LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCY
-John
Keats
"La
Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad, a medieval genre revived by the
romantic poets. Keats uses the so-called ballad stanza, a quatrain in
alternating iambic tetrameter and trimester lines. The shortening of the fourth
line in each stanza of Keats' poem makes the stanza seem a self-contained unit,
gives the ballad a deliberate and slow movement, and is pleasing to the ear.
Keats uses a number of the stylistic characteristics of the ballad, such as
simplicity of language, repetition, and absence of details; like some of the
old ballads, it deals with the supernatural. Keats' economical manner of
telling a story in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is the direct opposite
of his lavish manner in The Eve of St. Agnes. Part of the fascination
exerted by the poem comes from Keats' use of understatement.
Keats
sets his simple story of love and death in a bleak wintry landscape that is
appropriate to it: "The sedge has withered from the lake / and no birds
sing!" The repetition of these two lines, with minor variations, as the
concluding lines of the poem emphasizes the fate of the unfortunate knight and
neatly encloses the poem in a frame by bringing it back to its beginning. In
keeping with the ballad tradition, Keats does not identify his questioner, or
the knight, or the destructively beautiful lady. What Keats does not include in
his poem contributes as much to it in arousing the reader's imagination as what
he puts into it. La belle dame sans mercy, the beautiful lady without pity, is
a femme fatale, a Circe like figure who attracts lovers only to
destroy them by her supernatural powers. She destroys because it is her nature
to destroy. Keats could have found patterns for his "faery's child"
in folk mythology, classical literature, Renaissance poetry, or the medieval
ballad. With a few skillful touches, he creates a woman who is at once
beautiful, erotically attractive, fascinating, and deadly.
Some
readers see the poem as Keats' personal rebellion against the pains of love. In
his letters and in some of his poems, he reveals that he did experience the
pains, as well as the pleasures, of love and that he resented the pains,
particularly the loss of freedom that came with falling in love. However, the
ballad is a very objective form, and it may be best to read "La Belle Dame
sans Merci" as pure story and no more. How Keats felt about his love for
Fanny Browne we can discover in the several poems he addressed to her, as well
as in his letters.
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