Compare 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and 'Isabella, or The Pot of Basil'.

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                                                                                        Natalie Ward

Both the poems ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and ‘Isabella, or The Pot of Basil’ are by John Keats and are on the theme of love. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is about a knight who is not named and about a woman who seems in-human from another land. ‘Isabella, or The Pot of Basil’ focuses on two realistic characters called Lorenzo and Isabella. Keats has written in the literary tradition called Romanticism, which is where things are not explained and are just implied.

La Belle Dame’s appearance is described well: “hair was long… foot was light… eyes were wild”. This is making the reader visualise what she looks like and we see that she is unreal and “a faery’s child”. Isabella’s beauty is again emphasised by lists and repetition but unlike La Belle Dame, Isabella is a normal ordinary girl: “poor simple Isabel!” This is in contrast to the other poem and later on the reader feels sorry for Isabella as she wants to express her love but she can’t.

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In the two poems there is a male figure in each. In La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ the knight who is not named behaves in a different way to what a knight is expected to act like. There are many negative words about the knight as he is found “Alone and palely loitering”, bewildered and confused whereas typically a knight would seem confident and not “So haggard and so woe-begone”. The setting is dull and bleak and this shows the sad, depressing tone of the poem. The narrative structure of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is the narrator in ...

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