La Belle Dame sans Merci

views updated

La Belle Dame sans Merci

"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.

Author Biography

Born in 1795, Keats, the son of a stablekeeper, was raised in Moorfields, London, and attended the Clarke School in Enfield. After Keats's mother's death in 1810, Richard Abbey took care of Keats

and his three younger siblings. Although Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary (pharmacist), he soon realized that writing was his true talent, and he decided to become a poet. Forced to hide his ambition from Abbey, who would not have sanctioned it, Keats instead entered Guy's and St. Thomas's Hospitals in London, becoming an apothecary in 1816 and continuing his studies to become a surgeon. When he reached the age of twenty-one, Keats was free of Abbey's jurisdiction. Supported by his small inheritance, he devoted himself to writing. Keats also began associating with artists and writers, among them Leigh Hunt, who published Keats's first poems in his journal, the Examiner. But, within a few years, the poet experienced the first symptoms of tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother and brother. He continued writing and reading the great works of literature. He also fell in love with Fanny Brawne, a neighbor's daughter, though his poor health and financial difficulties made marriage impossible. He published a final work, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, which included his famous odes and the unfinished narrative, Hyperion: A Fragment. Keats traveled to Italy in 1820 in an effort to improve his health but died in Rome the following year at the age of 26.

Poem Text

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,     5
So haggard and so woebegone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew;     10
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,     15
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.     20

I set her on my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,     25
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
"I love thee true."

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore;     30
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dream'd—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream'd     35
On the cold hill's side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—"La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!"     40

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here,     45
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Poem 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.

Media Adaptations

A reading of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is available on a compact disc called Conversation Pieces, released in 2001 by Folkways Records. This recording was originally released in 1964 in LP format by Folkways.
A compact disc named Songs, released in 2001 on the Hyperion label, has a version of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" set to music and sung by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.
Lexington Records released a recording of Theodore Marcuse reading "La Belle Dame sans Merci" along with others by the same author on an LP called The Poetry of Keats and Shelley, produced in 1950.
The 1996 two-cassette set The Caedmon Collection of English Poetry features various poetic masterpieces, including "La Belle Dame sans Merci," read by famous actors such as Sir John Gielgud, Richard Burton, James Mason, and Boris Karloff.
Sir Ralph Richardson reads "La Belle Dame sans Merci" on a 1996 Caedmon audiocassette release called The Poetry of Keats.
HighBridge Co. of St. Paul, Minnesota, includes "La Belle Dame sans Merci" on John Keats, Poet, a reading of Keats's poems by Douglas Hodge. It was released on audiocassette in 1996 as part of the HighBridge Classics series.
Listen Library Inc. included "La Belle Dame sans Merci" on its 1989 audiocassette The Essential Keats. Poems for this recording were selected and read by poet Philip Levine.
A 1963 LP recording from Spoken Arts Records entitled Robert Donat Reads Favorite Poems at Home includes the famous actor's rendition of "La Belle Dame sans Merci."

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 who become enamored of fairies, elves, pixies, and the like generally suffer extreme emotional consequences once their affairs with the capricious beings have ended. Having loved an immortal, these hapless humans discover that mere mortal beauty—which can include not only human lovers but also life itself—will no longer do. Based on thse conventions, readers understand immediately that this is the knight's fate, and through his descriptions of his fairy-love's beauty, readers see the caprice that brings on his doom. In keeping with fairies' quick and unpredictable behavior, "her foot was light." Her long hair suggests the sensual nature of such creatures, who in lore are given to continual pleasures, and "her eyes were wild." The knight confesses he was taken in by his lady's fairy-penchant for "seeming:" She looked at him "as she did love." In the terms of chivalric belief-systems, earthly love is a mortally serious concept: it is at once an all-consuming renunciation of and at the same time the earthly manifestation of heavenly love. As such, it is considered by the knight to be eternal. Yet for the lady, who as a fairy has no such ideas about heaven or about chivalry, love is a purely earthly proposition. To her, it is merely an expression of her fairy-embodiment of nature, which begins and ends with the erotic. Thus, she makes a "sweet moan," which readers have no reason to believe is falsely manufactured. Thus, as well, she responds favorably to his gifts, which all represent natural or sensual pleasure: a "garland," "bracelets," a "fragrant zone." Her hold over the knight becomes complete when she sings to him her "faery's song," the type known to hopelessly enchant mortals' souls.

Lines 25–36

The lady's gifts to the knight represent her closeness to nature: she is able to find him "roots of relish sweet," "honey wild and manna dew." She professes to him, "I love thee true." But, she does so in a "language strange" whose words may (and, it turns out, do) not hold the same meanings as the knight's. Still, the knight believes because, in the truest fashion of the romantic sensibility, he wants and needs to believe. At this point, readers might examine the various allegorical meanings readers have attached to the knight's story. While some believe it is a representation of the perils of earthly love—whose desire and randomness can seem to have the qualities of fairy-love—others maintain Keats is really talking about the poet's infatuation with immortal concepts such as beauty. In either case, the lover—whether of another human or of some aesthetic concept—has little choice in the matter. To him, the experience of love is allencompassing, transcendent and, at least briefly, immortal. How many lovers, after all, have behaved rashly, even self-destructively, in the belief that their love took precedence over the normal modes of conduct. In addition, how many disappointed lovers carry with them the belief that they can never love the same way again? Still, new lovers proceed despite the warnings of previously disillusioned lovers. So, the knight proceeds into the fairy-cave, where, he says, "I shut her wild wild eyes"—the repetition suggesting a euphemism for sex—"with kisses four." In a poem devoid of many particulars, the number of kisses seems overly specific. Though there are many numerological interpretations of this detail, one simple explanation for the knight's specificity may suffice: it is the last thing he remembers. Moreover, it is his last act before the disillusionment and perhaps his last pure act. After the kisses, he is "lulled" to sleep, has his final dream, and awakes "on the cold hill's side."

Lines 37–48

In his dream, the knight is warned by previous lovers to beware "La Belle Dame sans Merci"—the lovely lady without pity. They come to him from the land of death, for once they have glimpsed immortality, all life seems a walking death to them. There are "pale kings and princes," "pale warriors"—all heroic characters whose romantic spirit led to their demise. Yet, the knight cannot head their warnings. He too is a hero, and in the romantic tradition, a hero is often someone who cannot learn from his mistakes. Regardless, he has already experienced a heightened state from which he cannot return to any previous existence. When he awakens on the hillside, he can only "loiter," waiting for the experience to return. After his fairy-romance, the world is pale and devoid of charm, yet to the poem's initial speaker the knight's vigil, however inevitable, seems to be pointless and grim. The poem concludes with a recollection of the first stanza: "though the sedge is wither'd from the lake / And no birds sing." This not only frames the poem; it also confirms that the knight agrees with the first speaker's assessment of the setting. At the same time, the knight cannot agree with the speaker's implication that no human ought to remain in such a godforsaken place. For the knight, who has glimpsed the immortal and will probably never do so again, any other place would seem equally desolate.

Themes

Unrequited Love

With its forlorn, heartbroken narrator suffering the pangs of embarrassment, "La Belle Dame sans Merci" appears to tell readers about the universal situation known as unrequited love. While love felt equally by two parties is a celebrated event in stories and song, unrequited love occurs when the love felt by one person is much stronger than that felt by the person who is loved. The root "requite" comes from "to repay," which indicates a balance that one expects in a love relationship and the sense of unfairness when one person "pays" love out but is not paid back.

In the poem the knight's disappointment would be less severe if he did not believe from the beginning of their affair that the fairy child loved him in equal measure. As it is, she appears to fall in love with the knight just as he is falling for her. The look she gives him in line 19 and her "sweet moan" in line 20 might be read as signs of her love, and the presents she gives him are further proof they are equally balanced in their feelings for one another. She even takes him back to her home, her "elfin grot," and makes him feel comfortable. It would be natural for him to assume she is as interested as he is in continuing their budding romance when he awakes.

It is unclear whether the knight's intense feeling when he finds his lady gone is caused primarily by the loss of the woman herself. It could be that he is suffering from the disappointing conclusion that she never really loved him as much as he thought she did. By the end of the poem he clearly feels alone, but he does not show any anger toward her. The only clues the poem gives about whether or not the lady may have felt love for the knight come from the spectral images who visit the knight in his dream and tell him the lady is pitiless, that she has no mercy. The presence of these dream images may be explained psychologically, as if the knight subconsciously knew the lady had left him, and his mind had already started shifting the blame toward her. The dream might just be his rationalization, a way of making her out to be evil in order to cope with the pain of learning his love is unrequited.

Topics for Further Study

Find a contemporary song you think has the same message as Keats's poem. Compare the song with the poem to comment on the ways people of the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century view love.
Research why it is significant that Keats wrote the title of his poem in French. Based on your research, do you think the French title has the same significance now that it would have had when Keats were living? Why or why not?
Write a sequel to this poem, explaining what will happen when the spring comes again. Will the lover return to the knight? If not, will he continue waiting, or will his attention fade as the seasons change?
Keats used a supernatural setting to explain his idea of romance. Find a folk story from a non-European culture that involves lovers in a supernatural setting and explain what the supernatural elements tell you about each culture.

Nature

The love story told in this poem is framed within images of nature. The lady with whom the knight falls in love is described as the child of a fairy. Fairy stories often stem from rural folklore traditions. The lady is described as having "wild" eyes and as living in a cave on a hill side. When they are together, the knight and the lady give each other presents made from flowers, roots, honey, and dew. After the knight awakens to find the lady gone, the world is described as one from which life has receded, using images associated with nature's death each winter: the squirrels have stored their provisions for the long dead months, the grass in the lake has withered, and the birds have quit singing. The only signs of living nature after the lady disappears are the fading ones on the knight's face. The "lily" that the poem's other speaker sees on the knight's brow is a sign he once was blessed with the delicate beauty of a flower, although lilies are associated with death. The rose color in his cheek is another sign he has been touched by beauty, but it, like the rest of nature, is "fading."

Despair

Despair is the state of having lost all hope, of finding oneself unable to believe life will ever be good again. The knight in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" falls into despair when he learns a relationship that seemed to be just starting has abruptly ended. His situation is clear from the very first line, when a stranger finds him out in the forest and can tell just by looking at him that something is gravely wrong. The stranger sees how pale he is and, noticing he has chosen to live by a dead, frozen lake, wants to know what ails him, by which he means what has made the knight so sick in spirit.

In the middle stanzas of the poem, the knight describes the romance, which meant more to him than anything that happened before it or since. The brief romance ended with the lady lulling him to sleep. Readers can assume that, comfortable and happy beside her, he expected their love to continue and even to grow when he awoke.

In the real (as opposed to magical) world, the knight's despair would take time to develop, because he would not know for sure that the woman he loved was gone forever. In the magical world of this poem, though, he is visited in his sleep by pale figures of noble men who describe the woman as merciless. When he wakes to find her gone, he readily believes her absence confirms the damning things the figures said about her. The poem does not have the knight looking for his lady or trying to find out why she has left; he is as certain she had no intention of staying with him just as surely as he knows he loves her. There is no hope they will be reunited, and therefore there is no hope that he can ever be happy again. His life is doomed to despair.

Style

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad, an old form of verse adapted for singing or recitation. The ballad form originated in the days when most poetry was memorized rather than written, and the typical subject matter of the ballad reflects a folk sensibility. Ballads are usually narrative, or storytelling, poems, and early ballads often addressed themes important to common people: love, courage, the mysterious, and the supernatural. Though the ballad is generally rich in musical qualities such as rhythm and repetition, it often portrays both characters and events in highly dramatic but simplistic terms.

Additional characteristics of the typical ballad include a set rhyme scheme and alternating line lengths. Formally, the ballad stanza is a quatrain, or a group of four lines, in which the first and third lines contain four stressed syllables while the second and fourth lines contain three stressed syllables. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" consists of twelve such stanzas, with a slight variation: the last line of each stanza contains only two stressed syllables, creating a dramatic suspension between stanzas. Aside from this, the quatrains exhibit the typical ballad stanza pattern of rhyme: the second and fourth lines are set in perfect end rhyme with one another, giving the poem the musical sound most ballads feature.

Historical Context

Romanticism

John Keats is considered one of the central figures in the English romantic movement. Romanticism was a philosophical and artistic ideal that spread across Western civilization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It sprang from the ideas of French writer Jean Jacques Rousseau and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Rousseau, a major figure in the Enlightenment, wrote eloquently and convincingly about theories of social equality. At the time, most governments were arranged in a system that divided the opportunities for social success available to commoners from those available to people considered to be of noble birth. Rousseau's writings presented society as a corruption of humanity's natural state. His theory that every citizen participates in society willingly, as part of an implied "social contract," created a cult of individual freedom that celebrated the human spirit and led to the French Revolution in 1789. The Revolution's ten-year struggle to over-throw the monarchy and the nobles was one of the most direct influences on the romantic movement.

Goethe was trained as a lawyer, but he became a celebrated poet, playwright, and novelist. In 1775 he, along with German philosopher Johann Gottfriend von Herder and historian Justus Möser, published a collection of essays called Of German Artand Style. Their theories about art's relation to traditional folktales and about the place of love and longing in art later evolved into romanticism.

Many literary critics consider the formal start of romanticism to be the 1800 publication of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the preface to that book, the two poets spelled out the principles of romantic thought. They emphasized the importance of feelings and emotion over intellectualism in poetry, and urged writers to cast away traditional forms and follow their inspirations. Their call for writers to focus on the natural and spiritual aspects of the world were mirrored throughout all the arts at the turn of the century, including painting, music, and architecture. They were strongly influential with the next generation of British poets.

The names most commonly associated with romanticism in literature are Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The three were friends and associates. Their poetry combined elements of the various romantic strains that had come before them: the thirst for social justice of Rousseau, the mysticism of Goethe, and the emphasis on nature of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In addition, Keats, Byron, and Shelley lived lives of freedom dedicated to the pursuit of love and adventure, a lifestyle often associated with romantic poets in general.

Chivalry

The fact that the character in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a knight is no coincidence. One of the key elements of romantic poetry is an interest in the folk traditions of one's home country. The chivalric tradition, concerned with knights and their relationships to the women they loved, had been familiar in European poetry for centuries. Chivalry was a code of ethics for knights that developed in the south of France in the twelfth century. It required knights to commit themselves to living by the virtues of loyalty, chastity, honor, and valor. It bound the knight to be loyal to God and to follow Christian ideals; to be loyal to the feudal lord under whom he served; and to be loyal to one mistress to whom he promised his love.

Compare & Contrast

1819: America is a small, new country with only twenty-two states. The nation battled Great Britain for its freedom in the American Revolution from 1776 to 1783, and fought them again for maritime rights in the War of 1812, which lasted until 1815.
Today: America is an economic superpower, and Great Britain is one of its closest allies.
1819: The entire population of England is around 21 million, leaving much open, unpopulated land.
Today: The population of England is around 46 million. With about 917 people per square mile, it is one of the most densely populated countries in the world.
1819: England has the world's greatest navy, making it one of the most powerful countries in the world.
Today: The Royal Navy is thirteenth largest fleet in the world and second largest in Europe (after Greece).
1819: Ordinary people rely on poetry to convey physical experiences.
Today: Technological advances in photography, sound recording, and computer-generated virtual reality make it possible to give people experiences without using words.
1819: Vast areas of the globe, such as the two poles, have not yet been explored.
Today: Any areas not currently populated are monitored from the ground and from space.

For knights of this tradition, love was considered more of an abstract ideal than something that could be experienced in this world. Women were to be loved from afar and to be considered unattainable. Knights chose women who were married, or who were of a higher social rank, who could be worshipped for their beauty and integrity but could not become involved in any sort of physical relationship without diminishing their appeal. A knight sworn to a lady would be bound to suffer in her name, to work hard at making himself worthy of her affection. This aspect of the chivalric ideal served to make knights good servants and citizens, directing their energies away from desire and toward a higher good.

In practice, the idea of chivalry was short-lived, falling to abuse and corruption. It was an idea more often talked about than acted upon by knights. It carried on in literature, however, in the songs of troubadours, who traveled from town to town singing poems for a living. In England, chivalry became crystallized in the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table during the fourteenth century. The suffering of the knight in this poem, his all-consuming desire for the nymph, and his relationship with her all refer back to the English chivalric tradition.

Critical Overview

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is one of Keats's most beloved poems and one of the few important works that seems to evade the kind of critical argumentation invoked by the odes and long poems. Typical of critics' magnanimity toward the ballad is T. Hall Caine's 1882 assessment of the poem as the "loveliest [Keats] gave us." He writes that the ballad is "wholly simple and direct, and informed throughout by a reposeful strength. In all the qualities that rule and shape poetry into unity of form, this little work strides, perhaps, leagues in advance of 'Endymion,'" one of Keats's most noted poems. Caine further argues that the ballad's strength comes from the poet's ability to "(move) through an atmosphere peculiar to poetry, lacing and inter-lacing … combinations of thought and measure, (and) incorporating … meaning with … music." In a 1913 essay, Mary de Reyes notes Keats's fascination with the doomed nature of love in "La Belle Dame sans Merci." She compares the poem with the work of another principle romantic poetin both tone and technique: "In the magical touch of this picture of desolation and gloom, there is much of the spirit of Coleridge. There is no full description. The poem is lyrical rather than narrative." De Reyes points out that the spare description of the landscape "gives the very spirit of the old romance world. And in the intense lyrical feeling we have the climax of passion."

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College. In this essay, Kelly examines the many ways in which Keats explores subjective reality in the poem.

One of the most notable things about John Keats's ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is the sly way it presents one of the key issues of romantic philosophy, that of objective versus subjective reality. The quick, simple understanding—the encyclopedia version—is that romantic poets favor subjectivism, particularly those who, like Keats, wrote at the height of the romantic period and helped define the movement, but also those aligned with romanticism to this day. Their world view is generally characterized as a writer focusing on his or her own experience, with no regard for the variety of perspectives that can occur when other points of view are considered.

The central figure in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a medieval knight-at-arms who has suffered one of the worst relationship scenarios imaginable. As he explains it, he met a woman and they fell in love, leading to a brief, passionate romance. After he fell asleep, the unreality of the situation assaulted him in two ways. First, he was visited in his dream by figures who warned him the lady was insincere in her love, and then their warning proved true when he woke up and found her gone.

All of these events, the disappearing lover and the warning he received about her, could just be in the knight's mind. Keats, however, establishes a level of objective reality in the poem by opening it with a second character who meets the knight in the woods and talks with him. It is the interplay between reality and fantasy, and the poem's refusal to clearly define what is and is not real, that makes this one of Keats's most compelling works.

Another poet might have used the uncertain existence of the phantom maiden herself as a test case for reality. There is, after all, no proof she ever existed anywhere but in the knight's imagination, while at the same time there is much evidence that she did not. To begin, she appears to the knight in the wilderness, where no one else could experience her. He describes her as a "faery's child," giving her, at the very least, mythical antecedents. The romance that transpires between them is too perfect too quickly to be thought of as the type of relationship that might develop in the "real" world. But, this poem does not really make much of the unreal aspects surrounding the woman and her sudden appearance and disappearance; they are taken as a given, as the natural course of the mysterious ways of love. It is a fairly standard conceit in romanticism to identify love as a part of the internal self, as more a matter of one person's mind than as a meeting of two. In terms of human relationships, this poem makes no effort to focus on more than one person's perspective, and so the mysterious nature of the faery child is not very telling. She might be a figment of the main character's imagination, or she might just be the catalyst that inspires it, but the reader can presume from the tone and from Keats's other works that this is always the case when one is in love.

The basic story of the poem could easily have been conveyed by the knight narrating his experience directly to the reading audience, if all that Keats were trying to do was to capture the dizzy high and unexpected plummet that can happen when one is in love. Instead, he adds another character, one whose worldly existence is never questioned. This second character defines the reality that surrounds the knight, giving readers another philosophical level against which to compare the love relationship.

Readers are not given any details about who is speaking in the first three stanzas of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and so this speaker can hardly be thought of as a character in the poem. While undeveloped, this stranger adds several vital elements to the poem. First, having another person in the real world offers the poet an opportunity to give readers a visual description of the knight. This is important because it gives details about the knight's state of mind that would not otherwise come out. The knight's attitude is more optimistic, or at least defiant, than his looks reveal: he himself is not aware of the toll that his ordeal has taken on him. In another type of poem, it might be possible for the knight to tell readers what he looks like without even being aware of how worn out he is. There are ways for a writer to have a character think about his own appearance, by seeing his reflection or by feeling his face with his hands. But in this case, having the knight take time from his broken-hearted misery to think about his own looks would have toned down the intensity of his love. His role in the story is to concentrate on his lover, not himself. While it is important for the poem to show what the knight looks like, that description has to come from someone who is not as deeply immersed in the situation as the knight is; therefore, the stranger is necessary.

The stranger's objectivity is also important for letting readers know just how odd the knight's behavior is. As is always the case in issues of subjectivity and objectivity, there is no way of knowing, from just one point of view, if the events are mundane, shocking, or just as they should be. If the knight's perspective were the only one given in the poem, readers could come away from it thinking that the quick romance was sad, unfortunate, but in some respect normal. Keats starts the poem with someone expressing shock at the knight's pale complexion and at the fact that he is loitering around the empty forest. The knight can express the agony of love, but he by himself could not put this agony into a social context without the presence of another person.

In addition to the knight's subjective view of his situation and the objective perspective the stranger gives to the same situation, the poem also provides several other elements to blur the line between internal and external reality. One seldom noted element is that the poem takes for granted a relationship between mental and physical wellbeing. The knight suffers in romance, and as a result, he is dying. His emotional turmoil leaves him pale and sweating, the color draining from his face. The images of dying nature that surround him can be accounted for easily enough if one believes that, in his misery, he would choose to pass his time in a miserable setting. Even though psychologists believe that mental states affect one's health, the relationship between the two is not generally considered as direct as Keats presents it. According to biographer Aileen Ward, Keats and his contemporaries believed "that emotional agitation, especially that of an unhappy love, could bring on consumption," or tuberculosis, which was the disease Keats had, and the one from which the knight seems to be suffering. The poem's presumption of a jump from the emotional to the physical world shows that, for Keats, the boundaries between the two were not as fixed as readers think of them today.

One final way that Keats blurs the line between subjectivity and objectivity is the appearance, in stanza 10, of the pale images who speak the poem's title to the knight. There can scarcely be any question about whether they exist in the outside world or only in the knight's mind: they appear in a dream, they appear in a crowd (the way kings, princes, and warriors never do), and they are even in the faded colors of a dream. There is no sign of them in the woods, only in the knight's mind. Keats complicates the question of existence by having them interact with the outside world in a way that goes past the range of the knight's subconsciousness.

To understand the significance of the ghostly figures, one must assume that the faery-child was in fact real and not just a figure of the knight's imagination. This is a more substantial interpretation than assuming that one fantasy is warning the knight against another fantasy. If the knight had in fact met a girl in the woods and shared a quick romance with her, then the figures in his dream could just be interpreted as his subconscious warning him, presumably because it had picked up some negative sign from her that his conscious mind had not noticed. That would only explain the fact that she would eventually be bad for him. In the poem, though, they are warning him she will abandon him at the same time she is abandoning him in real life. Dreams sometimes are thought to have the ability to predict reality, but granting them the ability to know what is going on in the outside world while the dreamer is dreaming raises a whole new question about where the mental world leaves off and the physical world begins.

Romantic poets are famous for describing the world as a subjective experience, one in which the important things happen in the human heart. There is certainly plenty of that in "La Belle Dame sans Merci," with the knight-in-arms either creating a fantasy love affair or not, creating his own tuberculosis within his mind, and then warning himself about the dangers of going beyond his own mind by entering into a relationship with another person. There is also a strong representation of the objective world, in the unnamed stranger who encounters the knight in the woods. The poem provides no clear-cut answers about how the world of emotion affects or is affected by the physical world, but it does raise substantive questions that cannot be easily ignored.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on "La Belle Dame sans Merci," in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Wolf Z. Hirst

In the following except, Hirst 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 journal-letter on 21 April 1819, which gives us the version usually preferred to the one printed in Hunt's Indicator in May 1820. (The latter, among other things, substituted "wretched wight" for the "knight at arms" of the first line, and in stanza eight omitted "kisses four," the expression Keats singled out for the banter quoted in chapter 2.) Whether Keats was most inspired by Spenser, the popular ballad "Thomas Rhymer," Dante, vampire literature, Celtic lore, Wordsworth and Coleridge, his own earlier poems, a painting by William Hilton, or his relationship with Fanny Brawne is less important than the skill with which he conjures the most diverse elements into a unified impression of spellbinding mystery.

The poem comprises three concentric dream circles. The outer frame (dream 1) consists of a weird encounter between the poem's first speaker and a haggard knight on whose cheek the rose is fading, while the knight's ride through the mead and the kisses in the grotto form an inner frame (dream 2) to the dream about the pale kings with the starved lips (dream 3). The aura of a transcendental experience which pervades the meeting with the fairy lady (dream 2) is undermined by the knight's dream of the death-pale kings and warriors (dream 3) with its suggestion of mortality and betrayal. This dream within the knight's dream in the dream poem—this third dream of the starved lips and horrid warning—comes true when the knight awakes on the cold hillside pale and enthralled as the dream prophesied. The realization of this dream of deathly pallor and starvation has moved in the opposite direction from Endymion's and Madeline's dreams, where fulfillment signified a shift from the actual to some ecstatic transcendental realm. Within the overall dream frame of the first speaker's words to the fantastic knight-at-arms and the latter's reply, the transition from the dream within a dream in the supermortal elfin world to the world of the withering sedge (from dream 3 to dream 1) has a touch of harsh reality. On the other hand the entry into, journey through, and sojourn in the elfin world itself remains pure dream throughout (dream 2). This dream comprises the poem's six central stanzas from the knight's encounter with the fairy's child till she lulls him to sleep; and the encroaching domination of the fairy world is reflected in the transfer of the initiative from the knight's "I" in stanzas four to six to the lady's "she" in stanzas seven to nine. The lady's ambiguity (does "as she did love" in stanza five mean that her love is true or sham? is she a flirtatious seductress or a caressing mother-figure?) and eccentricity (her sidelong bending, unusual food, strange language, and sore sighing), though explicable in a supernatural and perhaps even a natural context, yet create an atmosphere of dreamlike vagueness. The knight has evidently never entered a grotto and never left "the cold hill's side," for here, we are told, he dreams "The latest dream", so that instead of awaking in the grot he finds himself in the setting of the outer frame.

In the final stanza the knight tries to explain his sorry condition to the questioner. A folk ballad such as "Lord Randall," structured on question and reply, solves its mystery in the last stanza. In "La Belle Dame," however, the explanation ("And this is why …") raises more questions than it answers. The knight explains his haggard appearance and why he does not go home in the inclement season: he is "in thrall." But this explanation merely confuses the questioner, who sees that the knight is under a spell and wonders what the nature of this spell is. It is unclear whether the knight himself knows exactly how, why, and what things have happened to him. The dream in the grotto (dream 3), which is supposed to provide the key to the riddle, tells the questioner at the most what the knight himself has learned but what the reader has known all along from the title: the knight is entranced by a cruel lady. By only pretending to provide a solution to the enigma, this ballad calls attention to the indeterminacy and frequent mystery of its genre just as "St. Agnes" showed how the author of romance manipulates his reader. But whereas in "St. Agnes" the last stanza cast us abruptly back from romance to reality, the last six lines of "La Belle Dame," though apparently returning us to a realistic level, leave us in fact still within the dream world of the outer frame, which makes rational explanation of what has happened impossible and superfluous. The solution that does not solve anything merely confirms our initial impression that we have here the presentation of something felt on the pulses, of a beauty seized as a truth by the imagination and expressed in a language of sensation inaccessible to consecutive reasoning.

The poem pushes negative capability to a new extreme. Since we have to guess even at what has happened, it is not surprising that readers fail to agree upon what the lady, the knight, his journey, and his dream might symbolize. In this "most mysterious and evasive of all Keats's poems," we cannot know whether the fairy's child is a Cynthia who has failed to "make / Men's being mortal, immortal" (Endymion, I.843–44), a vampire, a Circe, "a fairy mistress from hell," or "neutral as to good and evil." If we conjecture that she stands for the poetic imagination, we still do not know whether the knight's lapse from vision is due to her refusal to keep up the deception or to the knight's own failure to sustain the transcendental experience; and in the latter case, whether this failure is, as Wasserman suggests, the inevitable concomitant of his mortal condition or the result of some particular deficiency on his part—for instance, as Richard Benvenuto argues, his fear of facing death. The lady may stand for any of the four intensities that attract Keats in "Why did I laugh tonight?": verse, fame, beauty, and death. She may represent the fatality of beauty or of what in "Ode on Indolence" the poet sees as "a fair maid, and Love her name", no less than the allurements of what in the ode he calls "my demon Poesy", especially since the perils of love have repeatedly appeared in Keats's poetry, notably in "Isabella" and in the Romeo and Juliet motif of "St. Agnes." But Murry's assertion that behind the poem lies "the anguish of an impossible love" (of Fanny Brawne) is only one more conjecture and his assumption that the joking comment on the four kisses in the letter "is the detachment of a man who has uttered his heart and must turn away from what he has said" can be proved no more than Jane Rabb Cohen's contrary (and more extravagant) suggestion that the comment indicates the humorous mood in which the ballad itself was written. The supposition that the knight's journey symbolizes the tragedy of Faustian rejection of human limitations is appealing, because the "starv'd lips" echo a passage in Endymion: "There never liv'd a mortal man, who bent / His appetite beyond his natural sphere, / But starv'd and died".

What Do I Read Next?

All of Keats's poetry is available in one volume entitled The Complete Poems. This book is edited by John Barnard and was published in 1977 by Penguin. The Modern Library also has a volume entitled The Complete Poems of John Keats, published in 1994, but it uses a revised version of "La Belle Dame sans Merci" that almost no other publisher uses.
Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe was published the same year as "La Belle Dame sans Merci." It is a tale of knights and sorcery set in the Middle Ages and began a trend in historical fiction that has come to characterize the romantic movement.
Since Keats presents his knight as turning pale and drawn, literally dying of lovesickness, students might want to read Susan Sontag's groundbreaking 1978 essay "Illness as Metaphor." It was republished in 2001 by Picador USA in one volume with the sequel essay, "AIDS and Its Metaphors."
Keats's own death at the young age of twenty-six is the subject of John Evangelist Walsh's 1999 book Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats, published by St. Martin's Press.
Andrew Motion's acclaimed biography Keats provides one of the most thorough portraits of the poet available. It is available in a 1999 paperback edition from the University of Chicago Press.
Keats's name is almost always mentioned along with that of his friend and fellow romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The most dependable, authoritative text of Shelley's poetry available is the 1977 edition entitled Shelley's Poetry and Prose, selected and edited by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers and published by W. W. Norton & Company.

We only know for certain, however, that the knight is a victim of his supernatural adventure and no longer finds his bearings in the natural world of birdsong, harvest, and decay. While he was journeying through the fairy kingdom, birds sang and the squirrel filled the granary; now the harvest is over and the knight is left unprovided for. (In the first two quatrains the truncated stanzaic close echoes the finality of this loss.) Those who boldly confront this world of growth and decline (as Keats does in "To Autumn") not only see the withered sedge but also experience the joys and fulfillment of harvest-time. In his vain attempt to die into the life of fairyland the knight separates himself from the natural order and thus becomes a double loser: cheated of both the wonders of elfin land and of nature, he suffers a kind of death-in-life. The Romantic journey into vision vindicated in Endymion and still depicted as a worthwhile risk in "St. Agnes" here proves disastrous.

Source: Wolf Z. Hirst, "Dying into Life: The First Hyperion and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'," in John Keats, Twayne, 1981, pp. 92–118.