La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats

About  poet :

John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first encounter with Keats an experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad by the Romantic poet John Keats, first published in 1819. The title translates to "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy" in French, and the poem tells the story of a knight who falls in love with a mysterious and enchanting woman, only to be betrayed and left to suffer.

The poem opens with the knight wandering alone in a desolate landscape, with no one around him except for the lady who appears suddenly. He is captivated by her beauty and falls deeply in love with her, but there is something otherworldly about her that he cannot quite understand.

The lady takes the knight to her fairy-like dwelling, where she sings and dances for him. The knight is completely entranced by her, and he promises to do anything for her. However, the lady's love is fickle, and she quickly grows bored with the knight. She leaves him alone in the cold, cruel world, and he is left to suffer in despair.

The poem ends with the knight's dream-like recollection of the lady's betrayal, and he is left to ponder the true nature of his experience. The reader is left with the sense that the knight has been ensnared by the lady's beauty, only to be cast aside once she has had her fill of him.

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a powerful exploration of love and loss, and it captures the essence of Romanticism in its use of vivid, evocative imagery and its focus on the emotional experiences of the individual. Keats was a master of language and emotion, and this poem is one of his most enduring and beloved works. It is a haunting and unforgettable tale of love and heartbreak that continues to captivate readers to this day.

About Poem:

To structure the poem’s narrative, Keats borrows a question-and-response form from earlier folk ballads and pastoral eclogues. In the first three stanzas the poet does indeed appear as a third-person narrator, but only as a kind of rhetorical presence, addressing the knight in a series of questions that allow the poet to “transfer,” in Coleridge’s words, “from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth” onto the character of the knight. Likewise, the knight’s predicament is laid out in this mini-interrogation—he is given a vocabulary—and the rest of the poem will be taken up by his response, his story, as it were.

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.

With the belle dame playing a figure of love and fantasy and the agent of death and decay to the knight, it is as though Keats has stumbled upon his mirror image as he gazes upon the knight:

I see a lily on thy brow,

            With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

            Fast withereth too.

For a fantasy poem whose setting seems so distant from real time, the poem might very well express figuratively what Keats was experiencing in his love life and his health. The mix of literary and emotional forces influencing Keats at the time he wrote “La Belle Dame sans Merci” was nothing less than extreme. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was 14; his brother, whom Keats nursed through his final months, died of the same disease in 1818. Even before his brother’s death, Keats too would begin to show signs of the disease, returning from his rigorous tour of Scotland and Ireland with a harsh cough and an ulcerated throat. That year he would also fall in love with Fanny Brawne and by the spring of 1819 would embark on what was to become one of the most important sequences of odes in our literature, all written in a single year. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” was written in the heat of his passion for Fanny, the fever of death hanging over him. He was on fire poetically, in love, growing ill, and suffering from depression. By the end of May 1819 Keats finished the poem:

I met a lady in the meads,

       Full beautiful—a faery’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.

The knight’s story is of coming upon “a lady in the meads,” “a faery’s child” with wild eyes. The story is full of double entendres: “fragrant zone” (a girdle of flowers or his lover’s nether regions?), “I set her on my pacing steed” (his horse, or his erection?). She weeps and sighs “full sore” (until she is sore?). There are often two ways of seeing this scene, as the knight quickly learns. The landscape is lush with meadows and spring, wild honey and manna dew, but the story quickly moves from idyllic to horrific, as the fairytale romp turns to imprisonment on a cold hillside.

After his rough-and-tumble, the knight finds himself in a kind of hell through the common gothic transport of a dream. He is surrounded by all of the lady’s previous victims, who include kings and princes and warriors; her taste in men is evidently consistent.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci

       Thee hath 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.

The repetition of “pale” reinforces the subtext of tubercular illness. In the next stanza we see the victims’ “starved lips” (starved for air?) and hear their only words, “La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!” The thrall of love is clearly equated with the thrall of illness.

The partnering themes in gothic literature—love and death; temptation and duty; dream and waking, and the murky suffering of the consequences of ungoverned emotion; ecstasy and its aftermath of despair; the otherworldly seductress, Homer’s Circe or Sirens, or the poetic muse herself—these are all figures without pity (sans merci) whose function is to entrap. All of this informs the consumptive grayness of the knight’s predicament, a cache of themes that are echoed in the poet’s own feverish condition. Even nature cooperates, with its withering sedge and finished harvest.

Keats’s notions that the poet is “without identity” and “the most unpoetical of anything in existence” extend Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief,” but mostly in practical ways: Keats’s knight seems a purer creation of dramatic character than Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner or Christabel, and more like a Hamlet or a King Lear, albeit in miniature. Of course, a total subjugation of “poetic character,” as Keats calls it in his letter, would be impossible, though many modern and postmodern poets have attempted just that. In this way, Keats was certainly anticipating post-Romantic strategies of expression. Through allegorical displacement Keats is able to diffuse overobvious “self-expression” and transform what in a lesser poet would remain self-pity into a self-erasing empathy for his created characters. By using the figure of the knight as a dramatically convincing surrogate for the pathos he himself feels, Keats makes powerful use of some of the most important Romantic themes: the stress of self-examination, the fraught duality of Eros and death, and individual mortality and its mirroring in the cycles of nature.