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    La Belle Dame Sans Merci

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    Bianca Iacob
    The poem tells the story of a knight who meets a beautiful yet dangerous lady. She seduces him and leads him to her home, where she puts him into a deep sleep through her song. In his sleep, he has nightmares of being warned about the lady's cruel nature. When he wakes, he is alone on a cold hillside, weak and dying. The poem uses the style of a traditional ballad to tell a supernatural story that serves as a warning about the dangers of seduction.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    La Belle Dame Sans Merci

    Uploaded by

    Bianca Iacob
    1K views9 pages
    The poem tells the story of a knight who meets a beautiful yet dangerous lady. She seduces him and leads him to her home, where she puts him into a deep sleep through her song. In his sleep, he has nightmares of being warned about the lady's cruel nature. When he wakes, he is alone on a cold hillside, weak and dying. The poem uses the style of a traditional ballad to tell a supernatural story that serves as a warning about the dangers of seduction.

    Original Description:

    English Project

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    The poem tells the story of a knight who meets a beautiful yet dangerous lady. She seduces him and leads him to her home, where she puts him into a deep sleep through her song. In his sleep, he has nightmares of being warned about the lady's cruel nature. When he wakes, he is alone on a cold hillside, weak and dying. The poem uses the style of a traditional ballad to tell a supernatural story that serves as a warning about the dangers of seduction.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    1K views9 pages

    La Belle Dame Sans Merci

    Uploaded by

    Bianca Iacob
    The poem tells the story of a knight who meets a beautiful yet dangerous lady. She seduces him and leads him to her home, where she puts him into a deep sleep through her song. In his sleep, he has nightmares of being warned about the lady's cruel nature. When he wakes, he is alone on a cold hillside, weak and dying. The poem uses the style of a traditional ballad to tell a supernatural story that serves as a warning about the dangers of seduction.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    You are on page 1of 9

    La Belle Dame sans Merci

    By John Keats

    Summary
    An unidentified speaker asks a knight what
    afflicts him. The knight is pale, haggard, and
    obviously dying. The knight answers that he met
    a beautiful lady, "a faery's child" who had looked
    at him as if she loved him. When he set her on
    his horse, she led him to her cave. There she had
    sung him to sleep. In his sleep he had
    nightmarish dreams. Pale kings, princes, and
    warriors told him that he had been enslaved by a
    beautiful but cruel lady. When he awoke, the lady
    was gone and he was lying on a cold hillside.

    Analysis
    "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is a literary ballad, a
    poem that imitates a folk ballad. A folk ballad tells
    a story on a theme popular with the common
    people of a particular culture or place. One of its
    key characteristics is a cadence that makes it
    easy toset to music and sing.
    Keats completed the poem in April 1819. Leigh
    Hunt (1784-1859), a critic and poet, published a
    revised version of the poem in his literary
    periodical, The Indicator, in 1820. The original
    version is generally regarded as superior to the
    altered version.

    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 wither'd
    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 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 merci, the beautiful lady
    without pity, is a femme fatale, a 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.

    Themes
    Love
    Women and Femininity
    The supernatural

    ("La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is part folk ballad, part


    romance, and part fairy tale. The lady's "wild" eyes suggest that maybe
    the knight isn't too far off when he calls her "a fairy's child." She appears
    out of nowhere, apparently lives in an "elfin grot" in the woods, and can
    ensnare any man she meets with her beauty, her "fairy's song," and her
    "language strange.")
    Versions of Reality (The knight in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"
    describes the dream he has towards the end of the poem, but the entire
    experience seems like a dream.)
    Abandonment The poem is about being abandoned by the one you love.
    The knight gets abandoned and left on a "cold hill's side," even though he
    appears to be at death's door. The beautiful fairy lady, we know from the
    title, is "sans merci," or merciless. She abandons him without pity, and the
    knight's solitude becomes the framing image of the poem. )

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?

    v=Za8I78YkzqY

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