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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The landscape in which the knight-at-arms is depicted at the beginning and, for that matter, the end of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is lifeless and sterile. The sedge has withered from the lake,...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
At the very beginning of the poem the speaker asks the knight what ails him. In other words, he wants to know what the matter is. This would indicate that there's something about the knight's...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
Romantic poetry tends to show a strong appreciation for the power of nature on humans and focuses on the emotional impact of experiences. It also tends to fondly recall the ideas of the past,...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
There is very little description of the lady in "La Belle Dame sans Merci." Keats's depiction of her is deliberately impressionistic, allowing the reader to imagine the details of her face and...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
In the poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats, an unidentified narrator comes upon a knight loitering beside a winter lake. He is alone, haggard, and despairing. He also seems to be ill and...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
In his dream, the knight sees "pale [dead] warriors" who tell him that the belle dame, or beautiful woman, has him in her "thrall." In other words, he is in her power. Before the dream, he had met...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
In answering this question, we need look no further than the first line. The speaker asks the knight "What can ail thee?", which is an old-fashioned way of asking what's wrong with him. Such a...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
In “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” one of the ideas that Keats presents is that beauty gives power. The speaker encounters a woman, “a faery’s child,” and immediately falls in love with her. As he...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
This is a rather old-fashioned way of asking someone what's wrong with them. That such a question is being asked of the knight indicates clearly that he's visibly upset as he stands there all alone...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The lady's tears are all part of the act. This beguiling fairy queen lures unsuspecting men into her elfin grotto—where she seduces and abandons them. And one of the reasons why she's so successful...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The first three stanzas consist of an extended request to know what's happened to the knight, why he's all alone and "palely loitering" by the withered lake. Clearly there's something up with him,...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The action at the beginning and the end of the poem seems to take place in autumn or early winter. We know this because of a number of features of the natural world to which the speaker refers....
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" has traits both of the romantic, in the modern sense, and of the Romantic in the sense of the Romantic movement. It is romantic in that it paints a picture of the...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
There are various clues in the poem which suggest what season of the year it is when the events of the poem take place. For example, early in the poem, it is mentioned that the "sedge"—a sort of...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The woman the knight meets in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (The Beautiful Woman without Mercy) is a femme fatale. That is, she is a fatal woman. She is beautiful, alluring, and irresistable, and...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The poet doesn't actually reveal what the lady is sorrowful about. However, there are several explanations for why she may be sorrowful. The most likely explanation is that she is sorrowful because...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
It is clear that from the beginning enchantment or some form of magic is at the heart of the attraction that the strange lady is able to provoke in the Knight who is left the worse for ever meeting...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The title of the poem translates to "The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy." The woman in the poem is a sorceress-like figure who attracts men to her and leads them to ruin. Her motive is never...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The speaker of the poem meets the knight-at-arms standing by a lake. It's a pretty depressing scene. The sedge—a grass-like plant that grows near water—has withered, and no birds sing. The poor old...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The poem is a meditation on the mystical quality of the natural world, as well as a paean to romantic, unattainable love. The girl the knight meets and falls in love with is a fairy, one of the...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
You might want to examine how nature is used to reflect the emotional and psychological desolation of the knight as he is left "Alone and palely loitering." Note the way that the action of the poem...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
These two poems Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" are expressions of unrequited love, the contrasts between the world of reality and the world of imagination,...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
There are many points of comparison and contrast between "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by John Keats and "The Lady of Shallot" (one of my favorites) by Alfred Tennyson. These points are in structure,...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The surface meaning of this poem is about this knight who is entranced and lured by this woman in the wilderness, a faery queen. The knight succumbs to her and is enamored with her, as they both...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
There are two opinions on the construction of La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats. The first is that there is an unidentified observer speaking to a knight lying on a hillside; but this view...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
Being a ballad, the style is a narrative, third person, story telling, lyrical method of retelling. It begins with an outsider's point of view about the knight and his experiences with the woman,...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
It might be more helpful to break down the poem into groups of stanzas, as often the emotion in one is carried on into the next few. Therefore, if we look at the first three, we could say that the...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
"La Belle Dame sans Merci" clearly exemplifies elements of Romanticism and the English tradition of chivalry: ROMANTICISM There is a dreamlike, visionary quality to the poem The sympathy of nature...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
According to the speaker, everything looks more dreary now that it is autumn and the harvest is complete. The speaker describes the knight as pale and tired, almost to the point of being...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
This famous poem tells a story as old as mankind itself: the tale of unrequited love. An anonymous speaker greets a "Knight-at-arms" at the beginning of the poem, asking why he is alone and...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
Clearly, in answering this question, you need to refer to the presentation of the knight in this poem, and in particular how he feels after being left alone by the mysterious lady that gave him...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
In the student's efforts to compose his own essay, he may wish to note that there have been two popular interpretations of "La Belle Dame sans Merci." One is that the lady is a person who is the...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
In order to define "La Belle Dame sans Merci" as a ballad, we must first explore what a ballad is. There are many definitions out there (some of them getting quite specific), but a good, general...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
Keats wrote the poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" about a knight that has been taken in by the love of a "capricious" fairy. His love is full and true, but the fairy is not interested in this and...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The speaker of the first three stanzas sees that the knight upon whom he happens is "haggard" and well past his prime, with "lily on [his] brow." Lilies are associated with death. The knight is, in...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
These two details perform the function of contributing to the mystical, other-worldly nature of the "belle dame sans merci" by presenting her as a "faery's child," as the speaker suggests. Note how...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
There have been many interpretations of this poem. Mine is that the beautiful and cruel woman of the ballad is a personification of nature. It is easy to fall in love with nature, but in the end...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The main device used throughout the poem is repetition, which is characteristic of the traditional form the poem takes: the ballad. Ballads pertain to the oral tradition and are designed to be told...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
"The Belle Dame sans Merci" means, in French, the beautiful lady without mercy (pity). The central idea of the poem is that beauty and our own illusions about it can deceive us. The knight in the...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
In Keats's poem, the dream may have multiple meanings, especially in terms of the knight's fate. First, there are class implications. The other men he dreams of share similar elevated positions in...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
I am not entirely sure whether I understand your question correctly. By asking about the "knights of unfortunate conditions," are you refering to the other knights that the knight who tells us...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
This is a very interesting question and one that I have been musing over since I first saw it. It is possible to talk about this great narrative poem and consider it using the theme you have...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
If we examine the poem carefully we can see that the fairy-lady that the knight meets and is so taken by is responsible for deceiving the poor, unsuspecting knight by clearly leading him on and...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
Keats' "lady without mercy" is described as the child of a fairy in the poem. Right away we know that this poem is going to be chock-full of supernatural elements, but also, to coincide...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
Each of the poems presents a man who is obsessed with a woman. In John Keats’s poem, the primary character, a forlorn knight, describes himself as helpless in the face of the woman’s charms: she...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The descriptions of the pale figures in Stanza 10 of this poem are images that help explain what the knight saw when the lady of the title brought him to her dwelling. The poem hints that she is of...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
In this poem, perhaps one of the most well-known of Keats' shorter works, we see a story of a knight who has fallen in love with a mysterious woman in the wilderness. The concept of "loitering" in...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
The traditional ballad is a songlike poem that tells a story dealing with romance or adventure. The narrative is usually told in simple language with dramatic action, dialog, and repetition; often...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
I think we need to revise some poetic terms here. I personally wouldn't describe this excellent poem as a ballad. Let us remember that a ballad is a story that is told in song. The majority of...
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La Belle Dame sans Merci
Keats’s poem is similar to "Lord Randall" in terms of overall poetic style. The poem consciously imitates the form of a folk ballad, of which "Lord Randall" is a well-known example. Ballads were...