A2 English Literature

Keats

Discuss Keats’ depiction of love in the poems ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’,

Isabella’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’

At the centre of Keats’s imaginative achievement lie the two narrative poems, ‘Isabella’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and the ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. What links these three poems is their attention to the concept of love and relationships between men and women. There are many parallels between ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, ‘Isabella’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, and owing to the fact that ‘Isabella’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ were written within months of one another, one might reasonably expect to find similarities of interest, theme or mood between them, however unique and distinctive each poem may be. Whilst ‘Isabella’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ are both narrative poems, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’s “brief, restrained, ballad-like form” has been said to “raise different questions from those which arise in extended narrative.” What is noticeable about Keats’s work is that it can be related to inner conflicts, as love is intertwined with pain, and pleasure is intertwined with death, in the three poems ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ ‘Isabella’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.

‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, which translates as ‘The beautiful lady without mercy’, takes its title from an early 15th Century poem by Alain Chartier and is thought to have been inspired by the 17th Century ballad, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’. Although the poems share the same name they are remarkably different; whilst Chartier’s work belongs to the tradition of courtly love, Keats’s own version appears to antagonise the very concept courtly love. In short, the ballad has been read as the story of a seductive and treacherous woman who tempts men away from the real world and leaves them vulnerable, alone, their dreams unfulfilled and their lives cursed. Whilst the ballad is appears superficially simple, it is arguably one of Keats’s most difficult poems to fully explain and therefore is subject to many interpretations. The most common reading of the ballad is that of0 the ‘femme fatale’ figure who tempts her knight with beauty and ultimately causes his downfall.

The subject of ‘Isabella’ or ‘The Pot of Basil’ was based upon a 14th Century macabre tale in Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, which tells of a love borne by Isabella, a damsel of Messina, for Lorenzo, a youth employed by her calculating merchant brothers. Although Keats’s dismissed the poem as “weak-sided” and being “too smokeable”, it was very popular with the Pre-Raphaelites and inspired several paintings, however, it was disliked by many 19th Century critics and has only recently been considered worthy of reconsideration.  The original tale is though to have presented Keats with “a number of entrees into his own personal and psychological territory,” and to have spoken to him about his “worst fears about his origins, his parents’ wasted lives and his own anxieties about his identity and future as a poet.”  

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‘The Eve of St Agnes’ is based on the belief that on January 20th, a girl could see her future husband in her dreams if she performed certain rites on the eve of St Agnes, the patron saint of virgins. It was believed that if she went to bed without looking behind her and lay on her back with her hands behind her head, her future husband would appear in her dreams, kiss her and feast with her. The poem has been described as the closest Keats came to “achieving a satisfactory fusion between idealised secret love and mortal ...

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