La Belle Dame Sans Merci Revision Title La

La Belle Dame Sans Merci Revision

Title • • "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" means "the beautiful woman without mercy. " • It is the title of an old French poem by Alain Chartier - the secretary and court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII. of France, written in 1424. • This title had caught Keats's fancy. • "Merci" in today's French is "thank you". • Keats probably knew a current translation which was supposed to be by Chaucer. • In Keats's poem "Eve of Saint Agnes", the lover sings this old song as he is awakening his beloved.

Stanza One • • The poem begins with a question which it will proceed to answer. • The question is asked by the poet and addressed to a knight-at-arms. • The question is: “What can ail thee? ” • The knight is both alone and palely loitering. • The landscape is also pale; “The sedge has withered from the lake. ” • The usual beauties of nature – bird song – are absent.

Stanza Two • The first line of the poem is repeated to become the first line, also, of the second stanza. • The knight’s unhappy predicament is emphasised by calling him both haggard and woe-begone. • The winter aspect of the landscape in shown in the squirrel’s granary and the harvest being complete. • The granary and harvest provide images of abundance against which the knight’s desolation is measured.

Stanza Three • • This stanza concentrates on the knight's physical appearance, which is associated with dying and with flower imagery. • The lily is a traditional symbol of death. • While the rose is traditionally an image of beauty, the rose in this poem is fading and withering, images appropriate to the knight’s predicament. • The moisture and the “dew” or perspiration on his forehead suggests the knight’s misery. • His anguish, the causes of which the poem will explain, is also introduced.

Stanza Four • • The narrator changes. The knight takes up the story. • He will provide an explanation of how he became the way the first narrator, the poet, found him. • He introduces the “belle dame” of the title and emphasises her beauty. • Calling her a “faery’s child” introduces the supernatural element into the poem. • Calling her eyes “wild” introduces an element of danger into the poem.

Stanza Five • • This stanza describes his pursuit and her response. • The emotions of the knight are positive, happy and loving, at this point in the poem. • His gifts to her are many. • Introducing the word “as” in the third line hints at her deception. • Her “sweet moan” is her response to his pursuit.

Stanza Six • • The loitering of the first stanza is offset here by the pacing steed and the movements of love. • The romantic image of her riding and singing through the landscape emphasises the knight’s happiness at this central point in the poem. • The fact that he saw “nothing else” all day long shows how much in thrall he is to her impression. • “Sidelong” means she is sitting sideways on the horse, a typical traditional pose for a woman on horseback.

Stanza Seven • • If her beauty seduces the knight, he is also seduced by the food and drink she offers him. • This food and drink is the product of the natural world – roots, honey and manna. • The strangeness of “la belle dame” is evident in her strange language. • The simplicity and brevity of her statement – “I love thee true” – adds to its effect.

Stanza Eight • • The setting of the poem moves from the outdoors into her “elfin grot, ” the grotto or cave where she lives. • Her weeping and sighing add an ominous note of sadness and darkness to the poem. • They are also intended to have an effect on the knight. And they do. • Repeating the word “wild” from stanza four reintroduces the element of danger. • The romantic nature of the knight is emphasised by his “kisses four. ” • Why four? See Keats’s explanation in the Comments section below.

Stanza Nine • • The repetition, over two stanzas, of the phrase “And there” keeps the momentum of the poem going at a regular pace. • The word “lulled” shows how the knight is seduced by the “faery’s child. ” • The mood of the poem changes with the phrase “Ah! woe betide!” • Repeating the word “dream” and complimenting it with “the cold hill side” introduces an ethereal unreal mood.

Stanza Ten • • The contents of his dream or nightmare revealed in this and the next stanza. • The repetition of the word “pale” reintroduces the death motif first developed in stanza three. • Bring kings and princes into the knight’s dream shows the widespread power for destruction and desolation of “la belle dame. ” • We now know why she is “sans merci. ” • We also know how she has so many in her “thrall. ”

Stanza Eleven • • The nightmare ends with a gruesome “horrid” image of the mouths of the dead or ghostly figures. • The word “starved” suggests they are starved of more than food. A woman who initially seemed to promise so much starves them of love. • The dream ends when the knight awakes from the heat of love to the cold hill’s side. He is no longer in the grotto or domain of “la belle dame. ”

Stanza Twelve • • The concluding stanza offers an explanation for the opening stanza by repeating words and phrases. • There is a variation from the “sedge has withered” of stanza one to “the sedge is withered” in the final stanza. This suggests the nightmare will continue forever for the knight. • The line “And no birds sing” has a much stronger resonance in the last stanza than in the first. Now we know why. • The absence of birdsong becomes a powerful image for the desolation of the knight’s predicament.

Point to Ponder: • • There are four voices in the poem: that of the poet; that of the knight; that of the lady; and the unified voice of the pale kings and princes. • The word “pale” is used repeatedly in the poem. • Repeating the central question of the poem in both the first and the second stanza is known as incremental repetition and is a characteristic of the ballad form. • As in many ballads, the poem tells a story that is both mysterious and dramatic. • As in many ballads, there is widespread use of dialogue. •

• As in many ballads, there is much repetition, of words, lines and even half-stanzas. • The short four-line stanza, with its ABCB rhyme scheme, is characteristic of the ballad form. • Lines 3 and 4 of the first stanza provide a direct contrast with lines 3 and 4 of the second stanza. • Lines 1, 2, and 3 of each stanza generally have four feet and eight or nine syllables. However, the last line of each stanza is a shorter line; it has only two or three feet and only four or five syllables. • The poem’s narrative begins with the voice of the poet in the first three stanzas. The knight's narrative consists of three sections: stanzas four to seven describe the knight's meeting and involvement with the lady; stanza eight presents the climax (he goes with her to the "elfin grot"); the last four stanzas describe his sleep and expulsion from the grotto.

• Eight and a half lines of this poem are devoted to his dream (the poem itself is only 48 lines long) and the last six lines are about the consequences of the dream. • The men he dreams about are all men of power and achievement (kings, princes, and warriors). • Their paleness associates them both with the loitering pale knight and with death; in fact, we are told that they are "deathpale. " • Whereas the impact of the lady on the knight is clear, her character remains shadowy. • We see her only through the knight's eyes, and he never got to know her. • The lady belongs to a tradition of "femmes fatales. " She seduces the knight (and others) with her beauty, with her accomplishments, with her avowal of love, and with her sensuality ("roots of relish sweet, / And honey wild, and manna dew"). The vision of the pale men suggests she is deliberately destructive. This destructiveness of love is a common theme in the folk ballad.

• Because the knight is associated with images of death — lilies, faded, withering, - he may well be dead or ghostly. He is clearly doomed to remain on the “cold hill’s side”, but the cause of his fate is a mystery that adds to the poem’s aura. • Words from the first stanza are repeated in the last stanza. The poem, consequently, has a circular movement, reinforcing the connection of the opening and the ending. • The poet Robert Graves considers the poem to be about the poet’s destruction by his muse. • Others have seen the poem as a comment on his own unsuccessful love life, particularly his complex relationship with Fanny Brawne.