La Belle Dame Sand Merci

27th October 2005

Emilienne Agius

La Bella Dame Sans Merci

‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was written by John Keats in the Romanticism Period in around 1821. Keats died of tuberculosis in 1821 at a young age. Romantic poets wrote their poems mostly about childhood, individuality, nature but mostly about their feelings. The title of this poem, when translated from its original French language, means the beautiful woman without mercy, and the lady was exactly that – without mercy because she made the knight fall in love with her by seducing him, then abandoning him. She belongs to the group of mythical creatures called the ‘femme fatales’. In ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, Keats uses simple, archaic language. It is a balled and therefore a narrative poem. There are various narrative levels that make it more difficult to the reader to understand he meaning of the poem. Keats provides minimal details about the characters and makes no judgements. Some details are realistic, others strange. As a result, the poem creates a sense of mystery and fantasy. In fact it is a poem full of fantasy and mystery with many questions and few answers. In fact, throughout the poem, dream and reality keep intertwining as if the are one so an unclear picture is given as there is the possibility of it all being a dream.

The poem starts with a question. ‘ O what can ail thee, Knight-at-arms’ asks the speaker to the knight, as he is ‘palely loitering’ in a barren site. The knight is lacking life and vitality. Similarly, ‘the sedge is wither’d’ and ‘no birds sing’. The hill mirrors the knight’s lifeless and pale state. The anonymous speaker focuses on the physical and emotional condition of the knight. He says that the knight is ‘haggard’ and ‘woe-begone’, thus the knight seems to be lacking vital energy possibly because of life and work, he seems to be worn out. He compares the knight’s paleness to first a lily, a symbol of death and then to a ‘fading rose’, symbolising beauty which is however losing its colour and thus once again symbolising lake of life and also symbolising a loss in health. The knight is being put out of context in the comparison of his lack of vitality with his surroundings(nature) which is full of life to offer All this life being metaphorically sucked out of the knight may give the idea of this fatal lady to be a vampire, which is yet another supernatural which sucks blood, which is a symbol of the life in our bodies and which the knight seems to be losing the story in this poem progresses. But his beauty is ‘fast withereth’ and here the knight’s physical appearance is being associated to lifelessness and death. At first they nature was used as imagery and comparison, but later on it is used metaphorically.

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The knight’s problems start as soon as he says, ‘ I met a lady in the meads’. The lady is the cause of his problems, a symbol of destructive yet lovable beauty. He starts by describing her beauty, ‘full beauty – a feary’s child’. The poet is here giving a picture of bright and breath taking beauty as usually fairies are very sweet and pretty creatures. He adds to this description of the lady by saying that ‘ her hair was long, her foot was light, and her hair was light and her eyes were wild.’ She is a symbol of the supernatural, she is a beautiful, light and passionate creature yet full of indescribable and intriguing mystery. She is a symbol of love and passion and her perfection seems so close yet unreachable through all its mystery, something so beautiful and loving beyond the knight’s imagination. She could also be an image of what the knight wants to dream. She is associated to nature and the supernatural, something mystical and unknown to the human scientific knowledge. This woman could be anything as she could also just be a creation of the knight’s imagination, of what he wants to see, and this could possibly create confusion in the reader’s mind. She is described by the title as a exquisite yet fatal woman without mercy. This lady’s mysteriosity is as ambiguous as the poem itself.

He talks about what they did together, the ‘ garlend’ he made ‘for her hair’, and they way ‘she look’d at me as if she did love’. He says that she told him that she loved him and took him to her ‘elfin groth’. They were both filled with passion. There, he slept and in his sleep he had a dream. Keats also names the ‘steed`, thus introducing a symbol of sexuality showing the physically attraction between the two. At this point it seems to be a relationship where the lovers seems to offer an equal sense of protection, where emotions are mutual. He dreamt of ‘pale kings and princes’, and ‘pale warriors’. They all cried ‘ La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. The kings, princes and warriors may show that the lady likes class since they were all humans of a high class. They may be the ‘faery’s child’s’ past lovers whom she has destructed completely as she attracted them into a fatal trap. They all had ‘starv’d lips’ and were rather chilling to see. Their paleness associates them with death, just like the knight. The woman’s aim was to suck out the knight’s passion, feeling and sexuality, drenching him completely of his vital energy. He is absorbed and consumed by the lady. In his dream he finds himself in a region of death, where he has been seduced into a trap by this mysterious lady. As he woke from his dream, where he dreamt about the ‘cold hill’s side’, and he finds himself there giving a chilling vibe to the knight. The poem is just a whole mystery and so is the lady. It is hard to understand the unimaginable or the unnatural, and dream and reality seem to collide and create confusion in the knight’s head, together with that of the reader.

This poem is a ballad with a typical rhyme scheme of A-B-C-B. A ballad is a narrative poem and in fact in this poem we are being told the story of this night and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. There are different narrative levels which increases the difficulty for the reader to understand what is going on yet it increases the sense of mystery which is very adequate to the main theme of the poem. This poem is full of questions however this increases once again the sense of vagueness. An alliteration on the letter ‘i’ can be founding lines 1 and 2. There is as well use of sound, soothing sounds which give the impression of a lullaby. There is the application of phrasing and repetition which is a characteristic of ballads. The poet shows an emphasis on the use of musicality, like an incantation with a magical touch. This relaxing rhythm may also be a symbol of the supernatural. Keats uses an archaic kind-of language to give a better idea about the plot being set in a sort of Medieval fairy time in the past. The poet does not comment throughout the poem about what happens, and he does not interpret it, making it more perplex and ambiguous, and simultaneously interesting and captivating.

The beauty of this poem lies in the mystery with which it attracts its reader. It is a very entrancing and appealing poem as its mystery give it a certain enhancing and yet mystical effect on me as a reader giving me a greater desire to explore the unknown view of this poem and it gives the opportunity to different views and explanations to what is going on which accumulates even more mystery within the poem. It may be seen as a gateway to the childhood in our hearts, a time when we thought that everything is possible. But after all, ‘all that we have see or seen is but a dream in a dream’ and so may all that we read in this poem be just a dream which may develop our sense of imagination and give us the opportunity to create a fantastical world of our own in our minds.

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