Compare and contrast the poems La Belle Dame sans Merci(TM) by John Keats and The Song of Wandering Aengus(TM) by W.B. Yeats

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Compare and contrast the poems ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ by John Keats and ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ by W.B. Yeats.

In their times, separated by at least 50 years, Keats and Yeats were among the leading exponents of ‘Romanticism’. The two poems under consideration epitomise a powerful aspect of the Romantic approach to women: idealised to such an extent that she was so perfect that once glimpsed all life thereafter was dust and ashes. Both poems are narratives, which describe overpowering encounters with women. The encounters leave the men love-stricken to the extent that they believe that there is no point in living. They are doomed to live in a perpetual vacuum.

In ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ – the title gives a clear clue as to the theme – the love-lorn hero (typically a ‘knight at arms’, an heroic character) is discovered miserable and ‘woe-begone’ in a desolate landscape ‘alone and palely loitering’.

The voice off- we don’t know who the interrogator is in the first three stanzas- sets the scene, adding on the one hand that since ‘the harvests done’ so it’s time to relax and make merry (and on the other that ‘with anguish moist and fever due’ the knight is close to death. ‘The sedge has wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing ’ The seasonal references in the first two stanzas present us with the idea of rotting vegetation- dying and decaying like the knight of the poem.

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The knight, in nine stanzas, recounts his meeting with a woman ‘full beautiful- a faery’s child’, who he fell deeply in love with. ‘Her hair was long, her foot was light/, And her eyes were wild.’ – This is a very provocative description, and would instigate lust in the mind of the foolhardy knight. She takes him to a grotto, feeds him with ‘roots of relish sweet/, And honey wild, and manna dew’… Is there a code here for narcotics, which were not unknown to the Romantic poets? ‘And there she lulled me asleep’ but not before ‘I shut her ...

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