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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 are 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 "death-pale."• 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.
