La Belle Dame sans Merci - John Keats

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

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" (French for "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy"^[1]) is a ballad written by the English poet John Keats. It exists in two versions with minor differences between them. The original was written by Keats in 1819. He used the title of the 15th-century La Belle Dame sans Mercy by Alain Chartier, though the plots of the two poems are different.^[2]

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.