Keats - La belle dame sens merci

Background

• - Before this poem was written, Keats' brother had been duped into loving a fake woman by a friends of his
• - Keats' whole family died of tuberculosis
• - Keats also exhibited dear in his own love relationships
• - The title is an allusion to a much earlier work of literature
• - It is very medieval and the knight seems to have wandered into someone else's fairytale
• - the poem is a form of dialogue between two speakers, the first which is not named and the knight
• - It is also possible that the knight is just a figment of the first speakers imagination

Themes

• Love, corruption, and death
• - Keats deals with the love between a human male and a superhuman female, which has deadly undertones
• - the woman is viewed as a deamon muse, who seduces the knight and fatally weekends him in the act of love
• - Corruption follows seduction in this poem, and it is not so much love we see as obsession
• - This is another of Keats' poems to feature the human being in a strange transitional state
• Abandonment
• - It is about being abandoned by the one you love, even when you are at deaths door
• - she is merciless and the knights solitude becomes the framing image of the poem

Themes

• The supernatural
• - it is part folk ballad, part romance, and part fairytale
• - her "wild eyes" "elfin grot" "strange language" and "fairy's song" all hint toward the supernatural
• Versions of reality
• - what is real and what is fantasy in this poem?

Symbols

• Flowers
• - The lily represents the paleness of the knight
• - the Knight's rose is fading and withering
• - garlands for the woman
• Seasons and cycles
• - Begins in what seems to be late autumn or early winter
• Paleness
• - repeated throughout the poem
• Dreams and sleep
• Dew and water

Quotes

• "O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?"
• "and no birds sing"
• "O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, so haggard and woe-begone?"
• "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"
• "A faery's child""her eyes were wild"
• "and nothing else saw all day long, for sidelong would she bend and sing a faery's song"
• "honey wild and mana-dew"
• "in language strange she said i love thee true"
• "she lulled me asleep, and there I dreamed -Ah! Woe betide! - the latest dream I ever dreamt on the cold hill side"
• "I saw pale king and princes too, pale warriors, death pale were they all; they cried la belle dam sens merci thee hath in thrall!"
• "starved lips"
• "gaped wide"
• "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 has withered from the lake, and no birds sing"