LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

JOHN KEATS

Introduction
• "La Belle Dame sans Merci" ("The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy") is a
ballad produced by the English poet John Keats in 1819.
• John Keats was one of the main figures of the second generation of
English Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe
Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four
years before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25.
• The title was derived from the title of a 15th by Alain Chartier called
century poem La Belle Dame sans Mercy.
• La Belle Dame sans merci, poem by John Keats, first published in the May
10, 1820, issue of the Indicator. The poem, whose title means “The
Beautiful Lady Without Pity,” describes the encounter between a knight
and a mysterious elfin beauty who ultimately abandons him. It is written
in the style of a folk ballad, with the first three stanzas a query to the
knight and the remaining nine stanzas the knight’s reply. The poem is
sometimes seen as a counterpart to Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” which
represents an idyllic view of love. Keats took his title from
a medieval poem with the same name by the French poet Alain Chartier.

• Considered an English classic, the poem is an example of Keats' poetic

preoccupation with love and death. The poem is about a fairy who
condemns a knight to an unpleasant fate after she seduces him with
her eyes and singing. The fairy inspired several artists to paint images
that became early examples of 19th century femme fatale iconography.
 The poem continues to be referenced in many works of literature,
music, art, and film.

About the poem

• “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is a ballad by John Keats, one of the
most studied and highly regarded English Romantic poets. In the
poem, a medieval knight recounts a fanciful romp in the countryside
with a fairy woman 3 — La Belle Dame sans Merci , which means "The
Beautiful Lady Without Mercy" in French — that ends in cold horror.
Related to this focus on death and horror, Keats wrote the poem
months after his brother Tom died of tuberculosis .
• femme fatale, La belle dame sans merci, the beautiful lady without
pity, is a 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.

Historical Context

• Keats wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci when he was dying from
tuberculosis. He had already seen his mother and brother die from this
terrible disease before he contracted it himself. It is likely that the
knowledge of his own imminent death inspired this poem. While Keats’
mother died in 1810, Keats contracted the same disease in 1819. He had
seen the effect that the disease had on his mother and his brother, and
he knew what was to come for himself.

• Even more tragic than his contraction of tuberculosis is that he was newly
engaged and desperately in love. He claimed that he could bear to die,
but he could not bear to leave his love. It is not difficult to make a
connection between this poem and Keats’ life. Although he does not
appear to view his real-life love as the cause of his death, there still
remain striking parallels. Both the Knight in this poem and John Keats
 himself fell in love shortly before death. Both were unable to enjoy love
for very long before death became imminent.

• Sadly, John Keats died at the young age of twenty-five. Having studied
some medicine, Keats knew his symptoms well enough to know that his
time was limited. Just as Keats had found love, and just as his poetry was
beginning to be noticed, he faced his own early death. Being fully aware
of his symptoms and the result of his disease (John Keats), Keats also
faced depression. He saw that his life was to end just as it was beginning.
He left behind a fiancee whom he desperately loved and a plethora of
poems that would eventually become some of the most renowned and
beloved poems of all time.

Inspiration for the poem

The ballad may have been inspired by the tomb effigy of Richard FitzAlan,
10th Earl of Arundel in (d. 1376) Chichester Cathedral. At the time of Keats'
visit in 1819, the effigy stood mutilated and separated from that of Arundel's
second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster (d. 1372) in the northern outer aisle.

Summary
The speaker notices a knight wandering alone on the road, and asks himself
what troubles the knight could possibly have encountered. He appears in
a poor physical and emotional state, his skin a deathly pallor. The speaker
asks the knight about his troubles. He tells a story about a mysterious woman
he met on the hillside. Her wild eyes quickly captivated the knight and, before
long, they made love and rode away on the speaker's horse. However, the
"faerylike" lady had a few tricks up her sleeve. In her home, a small cave
on the hillside, the woman lulled him to sleep. In the knight's dream, he
meets kings, princes, and warriors who were also seduced by the woman,
only to be left eternally pale and loitering in the woods. He woke up alone,
abandoned by the woman, lost like the others.
• In the first three stanzas , there is a sad and lonely knight who is
‘loitering’ on a hillside, who is encountered by a traveller (the
speaker) who asks him what is wrong. The knight is visibly sick,
sweating and turning pale.
 • In the fourth stanza , the narrative voice switches to the lonely knight
himself; he explains that he met a lively and wild looking woman in
a meadow. She behaved in an uncivilised, animalistic way — wild hair
(which she had crazy eyes and loose, seems natural nowadays but
would have been feared by readers at the time). The knight pities
her because she seems to be in a distressed state, as a knight’s
purpose is to protect vulnerable people (e.g. the idea of the heroic
‘knight in shining armour’).
• In the fifth stanza he is captivated by and begins courting (romancing)
the lady — she dresses the knight in jewellery made of wildflowers
to mirror her wild character.
• In the sixth stanza , the knight describes how he put her on his
horse, and from that point on he can only see her because he is so
focused on her and her singing; he becomes oblivious to his
surroundings.
• The seventh and eighth stanzas her fairy cave : the narrator is further
captivated by the lady, she takes him back to her ‘elfin grot’ — —
and he’s under her spell and stops thinking clearly; he wakes up on
the side of a hill (the same place that the narrator found him) and it
seems as though he has dreamt it all.
• In the ninth, tenth and eleventh stanzas he sees the other victims of the
lady — ‘pale kings and princes’, ‘pale warriors’ like himself, all opening
mouths in pain, suffering and warning — they shout to him and tell him
he’s been caught by ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (The beautiful lady
without mercy).
• The twelfth and final stanza is a repetition of the first stanza- the knight is
trapped in a cyclical structure, where he is doomed to wander on the cold
hill alone in a state like death, repeating his story to anyone who finds
him.

Summary and Analysis of lines 1-12

Summary
In the first three stanzas, the speaker notices a knight wandering among a
pastoral landscape near night-time. The knight is visibly wearied and fatigued,
and the speaker wonders what could possibly befall him. It's late Autumn or
early winter, and the birds are silent. While we don't know yet what happened
to the knight, the speaker sets up the reader for the knight's story, establishing
the poem's dreary tone and atmosphere.
Analysis
The speaker directly addresses the knight he meets in the hillside, calling
attention to the knight's vulnerability. The knight is "alone and palely loitering,"
his physical state mirrored by the landscape, which is a common feature of
Romantic poetry. The grasses have withered, and the birds have grown silent.
The harvest season is over, and the natural world prepares its transition into
winter. The lily on the knight's brow suggests purity, innocence, and virtue: in
spite of his haggard and woeful state, he retains the sense of honor and duty
expected of a man of his stature. But the lily also symbolizes death, and as the
speaker notices, the knight's face looks anguished and feverish, and the color is
quickly draining from his cheeks.
Although the first three stanzas are relatively short, we can learn a remarkable
amount about the knight, the speaker, and the poem’s conflict through the
language and detail. First, we know that the knight is traveling alone and, based
on his physical state, he’s been on the road for quite some time. Next, we know
that it’s the end of autumn or early winter, because harvest time has ended and
the grass has begun to wither and die. Finally, the symbolic juxtaposition of the
lily and rose foregrounds a tension between purity and eros. The troubles the
knight encountered on the road were likely erotic in nature.

From the repetition of “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,” we can deduce that
danger lurks in the woods, and that the knight isn't exactly in the best shape to
face any more impending challenges. By opening the poem with the question,
the speaker begins a conversation that will last throughout the duration of the
poem, and the majority of the poem is the knight's answer. What will the knight
tell him when he begins to speak?

Summary and Analysis of lines 13 - 36

Summary
In stanza four, the knight begins to recount his experience on the hillside. He
describes the beautiful woman he met in the meadows, and the way he quickly
fell for her charms. After making love, the couple ride away on the speaker's
horse, and the woman sings to him a 'faery's song'. They stop briefly, and she
feeds him honey and manna, claiming she loves him in her own, strange tongue.
When they reach her hiding place—an "Elfin grot"—the woman starts to weep,
and the knight kisses her eyelids. Then, the knight falls into a deep sleep,
dreaming wildly on the cold hillside.

Analysis
We learn that the knight was enchanted by the woman, and that his experience
with her caused his poor state. He compares her to “a faery’s child,” suggesting
that she possessed a supernatural charm. Her “wild” eyes indicate her sexual
appeal and desire. The garland and bracelets that he makes for the woman
indicate his own desire, while the woman’s looks and moans let us know that
their brief relationship was, indeed, erotic. However, the woman's supernatural
characteristics suggest that, for the knight, the love he found may be too good
to be true.

In stanzas four and five, the knight appears to occupy a position of power in the
relationship, in spite of the woman’s charms. He gives her gifts and sets her on
his horse, and the couple rides away. However, in stanza six, the situation
reverses: the woman feeds him honey and manna, expressing her love, and then
brings him to her home. When the knight kisses her eyelids, the woman lulls him
to sleep, bringing woeful, foreboding nightmares. The knight's act of love
becomes the cause of his pain, in spite of the affair's pleasure.
The first half of the knight's story creates a complex picture of the woman: she
is a femme fatale with a supernatural ability to seduce the men who cross her
path. Her "faery-like" characteristics, as well as the knights, kings, and princes
who populate the poem, look back to a medieval poetic tradition. Keats draws
upon these references and modernizes them through his explicit juxtaposition
of sexual liberation and the courtly tradition. What will happen in his dream, and
what will the horrific sights he sees tell him about the woman's true nature?

Summary and Analysis of lines 37-48

Summary
In his nightmare, the knight sees kings, princes, and warriors who tell him that
he's fallen completely under the woman's power. The men, once strong,
powerful, and chivalrous, are now starved, pale, and horrified. When he wakes
up, the woman is nowhere to be seen. Like the men in his dream, the knight is
doomed to wander pale and alone among the hillside, on a journey that never
ends.

Analysis
The climax of the poem occurs during the knight's terrifying nightmares in stanza
10. We learn that all of the men ensnared by the lady are of regal stature. This
detail is crucial because it alerts us to the tensions between the woman's sexual
liberation and the chivalrous, courtly tradition of the kings, princes, and warriors
she seduces. Bound to a code of honor, these men would probably think twice
before sleeping with a woman they met in the woods. However, their
exhaustion, loneliness, and desire, combined with the woman's charm and
forward nature, created the perfect storm for spontaneous, immediate, erotic
satisfaction.

At first, the joy and pleasure these men experience testify to the value of a less
straight-laced attitude to erotic love. But, as we know from the dream, falling
for the lady proved disastrous: they woke up cold and alone, wandering forever
in the woods, searching for a love that will never be found again. But the poem
isn't simply condemning this kind of love; rather, it expresses a contradictory
longing for both the courtly tradition's security and the intense passion of
eroticism. For the knight, the woman's earlier emphasis on her "true" love for
him certainly connected to an idea of stability and faithfulness; however, the
association of sex with the woman's "faery-like," bewitching charms suggests
the danger of erotic desire, and the uncertainty of these affairs.

Considering the poem's context in Keats' life—as well as the personal nature of
much of his poetry—it's possible that the poet's allegorically-inflected knight's
tale speaks to the frustrations and fears of his own relationship. Although Keats'
love for Fanny Brawne was reciprocated, the couple faced difficult obstacles—
first, Brawne's family was of a higher social class, and second, Keats' health was
failing. Keats' proposals to Fanny Brawne were initially rejected because of his
financial situation; Brawne and her family accepted when it became clear Keats
was dying of tuberculosis, knowing well his winter in Italy would be his last.
While scholars believe that Brawne and Keats never consummated their love,
the powerful emotions expressed in their letters read much like the speaker's
passion for the lady.

Giving in to sexual desire could mean losing love and experiencing profound
emotional pain—but resisting this desire can be just as painful, and just as
preoccupying as love's loss. Is it better to wander cold and alone, stuck
somewhere in a dream-space where time appears to stop, with only the
memory of this love? Or should one turn away from love and hold fast to
tradition, regardless of how strong one's desire may be and how lonely one may
feel? Even though the knight was bewitched by the woman, the pleasure and
joy he felt during their brief, erotic relationship was real. The woman is no longer
physically present at the end of the poem, but she still holds countless men "in
thrall," or captive beneath her power.

When the knight ends his story, the speaker from the first stanza has yet to meet
the lady in the meadows. What choice will he make when they eventually cross
paths? Will he make it through the woods with his heart intact? Or will he be
like the other men lost in the woods, alone and bloodless, only capable of
reliving his story as a warning?
 Analysis, Stanza by Stanza
Stanza One

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

With the opening stanza, the speaker sets up the scene and subject of this
poem. The speaker comes upon a Knight. The speaker knows that this man is
a knight upon seeing him, but he quickly reveals that this knight is not
behaving as one might expect a knight to behave. He does not seem brave
and valiant. Rather, he is alone and “loitering.” He seems to be wandering
about aimlessly. The speaker wonders why, and he asks. He also makes a
remark about the time of year. He claims that “the sedge has withered from
the lake, and no birds sing.” He is indicating that spring is over, and there is
no lively singing or springtime beauty in the atmosphere. He wonders why
the Knight would be wandering about, pale and lonely, during this time of
the year. It is probably growing cold, as the birds have clearly flown south
already. The speaker clearly finds it concerning that this Knight is sickly and
alone, without shelter, at this time of the year.

Stanza Two

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 this stanza, the reader can grasp the full picture of what the Knight looks
like. The speaker describes him as “alone,” “pale,” “haggard,” and “woe-
begone.” The setting is also described. The harvest is done. Therefore, the
reader can imagine the bare, dry ground and the silence of nature after the
birds have already flown south. Overall, this description gives La Belle Dame
Sans Merci a very gloomy tone. The subject is clearly down-trodden, and
nature itself seems stripped of all joy. The birds have ceased their singing,
and the squirrels have stored up enough food to go into hiding. Thus, the
lonely knight is left utterly alone.

Stanza Three

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

In this stanza, the speaker informs the knight that he looks very ill. He tells
him that his face is as pale as a lily and that his face looks moist with sweat
as if he had a fever. He tells him that all of his colors are fading quickly from
his cheeks. The speaker is apparently very concerned about the Knight’s
health. He speaks to the knight to make sure he is aware of how ill he is. In
the following stanza, the knight answers him.

Stanza Four

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.
Here, the speaker is now the knight as he gives answers to the concerns of
the first speaker. He tells him of a lady that he met. He describes her long
hair and her light step. He also describes her eyes as “wild.” It is clear from
this stanza that the knight fell in love at first sight of this lady he describes.
He describes her as not quite human. He doesn’t refer to her as fully fairy,
but he does call her a “faery’s child,” which gives the reader the impression
that she is at least half fairy.
Stanza Five

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

In this stanza, the knight describes his relationship with this lady. It appears
that he won her heart. He made her a garland of flowers for her head. Then
he made her bracelets from flowers. He also adorned her private parts with
flowers. This is implied when he says that he put flowers on her “fragrant
zone.” Then the Knight implies that he made love to this woman. He says that
“she looked at [him] as she did love” and that she “made sweet moan.” This
implies that the two were intimate with one another in this stanza.

Stanza Six

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.
This stanza can be read as an extension of the previous stanza, where the
lady riding the Knights stallion is a metaphor for their continued sexual
relations. On the other hand, it could be read literally. In this case, the Knight
would have placed her on his horse and watched her ride “all day long” while
she sang. In either case, the Knight is so entirely absorbed with this woman
that he sees and hears nothing else. He is devoted to her the entire day long.
Stanza Seven

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

This stanza continues to describe the fairy-woman’s supernatural qualities.

She feeds him sweet roots, wild honey, and manna. The sweet roots refer to
her human qualities, but the manna and the wild honey are symbolic of her
supernatural qualities. The Jewish religion tells of the way that God fed the
Israelite’s bread from heaven called manna. This same God promised the
Israelites a land flowing with milk and honey. Thus, the fact that the fairy-
woman was able to feed him bread from heaven, wild honey, and roots
suggests that the fairy is part human, part supernatural.

Stanza Eight

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.
The Knight continues to describe the fairy woman’s qualities. He describes
her cave, or “grot,” as something elf-like in nature. Then, he gives her human
characteristics once again when he says that “she wept and sighed full sore.”
He does not explain why she cried, but he does imply that he wiped her tears
away with his kisses. This occurs between the Knight and the fairy-woman
allows the reader to understand the depth of their relationship. Earlier in La
Belle Dame Sans Merci, they clearly connected physically. Here, they connect
emotionally as the Knight is there to wipe away her tears.

Stanza Nine

And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

With this stanza, the reader can begin to feel a little uncertain about this
fairy-woman. The readers should question why she is lulling this Knight to
sleep. In the previous stanza, she cried, and there was offered no reason for
her tears. Now, she lulls him to sleep. The Knight has a dream. It is clearly a
nightmare. For in his recollection of this dream, he cries out, “Ah! Woe
betide!” which suggests that this dream was woeful in nature. Then the
Knight says that this was “the latest dream I ever dreamt,” which suggests
that it was the last dream that he would ever dream. He does not explain
how he knows that this was the last dream he would ever have, but he seems
so confident of it that the reader does not question it. Suddenly, this poem
has taken a turn for the worse. Something awful has happened, and the
reader can begin to understand that the fairy-woman is at fault, but there
are no specifics given just yet.

Stanza Ten
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!’

At this point, the knight begins to describe the “pale kings and princes” that
he saw in his dream. In this case, “pale” is a symbol of death. Since La Belle
Dame Sans Merci has already introduced biblical symbols of the
supernatural, it is not too far-fetched to conclude that the pale warriors and
princes and kings are all after the likeness of the pale horse in the book of
Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. The pale horse and rider of
the Bible symbolize death and bring destruction. This poem continues to
become more and more nightmarish as it continues. All of the pale kings,
princes, and warriors cry out, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” This, of course, is
the title of the poem. It is in French, and it translates to read “The Beautiful
Woman without Mercy.” Suddenly, in the midst of his dream, the Knight
becomes aware of what is happening to him. He has been seduced by a
woman who would show him no mercy. Not only that, but he is one of many
who have come to ruin at the hands of this fairy-woman.

Stanza Eleven

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.

In this stanza, the Knight comes to the full realization of what has happened
to him. Every man that the fairy has ever seduced has died. He describes
these dead men that were in his dream. They have “starved lips” and they
looked at him “with horrid warning” but it was too late. The Knight had
 already been seduced, and as a consequence of his moment of pleasure, he
now faces death. When he awoke from his dream, he found himself “on the
cold hill’s side” with no fairy-woman insight. From the original description of
the Knight, the readers can conclude that he is, in fact, dying.

Stanza Twelve

And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

In the final stanza of this poem, the Knight finally answers the original
question of the first speaker. He claims that because of being seduced by the
fairy-woman, he know sojourns “alone and palely loitering” in his near-death
state. He ends La Belle Dame Sans Merci with the line with which the first
stanza ends. He repeats the first speaker’s observation that “the sedge is
withered from the lake, and no birds sing.” The readers are left to grieve the
loss of the Knight. He dies alone with no one to comfort him in his last
moments. Not even the birds are there to sing a song to offer comfort in his
death. He is utterly alone in his last moments, and all because he was
seduced by that beautiful fairy-woman without mercy.
Structure
The poem is simple in structure with twelve stanzas of four lines each in an
ABCB rhyme scheme.
Themes
• The supernatural
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" deals with supernatural elements. The woman that
the knight falls in love with is described as a "faery's child." A faery is a mythical,
supernatural being, thus, by describing the woman as a faery's child, Keats
brings out the theme of supernatural beings in this poem. Moreover, when the
knight describes the time he spent with the woman, he states that she gave him
wild food, thereby bringing out the eeriness of this woman.

In the end, the knight finds himself on a cold hillside along with other men who
were rapt in the same woman's spell. When they saw the knight, they exclaimed
that "La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!’. Through the setting and
the description of the woman, Keats brings out the supernatural element in this
poem.
• Erotic Love and Seduction
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" can also be approached through the tensions
between erotic love and seduction, and a ideal, chivalrous partnership. When
we first meet the knight, he still has "a lily upon [his] brow," signifying his loyalty
the courtly tradition. However, as the color quickly drains from his cheeks, he
becomes vulnerable to the woman's charms. With his defenses lowered, he
quickly succumbs to his desires. Here, love is immediately associated with sex,
fantasy, and the supernatural: they make love in the meadows, ride away on the
knight's horse, and then the woman expresses her love for him in her "strange
language," suggesting her words are closer to a magical spell than the truth.

Does the knight, weak and weary in the forest, give in so quickly to the woman
because of her supernatural charm, or because he longs for a love that falls
outside of the strict, courtly restraints? While the poem explores the pleasures
of sexual liberation, it ends cautiously. His love for the woman is briefly requited,
but the satisfaction is short-lived: she leaves him the way she found him, "alone
and palely loitering" among the hillside.
• The femme fatale
The theme of the femme fatale was popular among Romantic poets. The femme
fatale is a seductive, beautiful woman who charms and ensnares men, leading
them into dangerous situations. The poem clearly depicts the theme of the
femme fatale as the woman, described as a "faery's child," makes the knight fall
deeply in love with her, which later leads to his deterioration. Moreover, in the
end of the poem, it is revealed that the speaker was not the only man to be
ensnared by this woman. The dialogue spoken by the pale lovers—"La belle
dame sans merci, / Thee hath in thrall"—further highlights the theme of the
femme fatale.
• Love, Obsession, and Death
In the poem, a knight tells the story of how he becomes obsessed with, and then
gets abandoned by, a spirit known as La Belle Dame sans Merci, or "The
Beautiful Lady Without Mercy." Though seemingly aware she’s an illusion, the
knight lingers in his memory of the Lady, and it’s implied he will do so until he
dies. In this relationship, the knight’s love turns from enchantment into
obsession.
Through his example, the poem expresses two linked warnings about the
dangers of intense romantic love. First, obsession drains one’s emotional
energy. Second, when the object of obsession disappears, the lover left behind
undergoes a spiritual death, losing the ability to appreciate beauty in anything
but the memory of what is lost. These warnings suggest that love, though
wonderful, can quickly shift into a kind of death if it becomes obsessive.
The knight first describes falling in love with the Lady as a kind of enchantment
that consumes him completely. The Lady he finds in the meadow is "Full
beautiful—a faery’s child." The Lady’s perfect beauty captures the knight’s
attention. By describing her as the child of a magical creature, he emphasizes
that her ability to charm him is a supernatural force. Enchanted further by the
mysterious wildness in her eyes, the knight begins serving the Lady and devoting
all his emotional energy to her. He weaves the Lady "bracelets" and "a garland,"
and in reward receives her "love" and "sweet moan."
However, the line between enchantment and obsession is dangerously thin. The
Lady soon becomes the knight’s single focus—seemingly his single source of life.
Besides the Lady, the knight sees "nothing else … all day." This may sound like
hyperbole, but the knight means it: the Lady creates a private world for herself
and the knight.
Soon, the knight sees her in everything—he is obsessed. The flowers transform
into suitable material for the Lady to wear. The hillside cave, a feature of the
natural landscape, becomes the Lady’s "Elfin grot." As the knight’s obsession
deepens, he grows to depend on the Lady even for basic nutrition. The Lady
feeds the knight "roots of relish sweet, / And honey wild, and manna-dew."
The allusion to manna, the supernaturally nutritious substance provided by God
to the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt, implies that the Lady is literally
responsible for the knight’s survival. At this point the Lady says, "I love thee
true." The knight’s response is to give himself over fully to the Lady—he follows
her home, soothes her, and makes himself vulnerable before her, allowing her
to lull him to sleep.
Having devoted so much emotional energy to the Lady and put himself
completely under her control, the knight undergoes a spiritual death when she
disappears. In his dream the knight sees the Lady’s former victims: "pale kings,"
"princes," and "warriors"—"death-pale were they all." In their faces he sees the
man he will become: someone deathly, starved, and captivated by memories of
the Lady to the point of enslavement. Like them, he will wake up "death-pale,"
or, as the speaker first describes him, "Alone and palely loitering"—physically
alive, yet condemned to replay his memory of an obsessive love for the rest of
his days. The Lady is finally revealed to be La Belle Dame sans Merci—literally,
The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy.
Strangely, the Lady’s merciless behavior actually consists of the love and joy she
provides; her sudden disappearance is what makes the knight’s experience so
painful exactly because she was previously so kind. The shape of the Lady’s
cruelty suggests that anything one falls in love with or obsesses over can cause
such pain, since anything can disappear in an instant. The poem thus cautions
against such intense, obsessive love, arguing that it’s ultimately not worth the
agony it can cause.
• Imagination vs. Reality
In "La Belle Dame sans Merci," the speaker asks a medieval knight to explain why
he’s lingering in a clearly inhospitable area, where winter is setting in. The knight
answers by telling a sort of fairy tale that sets up a colorful, imaginative world in
opposition to the barren gray reality. By the end of the story, however, it is clear
that the fairy-tale world is directly responsible for the knight’s exhausted
desperation. The poem suggests that the two worlds are bound together: the
imagination can shape reality so profoundly that the two become
indistinguishable.
The physical descriptions of the setting ground the first stanzas in the real world.
Stanzas 1 and 2 evoke a specific time of year: late autumn. Plants have
"withered," birdsong is absent, and the animals are preparing for winter. This
somewhat harsh imagery will deepen the contrast between reality and the
imagination when the knight begins his fantastic story.
That story, in turn, blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. The Lady the
knight meets is "a faery’s child" who sings a "faery’s song" as she rides with the
knight on his "pacing steed." She feeds him "manna-dew," then brings him to
her "Elfin" cave. The story emphasizes these fanciful aspects of the knight’s
experience, but it is not entirely clear at first whether the knight is using terms
like "faery’s child" and "Elfin grot" literally. At this point in the poem, they could
just as well be the knight’s way of saying that the Lady was extremely,
enchantingly beautiful.
Even the revelation that the Lady is a spirit being doesn’t negate that. The knight
describes what he saw and how it affected him—the result is the same no matter
who the Lady actually is. This is why, at the end of the poem, he says quite
somberly and seriously, "And this"—"this" being his experience—"is why I
sojourn here."
As he dreams in the hillside cave, the knight learns from "pale kings and princes"
(the Lady’s previous lovers) that he is in the deadly grips of a spirit known as La
Belle Dame sans Merci. The dream is a fantasy within the knight's story—a kind
of double fantasy—but it’s also here that the knight finds the actual future
reflected. That is, at the deepest moment of his imaginative experience, the
knight learns the truth about what has happened to him.
By the end of the poem, the knight’s actual, lived reality becomes a fusion of the
barren lakeside and the memory of his experience. The knight wakes from his
dream "On the cold hill’s side" and surges back into the real world—that is, the
world where the poem started. This moment raises the possibility that the
knight was dreaming all along. However, given how closely bound the real and
imaginative worlds have become for the knight, waking doesn’t imply an escape
from the memory of the Lady.
In the last stanza, the first stanza is repeated—but now the knight is speaking.
The knight acknowledges his place, “Alone and palely loitering” by the lifeless
lakeside, and the poem’s final image is of a desperate man lingering in the
memory of an experience that may not have even happened. Ultimately,
however, it doesn’t matter whether the Lady was ever really there. Unable to
take his mind off this fantastical memory but also unable to return to it, the
knight ends up trapped in the place where his imagination merges with his
reality.

CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF THE POEM

‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is a ballad, a poetic form that was popular – and
‘popular’ in the true sense of the word, being a form sung and enjoyed by the
common people, many of whom could neither read nor write – during the
Middle Ages, which provides the poem with its (somewhat idealised) landscape
and detail. Ballads were usually written in a particular metre, known simply as
‘ballad metre’: four-line stanzas rhymed abcb comprising alternating lines of
iambic tetrameter and trimeter (i.e. four iambic feet in the first and third lines,
three iambic feet in the second and fourth lines).

Ballads usually tell a story. And ballads are often cyclical in that the final stanza
takes us back to the first stanza. We find all of these features in ‘La Belle Dame
sans Merci’, with the action beginning on the cold hillside with the knight-at-
arms, and coming back to this place at the end of the poem, after he has told us
(or his interlocutor) how he came to be there. . 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.
In other words, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ recalls the Middle Ages not just in its
content – knights, faeries, and the like – but in its very form.

There’s a sense of reciprocity between the knight and the lady, but how equal
are they? She is the one who is given star billing in the poem’s title, of course,
suggesting that the knight is merely the passive observer, used by her, yet
another victim to fall under the spell of the beautiful woman without mercy.

Running against this, however, is the to-and-fro of the action: the knight gives
the lady three gifts, and she responds with three gifts for him. He silences her
sighs with kisses, before she silences him in sleep by singing him a lullaby.

The gifts themselves are also significant. Recall how the knight makes the lady a
garland for her head, bracelets for her wrists, and a ‘fragrant zone’ or girdle for
her waist. All three of these things are circular, used to enclose the woman as if
the man is trying to keep her – and perhaps keep her under control. A fruitless
endeavour, given those wild eyes she has. They are also things used to adorn
her, while the three corresponding gifts the lady makes to the knight – the relish,
honey, and manna-dew – are all food-related. (The way to a man’s heart is
through his stomach, even in a John Keats poem.)

And whether she has even been won over by his gifts remains unknowable for
sure. The line ‘She looked at me as she did love’ implies that she loves them, and
perhaps even him, but the wording of ‘as she did love’ hovers delicately between
two quite different meanings: it could mean ‘because she did love’ or ‘as if she
did love’, i.e. ‘but in reality, she didn’t; she only looked as if she did’. And love
what? The verb here is left as an intransitive one, without an object, allowing us
to guess whether she loves him or whether she merely loves the garland and
bracelet he’s fashioned for her (if she even loves them or merely appears to).

Sure enough, we learn later that she loves him truly: she tells him plainly
enough. Or does she? She speaks the words ‘I love thee true’, but ‘in language
strange’ (presumably her own faery language), and this information is being
related to us by the knight, who may have been hearing what he wanted to hear.
(She swore she loved me, honest, she just came out and said it: ‘I love thee
true.’) Whether he can even speak or understand her ‘language strange’ remains
unknown, but the fact that he describes it as a ‘strange’ language invites
reasonable doubt.
In short, then, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is a fascinating poem because of its
unreliability and what it refuses to tell us. We have a mystified speaker relating
a story to us which he has heard from a (less-than-impartial) knight who has
apparently come under the spell of the ‘beautiful lady without mercy’. John
Keats famously advocated something he called ‘Negative Capability’: namely, as
Keats himself said, ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ inspires such negative capability within us as readers.
We cannot arrive at a neat analysis of this bewitching poem: like the lady herself,
the strange story is beautiful not least because it remains only half-understood.

Symbols, Allegory and Motifs

• Flowers (Motif)
Flowers are repeatedly mentioned throughout the poem, both as symbols of
virtue and sexuality, and as gifts expressing sexual desire. Early in the poem, a
lily and a fading rose are used to describe the knight's complexion, establishing
a tension between pure and erotic love. When he met the lady in the meadows,
he made her flower garlands and bracelets, hoping to gain her favor. The
multiple meanings attached to this imagery correspond to the poem's complex
psychological underpinnings: the men who fall beneath the woman's spell—
kings, princes, knights, warriors—are caught between their chivalrous honor
and their intense erotic desire for the lady. By allowing both interpretations to
exist side by side, Keats keeps the tensions alive.
• Paleness (Symbol)
All of the men who fall beneath the woman's spell are pale and weary,
suggesting illness or a loss of vitality. At the same time, the lily—a white flower
with a powerful symbolic history—upon the knight's brow indicates his purity,
virtue, and chivalrous honor. The paleness of the men in the knight's dream
could also express fear: the absence of color in their face reflects the horror of
being trapped upon the hillside by the woman's charms, stuck somewhere been
nightmare and reality.
• Lily (Symbol)
In a biblical tradition, the lily is commonly associated with the ideas of purity and
innocence. By alluding to the purity of the lily, the speaker lets us know that the
knight appears to retain his honor in spite of his poor state. It could also allude
to innocence or ignorance, meaning the knight may not fully believe that he was
tricked by the woman, believing he may come across her love again some day.
Finally, given that lilies are often used at funerals (to signify the purity of the soul
of the deceased), the lily may allude to the death-like state in which the knight
wanders.

Structure and Form

‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ by John Keats is in the form of a ballad. Many
well-known poets of the romantic era used this form in their written works.
This particular ballad has a rhyme scheme that produces a flow that engages
the reader. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is written in iambic tetrameter, which
simply means that the stress falls on four words per line of this poem. The
effect of this scheme is that it flows like a song, smoothly and with rhythm.
Thus, it is called a lyrical ballad. The rhyme, rhythm, and tone are all designed
to lure the reader in, just as the Knight in the poem was lured in by the
beautiful fairy-woman.

Tone and Mood

The tone and mood of La Belle Dame Sans Merci are also designed to help
the readers to identify with John Keats’ feelings as he neared the end of his
life. One could argue that the Knight in this poem is John Keats himself.
Although there are some differences between Keats’ life and the Knight’s
story, there are certainly plenty of similarities that would suggest that Keats
uses the Knight as a speaker to proclaim to the world just what he feels as he
neared his untimely death.
Literary Devices
Keats makes use of several literary devices in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’ These
include but are not limited to:
Caesura: occurs when the poet uses a pause in the middle of a line. For example,
“And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—” and “Full beautiful—a faery’s child
Alliteration: occurs when the poet uses the same consonant sounds at the
beginning of lines. For example, “Full” and “faery” in line two of the fourth
stanza and “light” and “long” in the following line.
Imagery: can be seen through the powerful images in the knight’s dreams as
he’s forced to suffer terrible nightmares. For example, “I saw their starved lips
in the gloam, / With horrid warning gapèd wide.”

Questions
1. Which season is the poem set in?
Ans: The poem is set in the late autumn and the advent of the winter season.
2. Who is being addressed at the beginning of the poem?
Ans: The knight-at-arms is being addressed at the beginning of the poem.
3. Where did the knight meet the lady?
Ans: The knight met the lady in a meadow.
4. In which year was the poem composed?
Ans: The poem was composed in 1819.
5. What words did the lady utter?
Ans: The lady uttered in a strange language - "I love thee true".
6. What did the knight make for the lady?
Ans: The knight, in order to express his love, made a garland for the head,
bracelets for the arms, and a girdle of flowers for the lady.
7. What did the lady give him in return?
Ans: In return for the gifts of the knight, the lady gave him relish sweet roots,
wild honey, and manna dew i.e. nectar of the gods.
8. What did the lady do in her cave?
Ans: The fair lady took the knight to her fairy cave. In the cave, the lady wept
bitterly and sight sorely. Being overwhelmed by her expression of love, the
knight kissed her wild and beautiful eyes. Then the lady lulled the knight to sleep.
9. Who did the knight see in his dream?
Ans: In his dream, the knight saw pale-faced kings, princess and warriors who
were the victim of the beautiful lady.
 10. What was the lady known as?
Ans: The lady was known as 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' - which means 'the
beautiful lady without pity'.
11. What are the signs that show us that the knight is suffering?
Ans: The poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' depicts the pain and suffering of the
knight as he was betrayed by the beautiful lady without pity. He is loitering
about alone and pales the cold and desolate hillside. His face looks wrinkled with
deep pain and internal turmoil. His brow is pale like a lily and is moist and
feverish caused by deep mental agony. Moreover, the bloom of radiant cheeks
of the knight is faded like a fading rose. Again, it is the late autumn, odd time of
the year and the place he visits is not suitable to visit at that time. The sedge has
withered away and the birds are also not singing. All these are the signs that
clearly show us that the knight is suffering.
12. Give a description of the lady.
Ans: The lady in the poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is a very beautiful one.
The knight met the lady in the meadow was pleasantly captivated by the charm
and beauty of the lady. She was extremely beautiful with a face like a fairly's
child, her hair was very long and she had attractive and wild eyes. Being nimble-
footed, she attracted the knight by her movements. Her alluring long hair, the
glance of her passionate eyes, and sweet moan enraptured the knight and
eventually, he fell in love with the lady.

The knight, in order to express his love, made a garland for her head, bracelet
for the lady. The lady was responsive to the knight's approach and her sweet
moan reflected her love for the knight. The knight took her on his horseback and
spent the whole day in a delightful ride. In response to the gifts of the knight,
the knight, the lady offered him relish sweet roots, wild honey, and manna dew.
She even expressed her love for the knight in a strange language. The fair lady
took him to her fairy cave. In the cave, the lady wept bitterly and sight sorely.
Being overwhelmed by her expression of love, the knight kissed her wild and
beautiful eyes. Then the lady lulled her to sleep. But the lady ultimately betrayed
the knight and left him all alone on a cold hillside.
13. Describe the dream of the knight.
Ans: In his sleep, the knight had a terrible dream. He dreamt of a number of
kings, princes, and warriors who were looking pale and wearied. Their lips were
dry and seemed to have been starved for a long period of time. They were the
earlier victims of the lady who tormented them by her indifference and betrayal.
They called the lady 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' - which means 'the beautiful lady
without pity' and warned the knight of the lady's apparent love, enslavement,
and eventual deception. They further cautioned the knight that he would meet
the same miserable fate as them. The startling dream woke the knight up and
he found himself lying all alone on a cold hillside.
14. Why was the knight loitering about?
Ans: In the poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' the poet John Keats speaks about
a knight who was once enchanted by a beautiful lady and eventually got
deceived by her apparent show of love. The knight happened to meet a beautiful
lady in the meadow who was extremely beautiful and charming. Her alluring
long hair nimble foot and glance of wild and passionate eyes enraptured the
knight and eventually, he fell in love with the lady.

The knight, in order to express his love, made a garland for her head, bracelet
for the lady. The lady was responsive to the knight's approach and her sweet
moan reflected her love for the knight. He spent the whole day in the delightful
company of the lady and finally followed her to the fairy cave. She offered him
relish sweet roots, wild honey, and manna dew and expressed her love for the
knight in a strange language. In the cave, she displayed her emotion and lulled
the knight to sleep.

In his sleep, the knight had a terrible dream. He dreamt of a number of kings,
princes, and warriors who were looking pale and wearied. Their lips were dry
and seemed to have been starved for a long period of time. They were the earlier
victims of the lady who tormented them by her indifference and betrayal. They
called the lady 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' - which means 'the beautiful lady
without pity' and warned the knight of the lady's apparent love, enslavement,
and eventual deception. They further cautioned the knight that he would meet
the same miserable fate as them. The startling dream woke the knight up and
he found himself lying all alone on a cold hillside.
To his utter surprise, the knight realized that his dream turned into reality as the
lady was not with him. He found it difficult to accept the reality - the betrayal of
his lady love. Hence, he was forced to loiter about aimlessly with the anguish of
unrequited love.
15. In your own words describe the experience of the knight.
Ans: Same as the previous answer
16. How does Keats suggest the season in his ballad?
The season in the poem is late autumn or early winter season. Keats
describes this season through dry grass, squirrel's granary, harvest, and
absence of birds. The grass on the bank of lake is dry. The squirrel keeps
its storage full with grains because if the winter grows, it cannot go out
for collecting food. The harvest is also over. No birds sing here because
they have moved some other place with favourable climate. Thus Keats
describes the season that indirectly points out the unfavourable condition
of the knight.
17. Narrate the sad tale of the knight at arms. Describe how the knight fell
in love with the beautiful lady and declared the love and passion for her.
The knight met a beautiful lady in a meadow. He made a garland of
flowers and bracelets for her. He put her on his moving horse. She gave
him delicious roots, wild honey and the heavenly food manna. She told
that she loved him truly. She took him to her cave and wept out of
grief. But he kissed her eyes and consoled with his love. She then lulled
him to sleep. In the dream, he was warned by dreadful pale kings, princes
and warriors about the lady. They told that the beautiful lady had made
him a slave mercilessly. He woke up and found him alone on the hill
side. Since then, he has been walking aimlessly here.
18. What happened at the elfin grot?
Elfin grot refers to a cave occupied by little angel-like super natural beings
called elfs. In Keats' poem, the beautiful lady takes the knight to such a
cave. There the lady started weeping out of grief. He kissed her eyes and
consoled with his love. She then lulled him to sleep. In the dream, he was
warned by dreadful pale kings, princes and warriors about the lady. They
told that the beautiful lady had made him a slave mercilessly. This is what
happened at the elfin grot. The introduction of such cave, elf and dream
 element add more charms to medieval theme of the poem. It is also
assumed that the lady has already cheated many kings, princes and
warriors who appear in the dream.
19. Bring out the ballad features in the poem.
Ballad is a narrative form of poetry. It often begins with a question and
the answer comes in the form of story. Keats has written “La Belle Dame
Sans Merci" in ballad form. It begins with the question why the knight is
so worried and walks alone on this hill side. Then the answer comes in
the form of knight's sad story of love affair with a beautiful lady. A ballad
is generally rhythmic in four line stanza, second and fourth line
rhyming. This poem is also musical and lines end with - Child, wild – long,
song- wide, side. Ballad also uses refrain – some lines are repeated. In
this poem, for example, the line – “O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms” is
repeated. The poem also uses medieval elements that is common with
ballad.
20. Bring out the romantic, medieval and supernatural elements in the
poem?
The poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” has romantic elements. The story
itself is a love story. The knight falls in love with a beautiful lady. Usually
lovers will exchange gifts. The knight gives her a garland of flowers and
bracelets. The lady also gives him wild honey and manna. The poem is
highly romantic when she says, “I love thee true" and he kisses her eyes
four times. The story also has medieval elements. Knight is commonly
found only in medieval period. Again, in medieval period, people believed
in supernatural elements such as ghost and elfs. The lady in the poem
appears to be a ghost. She, the elfs and the cave all suddenly
disappear. Thus the poem is rich with romantic, medieval and
supernatural elements.
21. What do the lily and the rose symbolize, and how do these images
foreshadow the poem's events?
In the poem's first stanzas, Keats uses images of a lily and fading rose to
describe the knight's complexion. The lily, a white flower biblically associated
with the Virgin Mary, symbolizes purity, virtue, and innocence. On the other
hand, the rose, with its bright, red colors, commonly represents sex, desire,
and romance. To have a rose on one's cheeks also indicates healthy and
vitality—but the rose on the knight's cheek is fading, which suggests
exhaustion, fatigue, and illness. Furthermore, the lily is often used at
 funerals, adding to the aura of death that hangs over the knight. By
juxtaposing these symbols, Keats foreshadows the poem's erotic tensions:
will the speaker avoid an affair with the woman if he goes on to meet her, or
will he give into her love's temptation?
22. Describe the tensions between erotic and courtly love in the poem.
By casting knights, kings, and princes as characters in "La Belle Dame Sans
Merci," Keats looks back to the courtly tradition of medieval verse and
legend, evoking the severe restraints it placed upon erotic love, as well as the
secrecy with which these affairs were often conducted. With a lily upon his
brow, the knight represents chivalrous honor and duty: his virtue is
untarnished by wickedness and temptation. However, as the knight's story
reveals, even the most honorable of men have fallen beneath the strange
lady's spell. The knight describes to the speaker the intense pleasure he
experienced with the woman, reliving the experience through his tale. But,
no matter how true their love felt, he wakes alone, cold, and loitering, just
like the men who wandered on the hillside before him.
However, the poem resists both easy denunciation of erotic love and simple
praise of the courtly tradition. The knight certainly experienced joy with the
woman, but he also felt the pain of loss and abandonment when he woke up
from his dream. While the courtly tradition provides security in love, it also
guards against the spontaneous pleasure of erotic love, which could be read
as another profound loss. There is no clear moral to the affair: just a warning
to the speaker, the lady's newest potential desire, making him aware of the
choice he will soon face between honor and eros.
23.Keats’s Romanticism through the Analysis of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

Romanticism, as Lovejoy reminded us in his essay “On the Discrimination of

Romanticisms”, does not have to be and cannot be one single definition,
should it be in literature or painting, in the British world or Germany, or
anywhere else in Europe. John Keats is often considered as one of the most
famous British Romantics and his work is present and cited in any anthology
on the subject. However, his poetry was very much different from early
Romantics, such as William Blake for instance. The themes were not generally
the same, and so it goes for rhyme, rhythm, etc. If they differed in style, still,
they all present common features in the content: distanciation from reason
and logical explanations on life, prevailing imagination, and contemplation of
and reflection on man’s position in the universe, through reminders of the
past history and awareness of contemporary history. This essay will first aim
at defining Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819) as a truly Romantic
poem, showing how it is inscribed in the Romantic tradition. We will also see
nonetheless how it departs in some way from other poets and is
representative of Keats’s poetry and conception of contemplation, life, and
the search for truth.

A first reading of this poem with a French title provides us with a first layer of
understanding of Keats’s world. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” recalls the story
of the encounter of this “knight-at-arms” with a supernatural creature, the
“faery’s child”. It is presented in the form of a two-voice ballad; twelve stanzas
of quatrains with very singsong, musical rhymes although set as to provide a
pretty slow rhythm. A series of repetitions also reinforces the song-like form
of the poem: “O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms” is repeated twice, and so
much for “Alone and palely loitering”, or “The sedge has wither’d from the
lake, / And no birds sing.” Besides, the number of one- or two-syllable words
contributes to the rhythmical and pleasing, though peaceful pace of the text.

The use of song-like, melodious devices highlights the medieval tone of the
text, already introduced through the characters of the knight and the lady. In
fact, Keats draws the title, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, from a French work
by Alain Chartier dating back to 1424, but uses a characteristic figure very
recurrent in medieval and later literature. As Barbara Fass Leavy explains in La
Belle Dame Sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism, this merciless lady
(depending on the translation) is either a femme fatale or just the object of a
man’s court, though never within reach, and is constantly referred to as with
a supernatural power of attraction. In French medieval literature, she was
particularly used to express men’s incapacity of resisting womanly love. Leavy
explains the original role of the belle dame sans merci as “the fairy who
exercises an uncanny power over the mortal who succumbs to her
charms.”(22) The femme fatale differs from the belle dame sans merci in that
she is not immortal or supernatural.

As far as their roles are concerned, both are promises of pleasure; the first is
more likely to be “specifically sexual in nature”, while the latter, “offering the
same pleasure, also dwells in a land that embodies human dreams of physical
perfection.”(22)

Keats’s Belle Dame Sans Merci is in different interpretations considered as a

combination of both, a sort of ‘Circe-like’ figure. The first layer of
understanding considered earlier can be that of reading the poem as a ballad
on the addiction to someone’s love and the loss of this love, thus focusing
more on the romance-like features. The knight, as he is found by the poet’s
voice, “alone and palely loitering”, has encountered a beautiful woman, so
beautiful that she is compared to a magical creature (the “faery’s child”).
Several elements indicate the knight’s passion for this woman; some of them
could even point at a carnal relationship, fleshy relationship. One can read in
the fifth stanza allusions to intercourse; the “fragrant zone”, in the second
verse for instance, refers to a belt made out of flowers, hence to the waist
and hips of the woman, symbols or at least indications to female sexuality.
This impression is reinforced in the next two verses: “She look’d at me as she
did love,/ And made sweet moan.”, conveying even more explicit sexual
meaning. Besides, the first line of the following stanza seems to restate the
meaning underlying here: “I set her on my pacing steed.” As to echo Leavy’s
argument on the inspirations to this tale, Earl Wasserman writes, in The Finer
Tone: Keats’(sic) Major Poems, on the origins of the legend, then re-told by
Keats: “Whatever the specific source may have been, the narrative clearly
belongs to a folk legend best known in the form of the medieval ballad
“Thomas Rymer”.”(68) Considering this, he studies the differences between
the traditional tale and that by Keats, noting when it comes to notions of
control, that in the original form, the woman – “the queen of fair Elfland” – is
the one who acts all throughout the poem. On the contrary, in Keats’s version,
roles are more shared although it is still the lady who dominates. The pronoun
“she” comes back more often that “I” – referring to the knight. Wasserman
writes: “In stanza six [the knight] truly governs only in the first line, and it
seems significant that Keats altered the action of the folk ballad, where it is
the lady who takes Thomas [the knight] upon her horse. Apparently there is a
special intent in giving the action to the knight in the first line.”(79) If we
consider his note on the changes brought to the original tale and so, Keats’s
presumed intention of shifting the action to the knight, one might read in “I
set her on my pacing steed” a desire to convey an underlying sexual meaning.
In that sense, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is sometimes regarded as a
romantic, Romantic poem, providing a reflection of life and man through that
of love relationships, some seeing in the conclusion only the denunciation of
the destructive power of passion and love, for once the knight wakes up from
his dream, he is only a cadavre-like character, pale and stuck to the ground,
depraved of life – “The sedge has withered from the lake, / And no birds sing.”

However there is a real integration of Romantic traditions, visible through this

intertwined integration of medieval, popular culture of tales within a
contemplation of nature. Although what might strike one is the relationship
between the knight and the fairy, Keats weaves under it a bigger canvas of
connections between the man and nature. As from the beginning, the knight
is “alone” in nature, lost in the middle of nowhere – which we learn later is
the “cold hill’s side” –, deprived from his own livelihood. He is “palely
loitering”, as a ghostly figure. The second and the third stanzas bring us more
elements of death-like appearance of the knight: he is “haggard” and “woe-
begone”; the use of the lily in “I see a lilly on thy brow” is intentional as it is
both a symbol of whiteness and purity and a flower used in funerals. It is also,
in the third stanza, associated with the “fading rose” on his cheeks, thus
making a very visual image of life withering away from the knight. Finally both
flowers are associated with the expressions of “anguish moist and fever dew”,
then disclosing the illness if not the ‘deadness’ of the knight. In a nutshell , at
the beginning his facial features are entwined with elements of this dead
nature, wintery scene. He makes as one with this naked, desolated nature.

The fairy becomes a symbol of nature as well, but in a spring or summer,

abundance scenery. From the fourth stanza, the voice shifts to the knight’s,
who starts describing his experience with her. He first describes her physical
appearance, “full beautiful”, which on the contrary to his, is not focused on
the face, but more on elements that makes her character synonymous of
livelihood, and hence, life: her hair is “long, her foot was light, / And her eyes
were wild.” He even compares her to a child (“a faery’s child”). While he
appears in the poem as a corpse confined to the ground, she almost does not
touch the ground. The association of her character to nature is strengthened
by the knight’s making a flower crown and “bracelets” for her in the fifth
stanza, as well as her feeding him with elements of nature: “roots”, “honey”,
and “dew”. But elements such as the dew, which is actually “manna dew”
implies her super-natural characteristics. She is given the ability to sing the
knight to etfulness and to sleep: “I set her on my pacing steed, / And saw
nothing else all day long; / For sidelong would she bend and sing / A faery’s
song.” Already her “light”foot hinted at her unearthliness in the fourth stanza,
only to be epitomized in the sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas; she provides
him with divine food, manna being biblical food and lives in a “grot”, a cave,
pointing at her being an element of some outside world.

Finally both characters, and through them, the natural and supernatural
worlds, are elements necessary to the penultimate part of the poem, the
dream, which is a form of contemplation, before going back to the same world
as at the beginning, with the repetition of elements of the first stanza, a world
where the knight is “Alone and palely loitering”.
Although certainly a poem about love, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is mostly
the expression of Keats’s conception of Romantic contemplation and above
all, access to Truth. Although he believed in the power of nature, its mere
contemplation was not, to him, sufficient to access Truth. This poem is a good
representation of the progress he considered necessary for the journey to
real, true Truth: imagination had to go through the experience of nature,
song, and finally love to be absorbed into Truth, What he calls “pleasure
thermometer” in other works is the gradual progression of pleasure and
appreciation of beauty that one takes. He wrote in Ode on a Grecian Urn that
“Truth is Beauty; Truth Beauty”(Anthology, 218); Truth is attainable through
the experience of beauty, of which appreciation grows along as one
experiences nature, song, and then, love. Wasserman describes how “La Belle
Dame Sans Merci” progresses following that pattern. He writes, concerning
the first step, the experience of nature;”The progress [in the first stanzas] is
toward a closer integration of nature and man. […] By [the] absorption of the
knight into the structural pattern of the natural imagery, the movement from
a suggested but unstated relationship of man and nature […] to an implied
interrelationship […] has now been completed.”(67) He interestingly notes
that Keats added some elements to the original tale, to highlight and match
his progression conception; “Keats has added three major details that do not
appear in the folk ballad […]: the knight weaves for the fairy’s child a garland,
bracelets, and a girdle of flowers; the lady sings “a faery’s song”; and at length
“in language strange she said– / ‘I love thee true.’””(69) Clearly we can see
appear in these three elements: nature, song, and love. To the first part,
which is a sort of communion with nature, is added the “climax”(68), with the
knight being taken to the elfin grot. Finally the departing from the grot,
through the dream, and going back to where the poem had started marks
“the completion of the circular movement.”(68) Although Keats believed in
the need to make that progress towards beauty and Truth, the poem ends in
the way it had begun, by going back to the mortal, natural world. Wasserman
comments:“Therefore, ideally, having ascended the pleasure thermometer,
the knight should perceive an immortality of passion, especially since his
vision-making imagination is aided by fairy magic.”(73) But elements of both
space and time indicate that there is no staying in the grot. “With the
dissipation of the vision in the ballad and with the consequent return to the
cold physical world, the ladder of intensities which the knight had ascended
to reach the ethereal world now crumbles beneath him.”(77) Although Keats
advances a theoretical path to Truth, through the imagination’s experience of
beauty, here remains a pretty pessimistic tone to the poem, eventually
presenting the quest for Truth has veined. Even if the knight explains the
reason why he “sojourn[s] here / Alone and palely loitering,” he nonetheless
expresses no will to change his situation despite the deadness of his
environment, since the poem ends on a concession clause: “Though the sedge
has withered from the lake,/ And no birds sing.” Leavy explains: “This is the
extreme romantic position: to be an artist one must lose the struggle to
dominate La Belle Dame Sans Merci, even if to do so results in total isolation
and, ultimately, death.”(45)

Under the romantic theme of the loss of love as well as the singsong rhythm
of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” lies Keats’s very conception of Romanticism
and develops one of his major sets of values.