Keat’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is a dream-like journey symbolizing love as a cycle of life and death, in contrast to an idealism of eternal love. The theme of this ballad presents in imagery of haggard faces, and knights of old. A daydream on a hillside reflects on symbols of past experience, and the commonality of love’s experience. An indictment of women as a source of suffering exists here. Symbolism incorporated throughout the poem gives clues as to the true theme of this work: the acceptance of love’s ideals and its reality and mortality.
Numerous symbols give clear announcement of the death theme present within the poem. Our knight is "Alone and palely loitering". The narrator asks: “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms! So haggard and so woe-begone?” (Penguin Academics) A pale knight compared to the color of a lily, a traditional symbol of death. (Melani) The first speaker says little about himself. On the other hand, he develops the situation of the poem rather fully. The poem is set in the fall. "the squirrel's granary is full." (Penguin Academics) The grasses have withered, and birds have migrated away. Cyclic events are presented which imply a temporary circumstance, and not a true end. Spring will come, birds will return. And the grasses will grow again. Since the setting is a reflection of the knight’s emotional state, the ballad implies a future rebirth. Evidently this is of no consequence to our distraught pale knight, who physically expresses the emotional death of love.
The pale knight suffers from a disease of idealism. This is evidenced by the very description as a knight. A knight is a traditionally honor bound ideal of chivalry. Conceptually he may have assumed a fixed and eter...
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...here is also rebirth and regrowth. The common symbol of the knight represents a fixed understanding that in the end is so inflexible that it breaks. The elf-like nature of the female figure represents the knight’s idealistic antithesis. She is the very nature of nature. She is impermanent, wild, and unrestrained. The season will begin anew when he accepts he cannot control the nature of things.
Works Cited
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Reyes, Mary de. "John Keats." Poetry Review (1913): 72-82.
...veryone else. He wakes up every day ready to crow his symbol to bring on that day. In the poem he is ready to protect all the female chickens, from another cock that could be in there house. He is ready to battle to the death for what he thinks is his. In this poem he uses ridicule, when he is talking about the old man in a terminal ward, and he also uses connotations. Some example of connotations are when he uses words like; enraged, sullenly, savagery, unappeased and terminal.
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Frost created many poems with a correlation to death. A poem that easily displays this theme is “A Soldier” because it deals with the falling of a soldier at war. As Karen Hardison explains that “"A Soldier" is composed around an extended metaphor that is introduced in the first line: "He is that fallen lance ...." The soldier is compared to a fallen lance, a weapon, that lies on the ground” (1). Most of this poem involves a metaphor and imagery, which help the reader understand the theme. The fallen soldier lies dead on the ground and as time passes he begging to deteriorate yet he remain in the same location, just like the lance. Frost also condemns war and all of the consequences that occur because of it. Furthermore, another of Frost poem that containing the theme of death is “Nothing Gold Can Stay’, the poem indirectly references the theme of death. The poem states that everything eventually comes to an end and that not even gold can remain unchanged. The poem explains this theme with many metaphors about everything’s coming to an end. Freeman explains that “Even the poem's rhymes contribute to this sense of inevitability: Nature's gold we (or She) cannot hold; the flower lasts only an hour; the post flower leaf is like Eden's grief; the coming of day means that dawn's gold cannot stay”(2). The poem explains that everything has a natural cycle and that nothing last forever. When the poem states “nothing can
Dissimilar to King Arthur’s opulent and boyish description, the Green Knight appears earthly, like an overgrown lumberjack in a debutante ball. His very entrance to the narrative aims to shatter Camelot’s superficial relationship with earthly trials. While Arthur seeks pleasure in hearing tales “of some fair feat” (92), the Green Knight undermines all formality known to be chivalrous challenging the king to a life risking game. With a “broad neck to buttocks” (137), (opposed to Arthur’s’ court depicted in the ever regal color red,) the Knight is clothed in green, the color of nature. He appears with no armor other then his faith, merely a utilitarian woodsman’s ax. While Green Knight is described like an animal who is said to have “wagged his beard” (306) yet understands the cyclical nature of life and truth of mans futility, it is only after Sir Gawain proclaims his lack of strength (though he says it at that point as a matter of chivalry) that he is able to ...
In the engraving, Knight, Death, and Devil, it appears that the hero (the Knight) is gaining a moral victory over death. The Knight has often been interpreted as Erasmus’s sturdy Christian soldier who scoffs at death and the devil as he goes about God’s work in his journey through life. The conception of the ‘Christian soldier’ embodies and ideal of manly virtue which the traditional instincts of the Germanic race, German mysticism and Northern versions of Renaissance ideals all contributed to form.
In the Medieval Period, knights dedicated their lives to following the code of chivalry. In Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a number of characters performed chivalrous acts to achieve the status of an ideal knight. Their characteristics of respect for women and courtesy for all, helpfulness to the weak, honor, and skill in battle made the characters King Arthur, King Pellinore, and Sir Gryfflette examples of a what knights strove to be like in Medieval society. Because of the examples ofchivalry, Le Morte d’Arthur showed what a knight desired to be, so he could improve theworld in which he lived.
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“The Knight’s Tale”, for example, uses the concept of a knight not only to parody the concept of the hero, but also to question the well-established courtly love convention. This last concept refers to a set of ideas about love that was enormously influential on the literature and culture of the medieval times for it gave men the chance to feel freely. Also, it gave women the opportunity to be an important element in the story – not only decorative. However, when scrutinizing the tale, the readers can realise that all the aspects of a knight’s love are exaggerated and conveyed throu...
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