La Belle Dame sans Merci Analysis

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La Belle Dame sans Merci, written by famous romantic poet John Keats in 1819, has been declared one of Keats’s greatest works due to the ambiguous boundaries it sets between imagination and reality [Kelly]. Throughout the poem, the reader always questions the “reality” presented by the poem, creating many facets that the readers have discussed for years and still have not established a definite answer as to their true meaning. La Belle Dame sans Merci embodies Keats’s “negative capability” perfectly. Keats believed that people of great intellectual prowess must retain the ability to accept that everything might not have a clear-cut value and that there is not always one true answer. This is the essence of negative capability, and the poem requires readers to utilize this mindset in order to possibly understand the mysticism the poem creates through the knight-in-arms’s tale.

La Belle Dame sans Merci consists of twelve quatrains, eight of them pertaining to the knight’s depiction of his short-lived love with a “faery’s child.” The first three stanzas belong to an unknown speaker addressing the knight. The first two stanzas are nearly the same, with their first line questioning the knight’s condition, their second line illustrating the condition of the knight, and their last two lines containing imagery illustrating a scene of winter. The third stanza depicts the knight further, showing his vitality decaying with “[his] cheeks a fading rose / fast withereth too.” The fact that there was a “rosy” quality to his cheeks but now is fading parallels with one leaving a warm house (the mead) and stepping into the winter’s cold (the hill.) This correlates with a latter portion of the poem when the knight claims that he fell asleep...

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... Belle Dame sans Merci apart from the rest of Keats’s work is not its theme, but its never-ending ambiguity. Regardless of how many times it is read or analyzed, the reader is never absolutely sure what happened to the knight [Hirst]. This characteristic is the key feature that truly makes the poem one of Keat’s greatest works.

Works Cited

Wolf Z. Hirst, "Dying into Life: The First Hyperion and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'," in John Keats, Twayne, 1981, pp. 92-118. Reprinted in Poetry for Students, Vol. 17. Literature Resource Center. Gale Group Databases.

David Kelly, Critical Essay on "La Belle Dame sans Merci," in Poetry for Students, Vol. 17, Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Gale Group Databases.

Lilia Melani. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Brooklyn College. 3/26/08 through 3/29/08.

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