La Belle Dame sans Merci | Dying into Life: The First Hyperion and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’
In the following except, the author illustrates how Keats intertwines the diverse elements of “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”
With an inimitable magic Keats depicts another cheated soul in “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Flight into visionary experience and back again is expressed by means of the well-known motif (to be used once more in Lamia) of a mortal’s ruinous love for a supernatural lady: a knight encounters and falls in love with a beautiful “fairy’s child”, dreams in her “elfin grot” of “pale kings, and princes” and “Pale warriors”, and wastes away “On the cold hill’s side.” The poet may have dashed off this masterpiece of the literary-ballad genre straight into the...
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