Keats. In the poems To Autumn, a lyrical portrayal of the season itself and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a literary ballad featuring a despairing knight in a fairytale plot,

Authors Avatar

Read again ‘To Autumn’ by Keats. This poem makes a strong appeal to our senses. Compare this poem with one other poem which also makes a strong appeal to the reader. You should refer closely to the language used in both poems.

        In the poems ‘To Autumn’, a lyrical portrayal of the season itself and ’La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, a literary ballad featuring a despairing knight in a fairytale plot, by one of the well known Romantics, John Keats, a strong appeal is given across to the reader. In both of them, a lot of sensuous detail can be seen to help make the ‘story’ of the poems interesting for the reader.

        The theme of nature is used to help appeal to the reader in both poems. In ‘To Autumn’, for example, ‘’And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;/To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells/With a sweet kernel’ portrays the sense that Autumn is seen a season of ripeness, calm and beauty by the poet. In addition the long vowel sounds in ‘To Autumn’ make it melodic as the words flow quite slowly and smoothly. and Then in ’La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ the nature is used as pathetic fallacy; ‘The sedge is wither’d from the lake,/ And no birds sing.’ reflects how the knight-at-arms feels inside as even nature is dying and gone away like the ‘alone and palely loitering’ knight has  as he finds himself under the power of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Furthermore, unlike ‘To Autumn’ the poem’s stanzas are of the four-line ballad form. However like other last lines of stanzas in the poem, ‘And no birds sing.’ is emphasised as it is shortened to convey a sense of something withheld or absent.

Join now!

Another similar technique featured in both of these poems is the use of interactive devices; such as rhetorical questions. ’La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is opened with a question towards the knight-at-arms asking what pains him. This makes the poem a dialogue as it helps create conversation. Whereas in ‘To Autumn’, the question of ‘Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?’ is being asked to the inanimate season of Autumn thus personifying it with this rhetorical device and with references to Autumn using personal pronouns such as ‘thee’ and ‘thy’. Keats has used such rhetorical devices in order to make the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay