These are all symptoms of tuberculosis from which Keats himself was dying.
The knight then tells his story of how he met a “faery’s child,” and they fall in love. The word faery gives you the image that there is something mysterious and magical about her. He makes her garlands and bracelets and she:
“Made sweet moan.”
The “faery’s child” gave the knight presents of relish and honey. In a strange language she told the knight:
“I love thee true!”
The strange language could be the faery’s language; this gives us the impression of magic again. It also casts more doubt of her love, speaking in a different language.
The lady takes the knight to her “elfin grot.” This also encourages the theme that there is something mysterious about the faery. The faery sings the knight to sleep. There is now another contrast, back to the theme of the start of the poem of misery. The knight finds himself in a place full of:
“Pale warriors, death-pale were they all.”
They warned him that:
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
This means the beautiful lady has you captured! All of the pale people were dead. The knight awoke and he was cold on a hillside, as in the first verse. The question:
“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms?”
Is repeated in the first line of the first and second stanza. Keats has done this to express that someone is ill in the poem, the knight. The word “pale” is also repeated in the tenth stanza. This maybe because the knight is close to death.
In the poem all the stanzas are the same length, four lines. In all the stanzas the end of the second and fourth lines rhyme as the rhyme scheme is ABCB.
John Keats appeals to the reader’s sense when he writes:
“She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew.”
John Keats uses the contrasts to emphasize the good things on life being taken away from the knight.
Imagery such as:
“I saw their staved lips in the gloam.”
Is used to give the image of death to the reader.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a dialogue. This makes the poem more effective. At the start it gives you an idea that the knight is very ill. The other speaker repeating the same line made striking as it kept the reader reading to find out what is wrong with the knight.
This is clearly a magical poem Keats was not only re-telling an old tale of beauty and evil, he was trying to exorcise the power of a doomed love in his own life. All the good things in life and love being taken away from him.
‘To Autumn’ is also by John Keats. It is not a ballad it is an ode and there is no narrative. An ode is a longish poem written in solemn and elaborate style, to praise a person or thing or to commemorate a special occasion.
John Keats’ odes are considered to be very beautiful. ‘To Autumn’ is an ode in praise of nature’s gifts. Keats talks about the autumn and the sun ‘plotting’ together and being close friends:
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.”
Personification is also used to make autumn more like a person. In the first stanza Keats uses lots of imagery and focuses on the maturity. Giving the image of a country house with fruit ripening:
“With fruit vines that round the hatch-eaves run;
to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees.”
In the second stanza there is a change in tone focusing harvesting:
“Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook,
spares the next swath and all its twined flowers.”
In the third stanza there is a suggestion of moving towards death. Autumn is coming to an end and bareness, “stubbing plains.”
The birds are starting to migrate:
“Gathering swallows twitter in the skies”
The poem has three stanzas and ten lines per stanza except for the last stanza that has eleven lines. The rhyme scheme is very complex. This could be to emphasize the death part. The poem is full of sensuous detail to appeal to our senses:
“Wailful choir the small gnats mourn.”
In conclusion ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ has all the characteristics of a ballad. It tells a story with a tragic theme and has short verses with a regular rhyme scheme. ‘To Autumn’ has no narrative but concentrates on rich imagery to describe the season. It has three long verses with a complex rhyme scheme. It is an ode.
The ballad uses repetition-contrasting atmosphere and contains elements of the supernatural. The ode has none of these. The ballad is written as a dialogue whereas the ode has only the voice of the poet.
Both poems contain rich imagery and sensory appeal but ‘To Autumn’ does this to a greater degree. Death plays a part in both poems but there is only a hint of death in the title.
The poem I prefer is ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ tells a story; this made the poem more interesting for me as it kept me reading to find out what happened to the knight. ‘To Autumn’ describes the autumn, for me the poem is not appealing and it did not keep me interested.
By Lee Baldwin