as an Oasis, protected from ancient influence and scorn, where ability can finally compound.

The hinge: a lecture breaks into panic—a wolf within the fold

The poem’s decisive turn comes when Psyche recognizes her brother. The public voice—smooth, confident, didactic—collapses into a private cry, her speech Faltering and fluttering. The intrusion is not just the presence of men; it’s the return of kinship, history, and the body. Psyche instantly adopts the academy’s alarm-language: A wolf within the fold! A pack of wolves! The place that promised rational calm reaches for animal metaphors, just as Ida’s leopards have been waiting in the background.

Notice the tension inside that metaphor. Men are called wolves; the gate threatens death—LET NO MAN ENTER—and yet the speaker argues the threat is partly theatrical, like a clapper used To scare the fowl. The poem holds two readings at once: the academy is either a necessary fortress against predation, or an overdrawn stage-set whose violence will destroy what it hopes to protect. The speaker warns that if the threat becomes real, it leads to war and the collapse of the school itself—all fair theories toppling in the noise.

The problem Psyche can’t solve: being Brutus and being a mother

Psyche’s crisis isn’t mainly ideological; it’s intimate. Her baby, Aglaïa, sleeps beside her in shining draperies, headed like a star, a living emblem of tenderness placed right in the lecture hall. When confronted, Psyche tries to harden herself into an exemplar, claiming she could be a Spartan Mother or the Lucius Junius Brutus of womankind—someone who would even slay this child for the common weal. The extremity of the claim exposes its desperation. She is attempting to talk herself out of love by borrowing a masculine myth of civic virtue.

But the poem immediately undermines that posture. She paces Like some wild creature, then softens with Florian, holding out lily arms, admitting I am sad and glad. She says duty spoke, not I, a line that splits her into public function and private self. Memory rises in sweet household talk until gracious dews fall—tears that the academy’s statutes cannot legislate away.

Knowledge proved—and then reduced to appetite

When the men sit in the theatres and watch flawless demonstration performed by female hands, the poem quietly concedes the academy’s intellectual legitimacy: they do all this as well as we. Yet the concession is immediately pressured by Cyril’s cynicism—when did woman ever yet invent?—and by his own comic breakdown about being unmanned by his zone. His speech is silly, but it reveals something the poem keeps worrying: that male desire and male vanity will keep trying to turn this project back into romance, conquest, and property (those three castles he wants to patch his coat).

Meanwhile, menace enters through Lady Blanche, who shoots sidelong daggers, a tiger-cat / In act to spring. Even in a women’s sanctuary, power is predatory. The academy is not simply peace; it’s politics.

The ending’s lullaby: the academy’s dream meets the sea-wind of longing

The final shift is the most quietly radical. After the organ’s melodious thunder and Ida’s public piety—calling for a blessing on her labours—the poem ends not with statutes or prophecy but with a cradle-song: Sweet and low, a Wind of the western sea, asking to Blow him again to me. The voice is intimate, rhythmic, pleading. The academy’s grand argument about equality and knowledge is suddenly placed beside the simplest human need: the child sleeping, and the absent father desired back into the household.

This is the poem’s central contradiction brought to music: the college tries to cut women off from men and from domestic dependence, yet the lullaby imagines reunion as comfort and completion. Tennyson doesn’t make that longing cheap; he lets it be beautiful. But he also lets it complicate Ida’s project—suggesting that any new social order will have to contend not only with laws and customs, but with the deep, persistent weather of attachment.