‘Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.’
The significance of the disappearance of the birds and animals suggests that because it is nearing winter, the birds have flown south to migrate. There is a sheer sense of completion in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ for the reason that the harvest is done, and the squirrel has collected all of his food that will get him through the change of season. The image of death in ‘To Autumn’ is that of the death of autumn when the plants start to fade and everything becomes overrun.
There are lethargic senses of nature in both poems, and both are in relation to the women. In ‘To Autumn’,
‘Or on a half-reaped furrow sounds asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook’
This portrays a view of the harvest being tiresome and took so long to complete that the world around has been sucked senseless with no ability to do anything. In ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ the woman ‘lulls’ the night to sleep as if under a spell, which points out the first image of her being secretive and having a darker side which is not shown. An other image of the woman being wild is that of making ‘sweet moan’ which can be interpreted in more ways that one, but I believe that it is her chant to place the night under her spell. ‘To Autumn’ very much celebrates the season of autumn in all its beauty, with many descriptive words to create in your mind your own fantasy of how autumn is, whereas autumn is only the natural setting in which ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is set to exaggerate other moments of the poem.
A theme of death is shown as said earlier, with the pale knight, however, in ‘To Autumn’ we come across a reaper with a hook that could be interpreted as the grim reaper out to tell someone of his or her death. There is a comparison between the two poems as ‘To Autumn’ is seen as warm, plentiful and pleasant, whereas ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is that of a mad experience that turns out to be dangerous all because of the ‘faery’s child’ who has cruelness hiding behind her back.
‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is written in two time periods, the first stanza is told by the narrator and is set in the present along with the last stanza, which is told by the night, whereas the rest of the poem is the telling of the story, and what took place. ‘To Autumn’ also, in a way, has two time periods. The main structure of the poem is talking about autumn, but at the beginning of stanza three spring is mentioned and is talked about in the past tense, indicating that it has been a while since any nature of spring as occurred. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is a Ballard, these type of poems are that of telling a story which Keats has evidently shown. ‘To Autumn’ on the other hand is an ode, which is a poem in praise of something, in this case the season autumn. Odes are descriptive poems with many flowing adjectives.
Keats was a romantic poet along with Wordsworth. Keats came from a lower middle class family background and was very much uneducated. To be a romanticist and be uneducated was seen as elitist because you had to have a public school education to understand the references to classics. Keats was often described of as a ‘cockney poet’ because he had no traditional training unlike other big poets at that time. Keats also didn’t have independent means and wrote poetry as a hobby as he was trained as a surgeon, which contrasts with the job of a poet. The two poems are very similar in many ways and very different in others. Because they are two different forms of poetry this is what makes them dissimilar, whereas the content of the two poems has numerous connections with each other.
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