Both of these poems have been inspired by something that had happened the writer for them to write it. John Keats, the writer of La Bell Dame sans merci, had had a dream about a beautiful woman meeting him in a magic place which turned out to be filled with enslaved lovers. Lord Tennyson had read the story of his poem in a book, but he adapted it and included the curse, the mirror, the song and her weaving a tapestry.
In both poems, the women are romantic figures and they experience strong feelings, and they arouse these feelings in others. La Belle Dame is able to have the knight under her control, he gives her his horse, puts flowers on her head, and she puts a curse on him. ‘I sat her on my pacing steed’, ‘I made a garland for her head’, ‘She took me to her elfin grot’. La Belle Dame clearly here has romantic feelings for the knight, and the same vice-versa. ‘And there she lulled me asleep’.
This is the same in The Lady of Shalott, she sees a single knight- Sir Lancelot, in the mirror, and it becomes too much for her that she breaks the curse and looks out of the window in order to see him. ‘As he rode down to Camelot. From the bank and from the river He flash’d into the crystal mirror’. The word, ‘flash’d’ is significant here because it really showed that he was special to her. Both of these romantic relationships end disastrously, in The Lady of Shallot, she breaks the curse, which makes everything fly out of the window, and she dies in the end in the little boat. ‘Out flew the web and floated wide; the mirror cracked from side to side.’ The curse took effect, after this she died, ‘Singing her song she died’.
In La Belle Dame, the knight feels as though he has been cursed by her and he dreams of princes and warriors, all pale as death. They shouted a terrible warning- they were the woman’s slaves. And now he was her slave too. ‘They cried- ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’’
There are a few differences between the women though: Both of the women link to destroying, La Belle Dame destroys the knight but the Lady of Shalott is destroyed by the curse because she liked the knight. Only the Lady of Shalott is the victim, La Belle Dame is yet more powerful than the knight, and he dreams of her enslaving him. ‘Pale warriors, death-pale were they all’.
At the end of The Lady of Shalott, Sir Lancelot, the knight, talks about her, ‘ ‘She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace’.
La Belle Dame is a free woman, and does what she wants to people such as the knight, while the Lady of Shalott is imprisoned in the tower for an unknown reason, and is restricted to looking through the mirror and weaving the tapestry. Also La Belle Dame has sexual attraction towards the knight, ‘And there a shut her wild eyes with kisses four’, while The Lady of Shalott cannot express any of her sexual feelings towards Sir Lancelot.
The feelings of the Lady of Shalott her centred entirely around her as she is alone, while La Belle Dame’s feelings are centered around the knight. La Belle Dame takes the initiative while the Lady of Shalott cannot help herself from looking out of the window and bringing on the curse, ‘She saw the helmet and the plume’.
From the poems there are some conclusions that we can draw: Both women have a lot of similarities and differences as we have seen Each of us lives partly in a world of make- believe. It shows that all good things must come to an end such as with the knight waking up from his dream. There are some explanations of life, in that telling us we are in a trap, and that eventually we will die. We know this from the experiences of John Keats, the writer of La Belle Dame, who used his own experiences in writing the poem. Life is even like a drug, which Keats had seen of experiences from, one can be on a high and then it wears off and one is on a low.
