BY JOHN KEATS
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.
She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
John Keats was an English poet writing in the early 19th century, towards the end of what became known as the ‘Romantic period’; a political and social movement as well as a literary one. Towards the end of the 18th century ‘love’ again becomes a major poetic theme, and among the Romantic poets, Keats is arguably one of the most ‘romantic’. The stories that Keats tells in his narrative poems are love stories, the facts about his life and early death, and his love for Fanny Brawne, are romantic ones, and in his poetry he is explicit about feelings and emotions. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ was written in the heat of his passion for Fanny Brawne. He was on fire poetically, in love, growing ill, and suffering from depression. The poem is a narrative of an encounter that entails both pleasure and pain.
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is in the poetic form of a ballad; generally using a bouncy rhythm and rhyme scheme to tell a story. The poem follows a singsong pace, and Keats compresses the lines by using a final line of only four or five syllables. This pattern hastens the poem’s rhythm as the lines act like a spring, hurtling us forward, “And no birds sing”. Moreover, Keats uses an array of euphemisms including “fragrant zone”, which could be flowers or a particular part of his lover’s body. The landscape is lush with meadows and spring, wild honey and manna dew, but the story quickly moves from idyllic to horrific, as the fairytale romp turns to imprisonment on a cold hillside.
The lady of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ can simply be depicted as the woman of whom broke the heart of the knight. His re-telling of the story, yet, casts her as supernatural in order to excuse his own weakness. “A fairy’s child” is the first hint that the lady is in some way associated with the supernatural, however this line doesn't make it clear whether the lady is a fairy, or whether she's just so beautiful and mysterious that she seems like "a fairy's child." Repetition of “fairy” comes soon after in “A fairy’s song”. It is possible to read this as a romantic hyperbole, implying her voice is so sweet to the enraptured knight that it sounds magical to him.
The idea of love suffers in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ as it is evidently one-sided; the lady "loves" in line 19, and confesses her love in line 28, whilst the knight only admires her beauty. In “I set her on my pacing steed, and nothing else saw all day long”, it is suggested the knight is so obsessed with the beautiful lady that he spends the day gawking at her, raising the question that is whether this is love, or an obsessive lust. Regardless, the relationship between the lady and the knight in this poem is doomed from the start as they’re both from essentially different worlds.
Similar to ‘The Anniversary’ by John Donne, the theme of death is explored in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, however quite differently. Whilst the ‘belle dame’ plays a figure of love and fantasy, she is also the agent of death and decay to the knight. Conversely, Donne claims the only thing not subject to “decay” is the love that he and the object of his affections share, suggesting love surpasses death. Moreover, both poems are told in the man’s narrative. The motives of the lady in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" are described only from the knight's point of view; because the knight is not a reliable narrator, it is possible that the reason she weeps in her "elfin grot" is that the knight has injured her in some way. In comparison, it's possible Donne’s perception is biased in that his and his lovers love for one another, is “mutual”.
Ultimately, the more we consider the knight’s story, the more we uncover parallels with Keats’s life; the poem might very well express figuratively what Keats was experiencing in his love life and his health. The knight’s predicament in the poem is Keats’s drama transformed and played out in allegorical fashion. Keats’s knight is lost and abandoned which is how the poet himself would eventually refer to the last months of his life just two years later.
M Chacko
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