Lady Of The Lake Canto 2 - Analysis

Morning benediction that already doubts itself

Canto II begins by letting the lake feel like a moral landscape: birds trim wings, the linnet sings, and reviving day seems to promise that life resets cleanly each morning. Yet the first song Allan-bane sings undercuts that comfort. He compares the rowers’ spray and the bright ripple that melts in the lake away to how quickly men erase kindness from memory. The poem’s central claim forms here: in a world of shifting loyalties and political danger, forgetting is the default human current, but true safety depends on the opposite—remembering who sheltered you. Even the farewell blessing—high place in court, true be thy sword, thy lady constant—sounds generous while quietly assuming the stranger will leave the island behind like a mood that passes.

Scott makes the contradiction explicit by building a loophole into the very act of dismissal. Allan-bane says, in effect, forget us—unless you become the kind of exile we are. If you see a plaided stranger under yon southern sky, or if mishap shall mar thy sail on life’s uncertain main, then remember your earlier luck as a stranger in the lonely isle. The island is offered as a place you must not think of—except when you most need it. Forgetting is praised, but contingency is the real creed.

The still harper and the “simple mute farewell”

When the boat reaches the mainland, Scott lingers on Allan-bane’s body as if the man were already half an emblem. He lies by a blighted tree, wasted, gray, and worn, so motionless he resembles someone waiting for a verdict: Till judgment speak. That stillness matters because it turns music into a kind of prophecy; the harper seems less like an entertainer than a vessel for whatever history is about to say. Even his desire is upward and hazardous: he raises his brow to heaven to claim a sparkle from the rising sun, as if inspiration were a last warmth he can still collect.

Beside him, Ellen’s smile is the canto’s first real human ambiguity. The narrator teases us with alternatives—she might be smiling at the drake and the spaniel baying at an unreachable prize—then presses the more intimate possibility: she smiles at the parting lingerer who waves, and stop and turn to wave again. Ellen’s own gesture is tiny, one courteous parting sign, yet the knight later says no public honor made his bosom swell like that simple mute farewell. Scott is showing how quickly a political narrative can be derailed by a private sign: a wave becomes an event with consequences, because it gives the stranger a claim in memory—the very thing the opening song said men discard.

Ellen’s double loyalty: Malcolm in the heart, Roderick in the debt

Ellen’s conscience immediately polices her attraction. When the stranger disappears, the guardian in her bosom scolds: Thy Malcolm!—calling her vain and selfish for letting a new face pull her attention. She tries to correct herself by demanding a heroic song for the Graeme, but blushes as soon as she says it, because Malcolm is already held the flower of his clan. Scott makes her feelings believable by making them incoherent: she is unconscious still and yet deeply reactive, compelled to steer the conversation, the music, even her own blush.

Her conversation with Allan-bane reveals the canto’s sharpest moral tension: gratitude versus consent. She admits her debt to Roderick’s household—Lady Margaret mothered her, and Roderick’s protection shelters her exiled father—yet she draws a line: he may command her blood and life, but not my hand. Scott refuses to let this be a merely romantic refusal. Ellen’s critique of Roderick is ethically specific: his claymore shows less mercy than he does; his generosity is stained by raids that leave ashes slaked with blood; she cannot clasp a hand reeking red from peasants killed in their sheds. And still she calls his virtues real—brave, true to his band—so that his violence becomes more frightening, like lightning o’er the midnight sky. The poem won’t allow the easy comfort of thinking brutality cancels charisma.

The harp that cannot keep a “lay of war” from turning into a dirge

When Ellen demands a martial theme, the harp itself refuses. Allan-bane strikes the martial chimes three times, and each time their pride dies into melancholy murmurs. He explains the mechanism with eerie clarity: he touches chords of joy, but the answer is notes of woe; the victor’s march sinks into wailing for the dead. Even when he tries to control his art, history breaks through the music. He remembers the same sighing sound on the night Ellen’s mother died, and when ruin came for the Douglases. The harp becomes an archive that won’t stay filed: it keeps spilling funerals into feasts, grief into celebration, warning into entertainment.

Ellen tries to rationalize the omen away as memory’s ties—songs entangled in an old man’s mind. Then she offers her own emblem, the blue harebell, which drinks heaven’s dew as happily as a rose in the King’s garden. It’s a brave argument for modest contentment: the exiled life is obscure, but safe. But Scott positions this speech so it reads like a charm spoken just before the spell breaks. Her harebell is a small, chosen symbol; the harp’s dirge is an involuntary one. The canto is about to show which kind of sign has authority.

The turn: from dew and harebells to pipes, banners, and a lion’s mane

The hinge of the canto is audible. Allan-bane hears what the landscape denies: no wind stirs the birch, the lake is still, yet he catches the pipe of war. Then the lake fills with four manned and massed barges, spears flashing, streamers flowing from loud chanters, and Sir Roderick’s bannered Pine glaring against the sun. The pastoral morning doesn’t exactly vanish; it’s overrun. Even the pibroch is described as a full narrative of violence—muster, marching, battle, rout, triumph—and then, crucially, it sinks into wild lament for the fallen. That musical arc mirrors Allan-bane’s earlier claim that war-march and funeral song cannot be separated. What looked like prophecy becomes simple accuracy.

The clan’s boat song praises the Pine as something moored in the rifted rock, proof against storms, rooting firmer the harder it blows. But the lyrics also brag about raids—Glen Luss smoking in ruin, widows lamenting—so the chief’s stability is built from others’ devastation. When the song wishes the island’s rosebud (Ellen) were wreathed around him, the poem clarifies the danger Allan-bane named earlier: Thy hand is on a lion’s mane. Courtship here is not separate from conquest; it is one of its rewards.

Night in the hall: love becomes a political weapon

Once Douglas returns and Malcolm is revealed, the canto tightens into a triangle where every feeling has public consequences. Douglas treasures the silent tear of Allan-bane and Ellen’s affection as more valuable than his lost pomp at Bothwell; at the same time, Roderick receives news that the King is coming north under the pretext of hunting and has already snared loyal hosts, leaving them struggling hung over their own gateways. Scott’s world is one where hospitality can be criminal evidence. Even Douglas’s decision to leave is framed as not drawing the lightning onto Roderick’s home, as if the King’s power were weather—impersonal, lethal, and attracted to prominent heads.

Roderick’s solution is blunt and revealing: marry Ellen, bind Douglas to him, and he can raise the clans—his nuptial torch threatening to become a thousand villages in flames. Ellen’s response is almost unbearable because it shows her temptation to self-sacrifice: she nearly buys her father’s safety with her hand. Malcolm reads that in her quivering lip and eye, and Douglas stops it, insisting he will not level a rebellious spear against his sovereign. Here the canto’s opening question about memory and benefits returns in harsher form: what do you owe the person who saved you, if repayment means becoming an accomplice to bloodshed? Ellen can offer life, even exile, but not a marriage that would sanctify violence and rebellion at once.

A parting that refuses to stay final

The canto ends with Malcolm choosing risk over safe-conduct, stripping for the water and plunging into the moonlit lake. It’s a physical echo of the earlier rowers’ spray and ripples, but now the water is not the medium of forgetting; it’s the medium of return. Malcolm says Earth does not hold a glen so secret they won’t meet again, rejecting Allan-bane’s first instruction to leave and not think back. The final image—Allan-bane straining his anxious eye to track Malcolm’s dark form across puny wave—restores the poem’s human scale. Chiefs and kings threaten from above, but the canto leaves us with an old man watching a single swimmer, as if loyalty has narrowed to one task: to keep someone in sight long enough for hope to reach the far shore.