La Belle Dame Sans Mercy

Hello everyone, This blog is a part of my thinking activity. In this blog I will discuss about John Keats’s poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci"

Introduction

La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is a ballad from the Romantic period. It was part of a literary movement that had arisen to counter the theories of the Age of Enlightenment – to bring back imagination, beauty, and art to a culture that had become science-based, theoretical, and realist. Romantic writers saw the violence of the French Revolution as proof of the failure of science and reason, and the suffocation of the human spirit.


Most of John Keats’ prolific works were written in 1819, shortly after he met the love of his life, Fanny Browne, and contracted a mortal disease. Keats’ poems focus on a return to beauty: Greek myth, fairies, idealism, nature, and individualism are all prominent themes in not just his work, but of Romantic literature as a whole.


About John Keats

Sadly, John Keats, one of the best 18th-century British poets, died at the young age of twenty-five. Having studied some medicine, Keats knew his symptoms well enough to know that his time was limited. Just as Keats had found love, best just as his poetry was beginning to be noticed, he faced his early death. Being fully aware of his symptoms and the result of his disease, Keats also faced depression. It occurred to him his life was to end just as it was beginning. He left behind a fiancee whom he desperately loved and a plethora of poems that would eventually become some of the most renowned and beloved John Keats poems of all time

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Analysis of the poem 


‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ by John Keats is a beautiful poem about a fairy who condemns a knight after seducing him with her singing and looks.


The first three stanzas introduce the unidentified speaker and the knight. The speaker comes across the knight wandering around in the dead of winter when “the sedge has withered from the lake/ And no birds sing.” In this way, Keats depicts a barren and bleak landscape.



The knight responds to the speaker, telling him how he met a lady in the meadows who was “full beautiful, a faery’s child”. Here, Keats’ language sweetens. The first three stanzas were bitter and devoid of emotion, but the introduction of the “lady in the meads” produces softness in the language of the knight. He reminisces on the lady’s beauty and her apparent innocence – her long hair, light feet, and wild eyes – and on her otherworldliness, as well. Moreover, he describes his sweet memories of the Lady: feeding each other, giving her presents, traveling with her, and being together.



In the eighth stanza, the lady weeps for she knows that they cannot be together as she is a fairy, and he is a mortal. She lulls him to sleep out of which he does not immediately wake. In his dream, the knight sees pale people like kings, princes, and warriors. They tell him that he has been enthralled by the woman without mercy. He wakes up from the nightmare alone, on the cold hillside, and tells the persona that is why he stays there, wandering, looking for the lady. The last stanza leaves the fate of the knight ambiguous.


Meaning

Keats’ ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ describes the short encounter between a knight and a fairy lady. The title of the poem is interesting as it isn’t Keats’ own invention. He adopted the title of Alain Chartier's French courtly poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Mercy’. In French, the phrase means, “A Beautiful Lady Without Mercy“. Readers can see the variation of the words “Mercy” and “Merci”. It seems that Keats went with the French spelling of the word.



Alain Chartier wrote that poem presumably in 1424 and the poem consists of 100 stanzas. Whereas, Keats’ poem is comparably short and doesn’t follow Chartier’s octosyllabic line pattern. Apart from that, as the poet chose directly a French phrase, the title also follows the French pronunciation.




Structure and Form

‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is after the form of the lyrical ballad. Many well-known poets of the romantic era used this form in their written works. This particular ballad has a meter and rhyme scheme that produces a flow that engages the reader.



The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, which simply means that the stress falls on four words per line. The effect of this scheme is that it flows like a song, smoothly and with rhythm. Thus, it is called a lyrical ballad. The rhyme and rhythm are all designed to lure the reader in, just as the knight in the poem was lured in by the beautiful fairy-woman.