La Belle Dame sans Merci

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1819

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Keats wrote the poem as a ballad, one of the oldest forms of poetry in English literature. A ballad is traditionally a rhyming song of many stanzas and narrates a tale. The balladic stanza is commonly a quatrain or four-line verse, with a rhyming scheme of ABAB or ABCB. Meant to be sung aloud and passed from one generation to another, the ballad is rhythmic and smooth-flowing. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” contains 12 quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme. The meter is largely iambic tetrameter, with the stress falling on four words per line, such as: “O what can ail thee, knight at arms” (Line 1). So far, the poem seems to be following a traditional balladic form. The twist occurs in the fourth line of each stanza, which is abruptly shortened, breaking up the flow of the previous three lines. Pointedly, this last line is only three or four words long and consists of just three stressed syllables. An example is the change in length and meter between Lines 2 and 4, from “Alone and palely loitering?” to “And no birds sing.” The purposely shortened line illustrates the poem’s central theme: Death is sudden and cuts short the rhythm of life.

The singsong rhyming quality of the poem gets an edge with the frequent use of enjambment. Enjambment in poetry occurs when a thought does not end at a line break and flows over to the next line or lines. An instance of this in “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is: “The latest dream I ever dreamt / On the cold hill side” (Lines 35-36). Keats also uses the literary device of the caesura to break up the rhythm of his poem. A caesura is a deliberate pause in the middle of a line, such as “Full beautiful—a faery’s child” (Line 14). The pause emphasizes the beauty of the lady. It also reflects the knight’s memory of wonder at seeing her. Her beauty literally stopped him short.

Anaphora, Alliteration, Assonance, and Repetition

The first two stanzas contain an example of anaphora, a figure of speech that repeats words or phrases at the beginning of successive sentences, phrases, or clauses. The phrase “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms” occurs in Lines 1 and 4, emphasizing the speaker’s bewilderment at the odd sight of the lonely pale knight decked in a full coat of arms. While the anaphora is a specific type of repetition, the poem contains other instances of repeated words and phrases as well. The lines, “ the sedge has withered from the lake, / And no birds sing” (Lines 3-4; 47-48) are repeated at the end of the poem’s first and last stanza, neatly rounding off the knight’s fate. The knight and the speaker speak the same words, which further identifies the knight with the speaker and the poet’s own persona. The words “pale” and “wild” are repeated throughout the poem, reinforcing the association of paleness with death and decay, and wildness with untamable magic and imagination.

Sounds are repeated as well, adding to the poem’s musicality and mnemonic quality. The knight describes the lady as “Full beautiful—a faery’s child” (Line 14), the repeated “f” sound constituting an alliteration. The exhaled sound deepens the aura of mystery around the lady. Another example of alliteration is the emphasized “m” sound in “And made sweet moan” (Line 20), infusing a note of sensual decadence in the poem. The alliteration thus acts in very specific ways to heighten the poem’s imagery and atmosphere. Apart from alliteration, the poem has several instances of assonance, in which a vowel sound is repeated. For instance, the long “a” sound is stressed in the opening stanza (ails, Line 1; palely, Line 2; lake, Line 3), adding to the forlorn mood of the poem. A similar effect is created by the long “o” sounds in Line 6: “So haggard and so woe-begone.” Examples of consonance, where consonant sounds are repeated in the same line, can be found in lines such as “Alone and palely loitering” (Line 2), where the “l” sound is repeated, creating an internal rhythm.

Allegory, Imagery, and Metaphor

“La Belle Dame sans Merci” is deliberately situated in a fantasy medieval landscape. Like many medieval romances, the poem’s narrative has layers of subtextual meaning, making it an allegory. On the surface, a story of a knight led astray by a femme fatale, the ballad is also an allegory for life and death, the dangers of delving too deep into the imagination, as well as a personal allegory for the poet’s life. Keats feared being taken by death from tuberculosis at the prime of his creative powers, and hence the knight’s tryst with the merciless lady. A complex system of metaphors, symbols, and imagery informs the many hidden meanings at play in the poem. For instance, the lady can be seen as a personification of death. The manna-dew she feeds the knight is linked with the fever-dew over the knight’s visage. What the lady gives onefold, she takes away a hundred times over, like cruel death and fate.

The use of the dew symbolism is linked with the water imagery in the poem, which is situated by a lake. The “sedge” (Line 3) or grass around the lake has died, making it a cold, foreboding place. Like the lake, and water itself, the lady can be a source of nourishment and destruction. Other examples of metaphor in the poem include “squirrel’s granary” (Line 7), where the poet uses the metaphor of a storage house to refer to a squirrel’s hole.

“La Belle Dame sans Merci” is known for its haunting, evocative imagery. Keats uses three specific kinds of imagery in the poem: those associated with nature, the supernatural, and sickness and decay. The nature imagery covers both the bleak and bountiful sides of nature, as seen in the descriptions of the isolated lakeside and the lush meads and woods. To paint a picture of nature’s decay, the poet uses lines such as “the sedge has withered from the lake” (Line 3) and “no birds sing” (Line 4). Note the use of the tenses here, which suggests that the season has just changed. This adds to the immediacy of the imagery. The knitting of garlands and phrases such as “roots of sweet relish” (Line 25) depict the sensuous beauty of nature.

The natural and the supernatural fuse in the imagery around the faery lady. In just a few descriptions of the lady, such as her long hair, grace, and wild eyes, the poet depicts someone both beautiful and fearsome. Images such as the lady feeding the knight manna and her taking him to her “elfin grot” (Line 29) heighten the supernatural element in the poem. The supernatural imagery flows over into horror as the descriptions grow more graphic. In the knight’s dream are death-pale figures with starved lips “With horrid warning gaped wide” (Line 42). The reader can imagine a host of pale zombie-like figures crowding around the knight.

The phrase “so haggard and so woe-begone” (Line 6), with its dolorous long “o” sounds evokes the sickness and decay about the knight’s person. The poet identifies the knight with the bleak aspect of nature and winter imagery, since the word “withered” (Line 3), is used to describe both the greenery around the lake and the roses of the knight’s cheeks.