Adrian Tam (G)
Compare and contrast the poems ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and ‘The Daemon Lover’
Love often drives people to do abnormal actions. In ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, the unnamed knight has a strange vision of having sex with a fairy, while ‘The Daemon Lover’ describes a man returns to his former lover and finally dies with her together. Although these two poems are written by different people and different time, they both shares common elements. Despite the theme of love, the technical details are similar with a clear rhyming scheme and fixed stanza lengths.
Both poems are written in the form of ‘ballad’, which is a short poem with a storyline. They both contains archaic wordings which are no longer used, e.g. “Daemon” in the poem Daemon lover, which is an iconography of the devil and “faery”, an old fashion word means fairy. Although both poems are ballads, they are used differently. In La Belle Dame Sans Merci, archaic words are deliberately added in after the first draft, meaning Keats intentionally make the poem more old fashion, which in a way recreate artificially the ballad feeling and Beowulf. The ballad in Daemon Lover is expressed in dialogues with archaic words fitted in naturally. This gives the impression of romantic love and depicts styles of lives after the industrial revolution where the country is modernising; the idea that people are still fascinated with the pre-modern stories.
