“I am half-sick of shadows”

“I am half-sick of shadows” is the line Anna recalls from Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” during an intimate encounter. In this scene, the poem’s images of a broken mirror and a web cast aside become a frame for Anna’s movement from watching and feeling removed toward wanting immediate, bodily experience—though the passage leaves that change tentative rather than complete.

The quotation and its source

The phrase enters as part of a brief, exact recitation: “Out flew the web, and floated wide; / The mirror crack’d from side to side; / ‘I am half-sick of shadows,’ cried / The Lady of Shalott.” Anna interrupts the quotation with the questions “Why Tennyson? Why now?” Her response makes the literary reference more than a decorative allusion: she recognizes that the poem has surfaced at a moment when its imagery seems to speak to her own condition, even as she cannot explain why it has come to mind.

The quoted lines link the expression to two acts of rupture: the web flies free, and the mirror cracks. In the immediate scene, those images accompany a shift away from distance and observation. The phrase itself is qualified rather than absolute: “half-sick” registers weariness with shadows, but not a clean escape from them. Anna soon intensifies the wording in her own thoughts, moving from the poem’s measured statement to the blunt declaration that she is sick of shadows.

The expression in the scene

The quotation appears after Anna and a man have fallen onto the landing floor and he carries her to the nearest bed. He kisses her; his stubble scrapes her cheeks and chin, one hand pulls at her hair, and the other tugs at her sash. Anna sucks in her stomach as her robe opens, but his kisses continue across her throat and shoulders. The physical details give the poem’s abstract opposition between shadow and contact a specific setting: Anna is not watching an image from a distance but registering another person’s touch against her skin.

Her reaction is not simply comfort or ease. She thinks, “I haven’t felt this in so long. I haven’t felt in so long,” repeating the claim until the lack of feeling itself becomes prominent. Then she states, “I want to feel this. I want to feel,” before returning to the image of shadows. The repetition makes the desire sound both urgent and newly recognized. The expression thus marks a contrast between prolonged numbness and an immediate sensation that Anna wants to inhabit, without suggesting that one encounter has resolved what preceded it.

After the moment of contact

The passage shifts into darkness after the intimacy. Anna’s fingers brush the man’s chest and stomach, then follow the line of hair below his navel; he breathes quietly, and she drifts away. The sequence moves from the earlier force and pressure of kissing to a quieter, tactile gesture. Its focus remains on sensation, but the scene does not present wakeful closeness as a settled destination: Anna falls asleep and half-dreams of sunsets and Jane Russell.

At some point she hears a soft tread on the landing. Rather than treating the sound as an intrusion, she is surprised to hope that the man will come back to bed. That hope gives the expression a small but meaningful continuation: Anna’s wish to be done with shadows is accompanied by a wish for renewed proximity. Yet the ending remains open. The man’s return is hoped for, not confirmed, so the movement toward contact is real in Anna’s desire but unresolved in the scene’s final image.