‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’,a ballad by Keats , written 1819 , published 1820 , which describes a knight fatally enthralled by an elfin woman. Although Keats himself spoke of it lightly, critics and biographers have written of it at length, many concurring with Robert Graves (The White Goddess, 1948 ) that ‘the Belle Dame represented Love, Death by Consumption…and Poetry all at once’. It was much admired by the Pre-Raphaelites and W. Morris asserted that ‘it was the germ from which all the poetry of his group had sprung.’
La Belle Dame sans mercy is also the title of a poem translated from Chartier , attributed at one time to Chaucer , but now thought to be the work of Sir Richard Ros .
[The entire page is 126 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Oxford University Press Titles
