La Belle Dame sans Merci

by John Keats

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An analysis of themes, imagery, poetic art, literary devices, and Romanticism in John Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci."

Summary:

John Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" explores themes of love, loss, and the supernatural, using vivid imagery and literary devices like symbolism and repetition. The poem's melancholic tone and ethereal atmosphere embody Romanticism, emphasizing emotion, nature, and the sublime. Keats' poetic art skillfully blends these elements to create a hauntingly beautiful narrative.

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What literary devices are used in John Keats' "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 or sung: repetition is a way to keep listeners engaged and even to make them participate in the telling. The fact that the poem is written in a rather simple and antiquated language also anchors it in the tradition of the folktale.

Throughout the poem, silence and death are intertwined through imagery: "no birds sing," "wither'd plants" run parallel to the description of the knight, "alone and palely loitering."

Keats uses a few metaphors that reinforce the lyricism of the poem and the otherworldliness of the setting. For instance, the pallor of the knight becomes "a lily on [his] brow" in the poet's description. This could be a hint at how the knight is under the...

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spell of the lady and risks losing himself in her world, since she is associated with flowers all through the poem.

These are seeds you can use in your analysis. Try to spot patterns in sound and imagery in the text: what kind is associated with whom, and to what effect?

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What is your critical appreciation of John Keats' poem "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 leaves the knight, where he continues to wait for her to return. Though all signs point to the knight's ill-fate in pursuing his feelings, the knight's devotion never wavers.

Some readers maintain that the poem is really about Keats’s confused feelings for Fanny Brawne...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. 

Regardless of one's perception, the knight is beyond saving. One source notes that the more one loves, the more disappointing the rest of the world becomes.

An unidentified speaker approaches the knight and wonders why he is pale and alone—where not even a bird sings. Again (in the second stanza), the speaker asks after the knight—why does he looks so "haggard" and sad. The knight speaks of meeting a "lady;" she had long hair, was light-footed, and had wild eyes. They spent time together—and the looks she gave him spoke of love. Then...

...sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery’s song.

It seems that having heard a faery's song, the knight would never be the same. Soon she tells him, "I love thee true." She takes him "to her Elfin grot," though she sighs and cries—but the knight kisses her four times. Then he falls asleep and dreams of knights, princes and warriors—all pale—trying to warn him of the danger of the faery's spell. He sees these ghostly-looking men with their...

…starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gapèd wide...

But the warning means nothing, for here the knight still sits, lonely and pale in a place where "no birds sing."

While the time of the year determines the emptiness of the place where the knight waits (it's fall and the harvest is over), it also supports the mood of emptiness and sorrow—for spring and summer are gone, nothing grows and the birds have left with the expectation of colder weather to come.

This is a chivalrous knight, this pale and lonely man who waits for the impossible—the fairy to return to him.

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.

And as a chivalric knight, his dedication and love for the "fairy" would have been a serious undertaking—a "forever thing." The fairy is not bound by such considerations, so she does not feel a sense of obligation to him in the least. Under her spell, he is doomed to spend the rest of his life, waiting for her.

The poem is written in twelve four-line stanzas. The rhyme scheme is abcb—the first and third lines do not rhyme (with the last word of the line), but the second and fourth lines do.

Keats' poem is fanciful at first glance, about a knight and a "faery." However, at second glance, this may well speak to the danger of losing one's heart in love.

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What are the features of Romanticism in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by John Keats?

John Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is often considered a prototypical poem of the Romantic movement. Its features both conform to and set a pattern for a certain type of Romantic lyric poem

In terms of form, the ballad structure was used by many of the Romantic poets. In contrast with the more regular and formal heroic couplets favored by the Augustans, the ballad is more fluid and allows greater room for variation. It is also a popular form as opposed to one grounded in educated literature, and this sense of folk tradition was also prized by Romantic poets and critics. The vocabulary, with its mixture of simplicity and archaism and use of loose rather than periodic sentence structure, is also typically Romantic.

Another Romantic feature is the medievalism of the poem. Many Romantic poets admired the medieval period and wrote about knights and other elements from medieval romance. The supernatural and folkloric elements are also typical of Romanticism, including the presence of fairies. Another typically Romantic feature is the pastoral setting of the poem, with a natural landscape remote in place and time from the urban environments in which many readers lived.

In terms of emotional tone, the poem is also Romantic in its sense of melancholy. The knight is not only weeping over a lost love, but there is no sense of a possible positive resolution.

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Much of the Romantic movement was rooted in an obsession with a legendary past, and the remoteness it represented from the modern, rational world. Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is set in this mythical land. It re-creates both the atmosphere and the theme of the medieval ballad "True Thomas." In this we can see two seemingly contradictory trends of Romanticism: the effort to create a folk-like, purportedly unsophisticated type of art (as Wordsworth did in a different way from Keats and the others of the second generation of Romantics), but simultaneously the use of mannered, partly archaic language to produce an atmosphere of mystery and remoteness from ordinary life.

Romantic literature, both poetry and prose, often takes the form of an adult fairy tale, with supernatural elements as in children's stories, but grim, pessimistic, and even shocking themes. Keats describes the beautiful lady as a "faery's child" who sings a "faery's song." Note the archaic spelling, and the use of other phrases with an olden-time ring, such as "she made sweet moan," "she sigh'd full sore," and "I saw their starved lips in the gloam." This is the same darkling forest to which the lady is leading the knight that beckons Keats in the "Ode to a Nightingale." It is a primeval place, irrational and forbidding, but inviting at the same moment.

Much of Romanticism is pessimistic, viewing man's destiny in a quite different way from the previous era of optimistic enlightenment and reason. Keats's knight is an emblem of man alone, victimized by hostile surroundings. The obsession with love, also typical of the Romantics, is portrayed negatively here, as the knight is victimized by the lady—much as Keats saw himself victimized by the rejection of Fanny Brawne, the girl with whom he had become obsessed. It is the same negativity and destructive sexual force we see elsewhere in Romantic literature, in works as diverse as Byron's Don Juan, Shelley's play The Cenci, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

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Write a critical essay on "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats.

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 object of the knight's love, and the other is that the "lady/dame" is the metaphysical concept of beauty.  In either case, however, the knight is helpless in his faithfulness to his love, for the more one embraces feelings of love and beauty, the more desolate and painful mundane life becomes.

Keats's narrative poem, which is written in ballad form, is arranged as a dialogue as the speaker is unidentified in the first twelve lines.  When the question "O what can ail thee?" is asked, the reader's knowledge of chivalric legend and lore points to love since a lily pallor and faded rose point cannot relate to the other two allegiances of a knight, his allegiance to God and to his lord.

However, the knight does not describe a woman; it is a faery that he loves:  "She took me to her elfin grot," and held him "in thrall."  This mythical spell placed on the heroic figure of a knight has caused the hillside to be cold and the sedge withered.  Only when the spell is broken can the land be fertile.

Because this "Belle Dame sans Merci" is a faery, many interpret her as the concept of beauty or art.  And, thus, is the plight of the artist who must live in the world of art or suffer the disappointment and desolation of the mundane. Certainly, this idea can be related to many musicians who, while delighted as they play their instruments, are often disillusioned or unhappy when not engaged in their music, seeking something to cure their "blues," and it is this despondence and unhealthy condition that causes their deaths--the "sans merci."

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What aspects of Keats's poetic art are illustrated in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"?

Keats began working on his poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" in 1819. It consists of 12 quatrains rhymed ABCB. The first three lines of each stanza are written in iambic tetrameter and the fourth line in iambic trimeter. The poem follows the generic conventions of the ballad.

The first feature which makes it typical of Keats' version of romanticism is the nostalgic setting in an idealized version of the Middle Ages, including its appropriation of the folk-poetic form of the ballad. 

Another feature typical of Keats' poetic art is the way that he uses the imagery of nature to establish mood, a technique sometimes known as the "pathetic fallacy." The despair and withering of the knight due to his love for "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" who abandoned him is reflected in the wintry landscape evoked in the final lines:

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing
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