Dec 22, 2009

La Belle Dame sans Merci | Introduction

“La Belle Dame sans Merci,” written in 1819 and published the next year in a form slightly different from the one here, depicts a knight-at-arms who has been seduced and abandoned by a capricious fairy. Told in the form of a dialogue, the poem recounts the experience of loving dangerously and fully, of remaining loyal to that love despite warnings to the contrary, and of suffering the living death of one who has glimpsed immortality. At the beginning and end of the poem, the knight remains on “a cold hill’s side,” a world devoid of happiness or beauty, waiting for his love to return. Some readers maintain that the poem is really about Keats’s confused feelings for Fanny Brawne, his fiancée, to whom Keats could not commit fully. Others claim the story is symbolic of the plight of the artist, who, having “fallen in love” with beauty, can never fully accept the mundane. Either way, the conclusion is the same: however self-destructive intense love may be, the lover has little choice in the matter. Further, the more one entertains feelings of beauty and love, the more desolate and more painful the world becomes.

La Belle Dame sans Merci Summary

Lines 1–12
The ballad consists of two parts of dialogue, each uninterrupted by the other and each uncouched by the normal story-telling mechanisms for identifying speakers (“I said,” “he said,” etc.). Because of this, the identity of the first speaker, whose part is completed in the first twelve lines, remains cryptic. Though he (or, it could equally be argued, she) reveals the identity of the other (the “knight-at-arms”), the first speaker says nothing, at least directly, about himself. He does, however, give plenty of information about the situation of the poem. The time is late autumn, the annual grasses having already “wither’d” and the birds having departed on their winter migration. The place, one can infer, is not always as forbidding as it seems to be now—its desolation is simply due to the time of year. There has been a “harvest,” but it has ended. There is latent life present around the two characters: “the squirrel’s granary is full.” Therefore, if the setting symbolizes the knight’s emotional desolation, one must understand it as a function of an individualized circumstance: of a very specific but not necessarily permanent condition. Come spring, after all, the cycle of the harvest will begin again. Yet, this seems little consolation to the knight the speaker describes. He is “alone and palely loitering,” “so haggard and so woebegone.” His pallor is described metaphorically in terms of a “lily” on his brow and a “fading rose” on his cheek. Further, he appears physically ill, “moist” from the “fever” of some “anguish.” Though through these observations the speaker has already foreshadowed the reasons for the knight’s grim condition, the form’s rhetoric demands the question be asked: “O what can ail thee?” A knowledge of chivalric lore should prompt the correct guess. Of a knight’s three profound allegiances—to his God, his lord, and his lady—only the last would be described in terms of lily-pallor and a faded rose.

Lines 13–24
The story’s twist occurs in the first stanza of the knight’s speech. Though a “lady” was bound to figure into the poem, that she is a “faery’s child” changes the expectations of the tale’s outcome and causes readers to reinterpret the nature of the knight’s desolation. Literature and myth are filled with examples of humans who fall in love with gods, and with little exception, such relationships bode disastrously for the mortal party. Particularly in that area of mythology dealing with fairies or fairy-like creatures, humans... » Complete La Belle Dame sans Merci Summary