La Belle Dame sans Merci
- John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was born on October
31, 1795, on the northern outskirts of London. His father was Thomas Keats,
manager of the Swan and Hoop, a livery stable, and his mother was Frances
Jennings, the daughter of the proprietor of the stables. In 1803, Keats entered
John Clarke's school in Enfield, about ten miles from London. Clarke was a
liberal and his influence may have contributed to Keats' political development.
The school, surprisingly, had a wider curriculum than such prestigious public
schools as Eton. There were about seventy-five boys in attendance. Its rural
location may have fostered Keats' love of nature. John was popular with the
other boys and won a reputation as an able fighter, in spite of his small size,
but was not outstanding as a scholar.
On April 15, 1804, John's father
was thrown from a horse and died from a skull fracture. His mother then married
a bank clerk whom she soon left. Her second husband sold the stables and the
four Keats children were left without a home.
In March 1805, John's grandfather
died, leaving the children without a male protector. The mother seems to have
dropped out of their lives, and so their grandmother, Mrs. Jennings, took them
into her house. Their mother reappeared in 1808, but died of tuberculosis in
1810. After his mother's death, Keats developed a love of reading, including
the thrillers popular in his time. In his last two or three terms at Enfield he
won several prizes and even began a prose translation of Virgil's Aeneid. At
this time he made a friend of Cowden Clarke, eight years his senior, who had
been his tutor in his first years at Enfield. Clarke was instrumental in
fostering a love of music and poetry in Keats.
Possibly because he had watched
his mother die, Keats decided to become a doctor and, in 1811, when he reached
the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to a Dr. Hammond. Not until he was
eighteen did he become deeply interested in poetry. It was apparently Cowden
Clarke's lending Keats a copy of Spenser's Faerie Queene that
furnished the stimulus. His first poem was an imitation of Spenser. Keats has
often been compared to Spenser in his richness of description.
In 1815, Keats ended his
apprenticeship with Dr. Hammond and matriculated at Guy's Hospital for one term
(six months). In the beginning, Keats was an industrious student, but in the
spring of 1816, he seems to have begun to lose his interest in medicine in
favor of poetry. However, he passed his examinations in July 1816, and was
qualified to practice as an apothecary and a surgeon.
At this time Keats renewed his
friendship with Clarke, met another young poet, John Hamilton Reynolds, and was
introduced to the essayist, journalist, and poet Leigh Hunt, who was impressed
by the poetry Keats had written so far. His friendship with Hunt was to have an
important effect on his life. Hunt deepened his interest in poetry and made him
a liberal in politics. His association with Hunt, however, who was a well-known
liberal, brought upon him the hostility of the influential Tory critics.
Early in 1817, Keats gave up
medicine for poetry. His career at Guy's Hospital had been a successful one,
but his fascination with poetry was stronger, and he had proved, at least to
his own satisfaction, that he could write poetry. His modest inheritance would
support him, he thought, until he had made his way in poetry. His first volume,
published by Shelley's publisher, Oilier, appeared March 3, 1817. It was a
mediocre achievement, but it contained "Chapman's Homer." An acute
critic should have been able to see, at least on the basis of this one poem,
that the author showed promise, but unfortunately no acute and influential
critic appeared as Keats' champion. The volume went almost unnoticed. The many
new friends he had made since coming to London — Keats had a gift for
friendship — were hopeful, but there was little they could do.
Keats now decided to try his hand
at a long poem. The result was Endymion, an involved romance
in the Elizabethan style, in which a mortal, the shepherd Endymion, was wedded
to the goddess Diana and won immortal bliss. Keats worked on it from April to
November 1817, and it appeared in April 1818. Before the year was over, Endymion was
harshly reviewed in Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly
Review. These reviews effectively stopped the sales of the
volume. Endymion, it must be said, while containing many
good lines and passages, is not a good poem, but worse poems now forgotten have
won fame and financial rewards for their authors. If Endymion had
been written by a respected Tory poet, it might have been hailed as a fine poem
by Blackwood's and the Quarterly. Keats'
politics happened to be the wrong ones in 1818.
An important change in Keats'
life was a walking tour that he took through the Lake Country, up into
Scotland, and a short trip to Ireland, with one of his friends, Charles Brown,
in the summer of 1818. The trip lasted from June to August and reached its
terminus in Cromarty, Scotland. The walking tour broadened Keats' acquaintance
with his environment and with varieties of people. The hardships which Keats
and Brown had to endure, often spending the night on the mud floor of a
shepherd's hut, may have weakened Keats' constitution and shortened his life.
In Inverness, he developed a sore throat and decided to return to London by
boat. The trip itself produced very little poetry.
In September, Keats began a new
long poem, Hyperion, which he never finished. The blank
verse of Hyperion revealed that Keats had become a
first-class poet. His firm control of language in Hyperion is
truly astonishing. Endymion and Hyperion could
have been the work of two different poets.
During the last months of 1818,
Keats nursed his brother Tom, who had been stricken with tuberculosis. Tom died
on December 1 at the age of nineteen. The three months which Keats spent
nursing his brother exposed the already weakened poet to tuberculosis, and, by
the spring of 1819, he showed many of the symptoms of the disease — depression,
hoarseness, insomnia, and an ulcerated sore throat.
In April and May of 1819, Keats
experienced a burst of energy and wrote "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on
Melancholy," "Ode on a Grecian Urn "and "Ode on
Indolence." In January he wrote his most perfect narrative poem, The
Eve of St. Agnes.
Keats' future was now a problem.
He was running out of money — and was in love with a lively and lovely girl,
Fanny Brawne. He thought of becoming a ship's surgeon. His friend Brown, who
had written a successful play, suggested that they write a tragedy together
that might be a financial success. As Keats needed solitude for a lengthy work,
on June 27 he left for the Isle of Wight, where he had begun Endymion. Brown
joined him there and supplied the plot while Keats supplied the words. They
spent the summer of 1819 working on Otho the Great. During
this summer, Keats also wrote his lengthy narrative poem Lamia,
which he hoped would prove popular. Unfortunately, neither of the legitimate
theaters, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, would take a chance on Otho,
which was a decidedly mediocre work, but not worse than some other plays staged
by these two theaters.
After this summer Keats
accomplished very little. He worked at Hyperion now and
then, began a new play (King Stephen), began a satire, and wrote his
superb "To Autumn." He had very little money left and he was filled
with anxieties, but nevertheless he and Fanny Brawne became secretly engaged.
In February 1820, Keats had a hemorrhage in his lungs; he began to cough blood
and soon became an invalid.
Keats' third and last volume of
poetry came out July 1, 1820, when he was staying with the Hunts and recovering
from another hemorrhage. Gradually the volume began to receive favorable
reviews, including one in the influential Edinburgh Review. Nevertheless
the volume sold slowly. Keats did not begin to receive attention as a poet
until after the romantic period was over.
On the advice of two doctors, Keats
decided to go to Italy, a trip that was often a last resort when one was
stricken with tuberculosis. John Taylor, who had published Keats' last volume
put up the money for the Italian trip. The expected sales of the Lamia volume
were the security for the loan.
Keats sailed from London on
September 17, 1820, and arrived in Naples almost a month later. From there, he
travelled to Rome, where he rented an apartment overlooking the famous
"Spanish Steps." There, attended by his painter friend Joseph Severn,
he entered the last stages of tuberculosis and died on February 23, 1821. He
was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome near the stately Pyramid of Caius
Cestius. On his tombstone appears, at his own request, the words "Here
lies one whose name was writ in water." The thousands of visitors who read
these words every year are eloquent proof of how greatly he underestimated his
poetic achievement.
John Keats
John
Keats was born on October 31, 1795, on the northern outskirts of London. His
father was Thomas Keats, manager of the Swan and Hoop, a livery stable, and his
mother was Frances Jennings, the daughter of the proprietor of the stables. In
1803, Keats entered John Clarke's school in Enfield, about ten miles from
London. Clarke was a liberal and his influence may have contributed to Keats'
political development. The school, surprisingly, had a wider curriculum than
such prestigious public schools as Eton. There were about seventy-five boys in
attendance. Its rural location may have fostered Keats' love of nature. John
was popular with the other boys and won a reputation as an able fighter, in
spite of his small size, but was not outstanding as a scholar.
On
April 15, 1804, John's father was thrown from a horse and died from a skull
fracture. His mother then married a bank clerk whom she soon left. Her second
husband sold the stables and the four Keats children were left without a home.
In
March 1805, John's grandfather died, leaving the children without a male
protector. The mother seems to have dropped out of their lives, and so their
grandmother, Mrs. Jennings, took them into her house. Their mother reappeared
in 1808, but died of tuberculosis in 1810. After his mother's death, Keats
developed a love of reading, including the thrillers popular in his time. In
his last two or three terms at Enfield he won several prizes and even began a
prose translation of Virgil's Aeneid. At this time he made a
friend of Cowden Clarke, eight years his senior, who had been his tutor in his
first years at Enfield. Clarke was instrumental in fostering a love of music
and poetry in Keats.
Possibly
because he had watched his mother die, Keats decided to become a doctor and, in
1811, when he reached the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to a Dr. Hammond.
Not until he was eighteen did he become deeply interested in poetry. It was
apparently Cowden Clarke's lending Keats a copy of Spenser's Faerie
Queene that furnished the stimulus. His first poem was an imitation
of Spenser. Keats has often been compared to Spenser in his richness of
description.
In
1815, Keats ended his apprenticeship with Dr. Hammond and matriculated at Guy's
Hospital for one term (six months). In the beginning, Keats was an industrious
student, but in the spring of 1816, he seems to have begun to lose his interest
in medicine in favor of poetry. However, he passed his examinations in July
1816, and was qualified to practice as an apothecary and a surgeon.
At this
time Keats renewed his friendship with Clarke, met another young poet, John
Hamilton Reynolds, and was introduced to the essayist, journalist, and poet
Leigh Hunt, who was impressed by the poetry Keats had written so far. His
friendship with Hunt was to have an important effect on his life. Hunt deepened
his interest in poetry and made him a liberal in politics. His association with
Hunt, however, who was a well-known liberal, brought upon him the hostility of
the influential Tory critics.
Early
in 1817, Keats gave up medicine for poetry. His career at Guy's Hospital had
been a successful one, but his fascination with poetry was stronger, and he had
proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that he could write poetry. His
modest inheritance would support him, he thought, until he had made his way in
poetry. His first volume, published by Shelley's publisher, Oilier, appeared
March 3, 1817. It was a mediocre achievement, but it contained "Chapman's
Homer." An acute critic should have been able to see, at least on the
basis of this one poem, that the author showed promise, but unfortunately no
acute and influential critic appeared as Keats' champion. The volume went
almost unnoticed. The many new friends he had made since coming to London — Keats
had a gift for friendship — were hopeful, but there was little they could do.
Keats
now decided to try his hand at a long poem. The result was Endymion, an
involved romance in the Elizabethan style, in which a mortal, the shepherd
Endymion, was wedded to the goddess Diana and won immortal bliss. Keats worked
on it from April to November 1817, and it appeared in April 1818. Before the
year was over, Endymion was harshly reviewed in Blackwood's
Magazine and the Quarterly Review. These reviews
effectively stopped the sales of the volume. Endymion, it
must be said, while containing many good lines and passages, is not a good
poem, but worse poems now forgotten have won fame and financial rewards for
their authors. If Endymion had been written by a respected
Tory poet, it might have been hailed as a fine poem by Blackwood's and
the Quarterly. Keats' politics happened to be the wrong ones
in 1818.
An
important change in Keats' life was a walking tour that he took through the
Lake Country, up into Scotland, and a short trip to Ireland, with one of his
friends, Charles Brown, in the summer of 1818. The trip lasted from June to
August and reached its terminus in Cromarty, Scotland. The walking tour
broadened Keats' acquaintance with his environment and with varieties of
people. The hardships which Keats and Brown had to endure, often spending the
night on the mud floor of a shepherd's hut, may have weakened Keats'
constitution and shortened his life. In Inverness, he developed a sore throat
and decided to return to London by boat. The trip itself produced very little
poetry.
In
September, Keats began a new long poem, Hyperion, which he
never finished. The blank verse of Hyperion revealed that
Keats had become a first-class poet. His firm control of language in Hyperion is
truly astonishing. Endymion and Hyperion could
have been the work of two different poets.
During
the last months of 1818, Keats nursed his brother Tom, who had been stricken
with tuberculosis. Tom died on December 1 at the age of nineteen. The three months
which Keats spent nursing his brother exposed the already weakened poet to
tuberculosis, and, by the spring of 1819, he showed many of the symptoms of the
disease — depression, hoarseness, insomnia, and an ulcerated sore throat.
In
April and May of 1819, Keats experienced a burst of energy and wrote "Ode
to Psyche," "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode on a Grecian Urn
"and "Ode on Indolence." In January he wrote his most perfect
narrative poem, The Eve of St. Agnes.
Keats'
future was now a problem. He was running out of money — and was in love with a
lively and lovely girl, Fanny Brawne. He thought of becoming a ship's surgeon.
His friend Brown, who had written a successful play, suggested that they write
a tragedy together that might be a financial success. As Keats needed solitude
for a lengthy work, on June 27 he left for the Isle of Wight, where he had
begun Endymion. Brown joined him there and supplied the plot
while Keats supplied the words. They spent the summer of 1819 working on Otho
the Great. During this summer, Keats also wrote his lengthy narrative
poem Lamia, which he hoped would prove popular. Unfortunately,
neither of the legitimate theaters, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, would take a
chance on Otho, which was a decidedly mediocre work, but not worse
than some other plays staged by these two theaters.
After
this summer Keats accomplished very little. He worked at Hyperion now
and then, began a new play (King Stephen), began a satire, and wrote
his superb "To Autumn." He had very little money left and he was
filled with anxieties, but nevertheless he and Fanny Brawne became secretly
engaged. In February 1820, Keats had a hemorrhage in his lungs; he began to
cough blood and soon became an invalid.
Keats'
third and last volume of poetry came out July 1, 1820, when he was staying with
the Hunts and recovering from another hemorrhage. Gradually the volume began to
receive favorable reviews, including one in the influential Edinburgh
Review. Nevertheless the volume sold slowly. Keats did not begin to
receive attention as a poet until after the romantic period was over.
On the
advice of two doctors, Keats decided to go to Italy, a trip that was often a
last resort when one was stricken with tuberculosis. John Taylor, who had
published Keats' last volume put up the money for the Italian trip. The
expected sales of the Lamia volume were the security for the
loan.
Keats
sailed from London on September 17, 1820, and arrived in Naples almost a month
later. From there, he travelled to Rome, where he rented an apartment
overlooking the famous "Spanish Steps." There, attended by his
painter friend Joseph Severn, he entered the last stages of tuberculosis and
died on February 23, 1821. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome
near the stately Pyramid of Caius Cestius. On his tombstone appears, at his own
request, the words "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." The
thousands of visitors who read these words every year are eloquent proof of how
greatly he underestimated his poetic achievement.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
The poem is considered an English classic, typical of other of Keats'
works. It avoids simplicity of interpretation despite simplicity of structure.
At only a short twelve
stanzas, of only four lines each, with a simple ABCB
rhyme
scheme, the poem is nonetheless full of enigmas, and has been the subject
of numerous interpretations.
Poem
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.
She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Analysis
"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a popular form given an artistic
by the Romantic poets. Keats uses a stanza of three
iambic
tetrameter lines with the fourth dimetric line which makes the stanza
seem a self-contained unit, giving the ballad a deliberate and slow movement,
and is pleasing to the ear. Keats uses a number of the stylistic
characteristics of the ballad, such as the simplicity of the language,
repetition, and absence of details; like some of the old ballads, it deals with
the supernatural. Keats's economical manner of telling a story in "La
Belle Dame sans Merci" is the direct opposite of his lavish manner in
"
The Eve of St. Agnes". Part of the
fascination exerted by the poem comes from Keats' use of understatement.
Keats sets his simple story of love and death in a bleak wintry landscape
that is appropriate to it: "The
sedge has
wither'd from the lake / And no birds sing!" The repetition of these two
lines, with minor variations, as the concluding lines of the poem emphasizes
the fate of the unfortunate knight and neatly encloses the poem in a frame by
bringing it back to its beginning. Keats relates the condition of the trees and
surroundings with condition of the knight who is also broken.
In keeping with the ballad tradition, Keats does not identify his questioner,
or the knight, or the destructively beautiful lady. What Keats does not include
in his poem contributes as much to it in arousing the reader's imagination as
what he puts into it. La belle dame sans merci, the beautiful lady without
pity, is a
femme fatale, a
Circe-like figure
who attracts lovers only to destroy them by her supernatural powers. She
destroys because it is her nature to destroy. Keats could have found patterns
for his "faery's child" in folk mythology, classical literature,
Renaissance poetry, or the medieval ballad. With a few skillful touches, he
creates a woman who is at once beautiful, erotically attractive, fascinating,
and deadly.
Some readers see the poem as Keats' personal rebellion against the pains
of love. In his letters and in some of his poems, he reveals that he did
experience the pains, as well as the pleasures, of love and that he resented
the pains, particularly the loss of freedom that came with falling in love.
John Keats and La Belle
Dame sans Merci
La
Belle Dame sans Merci is in the form of a folk ballad and relates the
story of a man (a knight) and a beautiful woman (a faery's child), in what is a
curious allegorical romance.
Many
think John Keats got the idea for the title from a medieval French poem written
by one Alain Chartier (in old french merci meant mercy, not thank you as it
does today) and he could also have been inspired by the earlier Scottish story
of Thomas the Rhymer, who is taken off by the beautiful Queen of Elfinland on a
white horse.
There
are some strong arguments for a later version of this story being of particular
interest. Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border contained
the original ballad of Thomas, written in rhyming verse, and Keats could well
have come across it.
Edmund
Spenser's The Faerie Queene has also been cited as a possible influence.
Published in 1590, it has a character called Florimell, a lady, 'Fair
Florimell, beloved of many a knight.'
Other
events in his life may well have contributed to the idea of an enigmatic and
slightly disturbing romance in poetic form such as a ballad.
For
instance, his brother Tom had died in the winter of 1818, of tuberculosis
(which was to claim Keats himself in 1821) and during this illness some cruel,
deceptive letters from trickster friends purporting to come from a French woman
Amena, who was in love with Tom, arrived, with Keats's brother on his death
bed.
And
Keats too had his own anguished relationship with Fanny Brawne to contend with.
He was madly in love with her but hadn't the resources or good health to fully
commit. His letters to her are painful and passionate, and he knew that he
would never be able to fulfil his hopelessly romantic dream.
There
is no doubt that he had difficulty expressing himself when in the company of
women.
'When
I am among women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen - I cannot speak or be
silent - I am full of suspicions and therefore listen to no thing - I am in a
hurry to be gone...I must absolutely get over this - but how?'
Letter
to Benjamin Bailey 1818
·
So, La Belle
Dame sans Merci is perhaps the result of emotional conflict merging
with poetic craft. Keats created the poem using his imagination out of which
came beauty and truth, contained in a dream-like and disturbing drama.
·
In
addition, the poem takes the reader into a supernatural world, where real or
imagined experience morphs into fairy tale, where conscious control is lost to
the seductive powers of a fleeting sensuality.
Is
the Belle Dame a kind of femme fatale? A succubus of sorts? She seems to have a
way with mortal men that's for sure. And the man? What were the occupiers of
his dream warning him about? His impending destruction?
Just
as in the first and second stanzas and that question 'O what can ail
thee?', there are no definitive answers.
The
poem first appeared in a letter he wrote to his brother George in April 1819.
This version is the one shown below, as opposed to the second version, later
published in The Indicator in 1820.
Analysis of La Belle
Dame sans Merci
La Belle Dame sans Merci with
its mysterious narrative and ethereal atmosphere, combines innocence and
seduction in an unusual ballad form to produce a haunting story.
In one sense it's little more than
man meets woman in the countryside, they have a fling and the man ends up
dumped, by a lake. He doesn't know if he's been drugged or not but it certainly
seems he has been intimate with this beautiful stranger.
It's up to the reader to fill in
the details.
Perhaps this is why the poem is so
successful in its portrayal of a relationship that came out of nowhere,
progressed to a different dimension and had such a profound effect on the male,
and probably the female too.
The reader is left hanging on, with
a need to know more, thanks to the metric pattern of the stanzas and the
bizarre circumstances the man finds himself in.
·
And
in certain sections of the poem there is the suggestion of a sexual liaison
which is perhaps drug inspired. Notably, stanzas five and seven stand out, with
mention of the man making garlands and bracelets and a fragrant girdle (Zone)
whilst the woman made sweet moan. And later she finds sweet roots, honey wild
and manna dew (manna is the food from heaven as stated in the Bible), most
certainly the food of love.
The other question that has to be
asked is: Has this whole scenario been imagined by the speaker? Is it some sort
of dream sequence based on the polarities of pleasure and pain?
Further Analysis
The structure of this poem is more
or less straightforward. The twelve stanzas are split:
·
1
- 3 stanzas... observations and repeated questions from stranger.
·
4
- 6 stanzas... the knight answers, repeating I met, I made, I set.
·
7
- 9 stanzas. the knight progresses, repeating She found, She took, And She
lulled.
·
10
- 12 stanzas... the knight reverts, repeating I saw, I saw, I sojourn.
Stanza 1 - A
stranger encounters a pale knight by a lake. There is something wrong with the
man. Sedge grass has died, the birds are quiet - is this a winter scene or an
integral part of the atmosphere?
Stanza 2 -
The stranger repeats his enquiry. This knight looks miserable and sick. It's
the back end of autumn, approaching colder weather.
Stanza 3 -
There is a direct observation by the stranger. The lily and the rose are both
symbols of death (in a Petrarchan sense). Is the knight so close to meeting his
Maker?
Stanza 4 -
The knight replies. He met a woman in the meadows (Meads), no ordinary woman
but a beauty, an otherworldly figure.
Stanza 5 -
The knight made love to her in the meadow. It was consensual.
Stanza 6 -
Afterwards he put her on his horse and he walked alongside as she sang her
exotic songs.
Stanza 7 -
She knew just where to look for sweet and heavenly foods. I ate them and she
loved me for it, even though I didn't really understand what was happening.
Stanza 8 -
She took me to her special place, deep in a grotto, where she became so
emotional I had to reassure her, so wild were her eyes. I kissed them 4 times.
Stanza 9 -
She calmed me down too, so much so I feel asleep and had a dream. There was
trouble brewing. That was my last ever dream.
Stanza 10 -
In the dream I saw pale kings, warriors and princes, near to death. They were
warning me about the beautiful woman.
Stanza 11 -
Their mouths were gaping open in that dreamy twilight gloom. Then i woke up on
a cold hill side.
Stanza 12 -
And so you find me here by the lake. I don't know what I'm doing.
So the cycle is complete, yet the
reader is none the wiser about the woman's or indeed the man's, intentions or
motivations.
Was she an evil entity set on
absorbing the knight's life forces? A kind of vampire come to the human world
to seek knowledge of flesh and blood? Or did he take advantage of the woman
first, after which she wanted some kind of revenge?
Perhaps their chance meeting was a
combination of wishful thinking on behalf of the knight and opportunity grasped
by the beautiful if supernatural female.
The whole poem suggests that the
borderline between reality and imagination is often blurred. We give ourselves
up to ideals of beauty, then in a trice it is gone, or we go through
experiences that are not to our liking, that leave us spent, hollowed out.
As in a typical folk lyric ballad,
there are several repetitions which place emphasis
on certain lines and reinforce sub-themes:
O what can ail thee, knight at
arms x2
Alone and palely loitering x2
The sedge is/has withered from
the lake/And no birds sing.x2
On the cold hill/hill's side x2
And there x4.
More Analysis of La
Belle Dame sans Merci
La Belle Dame sans Merci is
a 12 stanza ballad, each stanza a quatrain (four lines), each quatrain having
three lines of iambic tetrameter followed by a single line of iambic dimeter.
·
The
second and fourth lines are in full rhyme, so the rhyme scheme is abcb.
(but note the slant rhyme woebegone/done in the second
stanza).
Metre (meter in American
English)
This ballad has a classic iambic
beat: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM with
the stress on the second syllable in each foot:
O what / can ail /
thee, knight / at arms,
(8 syllables, 4 feet= iambic tetrameter)
Alone / and pale
/ ly loit / ering?
The sedge has withered from the lake
And no / birds sing! (4
syllables, 2 feet=iambic dimeter)
This tetrameter/dimeter contrast is
unusual for the typical folk ballad so Keats must have wanted the change to
place emphasis on that last shortened line in each stanza.
·
The
last line of each stanza therefore creates a kind of suspension. The reader,
being used to the longer tetrameter lines, is then faced with a missing couple
of beats, which adds a sense of loss, which in turn suggests mystery.
·
In
stanzas 2, 3, 4, 9 and 11 the last line has an extra beat, an anapaest foot
(da-da-DUM) being employed:
And the har
/ vest's done (5
syllables, 2 feet= anapaest + iamb)
And her eyes
/ were wild
On the cold
/ hill side
On the cold
/ hill's side
·
Stanza
3 also has 5 syllables in the last line, a spondee foot (DA-DUM) and
a following anapaest:
Fast with / ereth too. (5
syllables, 2 feet= spondee + anapaest)
Summary
An
unidentified speaker asks a knight what afflicts him. The knight is pale,
haggard, and obviously dying. "And on thy cheeks a fading rose / Fast
withereth too — ." The knight answers that he met a beautiful lady,
"a faery's child" who had looked at him as if she loved him. When he
set her on his horse, she led him to her cave. There she had sung him to sleep.
In his sleep he had nightmarish dreams. Pale kings, princes, and warriors told
him that he had been enslaved by a beautiful but cruel lady. When he awoke, the
lady was gone and he was lying on a cold hillside.
Analysis
"La
Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad, a medieval genre revived by the
romantic poets. Keats uses the so-called ballad stanza, a quatrain in
alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. The shortening of the fourth
line in each stanza of Keats' poem makes the stanza seem a self-contained unit,
gives the ballad a deliberate and slow movement, and is pleasing to the ear.
Keats uses a number of the stylistic characteristics of the ballad, such as
simplicity of language, repetition, and absence of details; like some of the
old ballads, it deals with the supernatural. Keats' economical manner of
telling a story in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is the direct opposite
of his lavish manner in The Eve of St. Agnes. Part of the
fascination exerted by the poem comes from Keats' use of understatement.
Keats
sets his simple story of love and death in a bleak wintry landscape that is
appropriate to it: "The sedge has wither'd from the lake / And no birds
sing!" The repetition of these two lines, with minor variations, as the
concluding lines of the poem emphasizes the fate of the unfortunate knight and
neatly encloses the poem in a frame by bringing it back to its beginning.
In
keeping with the ballad tradition, Keats does not identify his questioner, or
the knight, or the destructively beautiful lady. What Keats does not include in
his poem contributes as much to it in arousing the reader's imagination as what
he puts into it. La belle dame sans merci, the beautiful lady without pity, is
a femme fatale, a Circelike figure who attracts lovers only to
destroy them by her supernatural powers. She destroys because it is her nature
to destroy. Keats could have found patterns for his "faery's child"
in folk mythology, classical literature, Renaissance poetry, or the medieval
ballad. With a few skillful touches, he creates a woman who is at once
beautiful, erotically attractive, fascinating, and deadly.
Some
readers see the poem as Keats' personal rebellion against the pains of love. In
his letters and in some of his poems, he reveals that he did experience the
pains, as well as the pleasures, of love and that he resented the pains,
particularly the loss of freedom that came with falling in love. However, the
ballad is a very objective form, and it may be best to read "La Belle Dame
sans Merci" as pure story and no more. How Keats felt about his love for
Fanny Brawne we can discover in the several poems he addressed to her, as well
as in his letters.
