Understanding Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
John Keats: A Romantic Poet’s Life
John Keats (1795–1821) was a prominent English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets and also part of The Cockney School, alongside Leigh Hunt. The early deaths of his father, mother, and brother gave him a premonition of his own early demise from tuberculosis. This profound awareness led to a heightened interest in literature as an escape from the realities and tragedies of his life; indeed, he stopped studying medicine to focus entirely on his literary pursuits.
In 1819, Keats wrote his most important odes and sonnets. He is often called the poet of the senses, as his imagery is richly dominated by sensory details. He presents experience as a tangle of inseparable but often irreconcilable opposites, such as:
- Shade and light
- Energy and indolence
- Pain mixed with joy
Keats finds melancholy in delight and pleasure in pain, feeling the highest intensity of love as an approximation to death.
“La Belle Dame sans Merci”: Poem Summary
La Belle Dame sans Merci is one of Keats’s notable poems, centered on a beautiful lady without pity. It is based on the figure of the femme fatale, a woman who attracts lovers only to destroy them, often with supernatural powers. In this ballad, a knight encounters this beautiful lady, who subtly represents death. She desires him as her lover and invites him to her fairy cave. She places a spell on him, and he dreams of her other victims. He awakens to find himself back “on the cold hill-side,” waiting for death.
Themes and Interpretations
The poem is deeply personal; Keats identified with the knight, being acutely aware of his own approaching death. He subtly represents his own illness through words like *ail*, *alone*, *palely*, and *loitering*. It is a dramatic narrative based on a folk story about love, war, passion, and death, illustrating how medieval themes were revived by the Romantic poets.
La Belle Dame sans Merci is a representative poem of the Romantic Movement due to its focus on loneliness and nature. It incorporates natural elements such as flowers, grottoes, lakes, and squirrels, but also confronts death, which, though a somber theme, is presented as a natural part of existence. However, it offers an unusual portrayal of death, likely influenced by Keats’s Romantic legacy, transforming somber realities into beauty and infusing a supernatural atmosphere through elements like magical foods and the enchanting voice of death.
Poetic Form and Structure
This is a twelve-stanza ballad, with each stanza being a quatrain (four lines) featuring a simple ABCB rhyme scheme. Each quatrain consists of three lines of iambic tetrameter followed by a single line of iambic dimeter. The fourth line is intentionally shortened to give the ballad a deliberate and slow movement. The poem is written with simple language, repetitions, and an absence of excessive detail. It possesses a supernatural, sad, and dramatic tone, which is heightened by its effective use of dialogue.
Literary Devices and Imagery
Imagery is used effectively throughout the poem. For example, “Sedge has wither’d” suggests winter, and the “lily” serves as a premonition of death. The poem also employs various figures of speech:
- Metaphors:
- ‘withered sedge’ represents passing youth.
- ‘bird’s song has ceased’ represents the knight’s (or Keats’s) own poetic voice.
- ‘full granary’ represents the coming winter. Notably, the approaching winter itself serves as a metaphor for impending death.
- Paradox: Found in the phrase “sweet pain.”
- Alliteration: Examples include “Alone and palely loitering” and “I saw pale kings and princesses too, pale warriors, death-pale…”
- Repetitions: Typical in ballads, words such as *dream*, *wild*, and *pale* are repeated to emphasize the poem’s main topics.