{"id":257,"date":"2023-03-02T17:16:03","date_gmt":"2023-03-02T17:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/?p=257"},"modified":"2023-03-02T17:16:28","modified_gmt":"2023-03-02T17:16:28","slug":"an-ode-to-la-belle-dame-sans-merci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/2023\/03\/02\/an-ode-to-la-belle-dame-sans-merci\/","title":{"rendered":"An Ode to \u2018La Belle Dame Sans Merci\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

My first introduction to this poem was the absolutely gorgeous painting of the same name by <\/span>Frank Bernard Dicksee<\/span><\/a>. I love it so much that it is hanging in my dorm room, and now having read the poem in this class (finally), the painting takes on a whole new meaning. While Dicksee depicts the romance between the knight and the fairy maiden as loving and fantastical, awash in bright colors and longing gazes, the poem by Keats is less about the romance and more about the danger of it. I argue that Keats\u2019 <\/span>La Belle Dame Sans Merci <\/span><\/i>warns against obsessive love using the frame of a medieval romance, and that the metaphors and descriptors he uses ultimately describe a metaphorical death for the knight.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Dicksee, Frank; La belle dame sans merci; Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives; http:\/\/www.artuk.org\/artworks\/la-belle-dame-sans-merci-188451<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The story follows the very basic plot of an \u2018otherworldly romance,\u2019 which are very common in the courtly romances of the Middle Ages. I took a class on Medieval Romance literature last semester, and wrote my final paper on the complicated and independent nature of these otherworldly female fairy lovers. Essentially, in a majority of these romances, female fairies arrive in \u2018our world\u2019 (or the world of knights and kings) to offer herself as a lover to some worthy man, either with happy or disastrous results. In Keats\u2019 poem, \u2018La Belle Dame Sans Merci\u2019 (or \u2018The Beautiful Lady without Mercy\u2019) takes on a deceitful role, luring the knight in with her beautiful appearance and \u201cfairy\u2019s song\u201d (Line 24).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The essential point of this recounting of the experience, to me, is when the knight tells of how there was \u201cnothing else [I] saw all day long,\u201d which alludes to his overwhelming obsession with his lover (Line 22). After he meets this lady in the meadow, he cannot do or think of anything else but her, and when \u201cshe lulled me asleep\u201d he saw the other \u201cdeath-pale\u201d past lovers of the lady (Line 33, 38). I argue that when the knight enters this slumber, he metaphorically dies due to the loss of his lady.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Keats hints at this death with how the poetic speaker describes the knight after he has \u2018awoken\u2019 \u2014 he asks twice \u201cOh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms\u201d and describes the man as \u201calone and palely loitering,\u201d \u201chaggard and so woe-begone,\u201d and almost withering away (Line 1, 2, 5, 6). The repetition of specific phrases and the structure of the questions quickly establish the disheveled and dissociative state of the knight. Keats then employs two metaphors to discuss the knight\u2019s appearance, with the speaker mentioning how they \u201csee a lily on thy brow\u201d (Line 9). The whiteness of the lily can allude to the paleness of the knight, but lily\u2019s also represent grief and death, which the knight seems to embody. The speaker also mentions a \u201cfading rose\u201d on his cheek, which is both the fading color from his complexion (which connects to the pale and sickly appearance of the knight) and the fading of love, which the rose symbolizes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Although the poem does center around the love affair with the lady, to me it is not the main focus of the poem. Unlike the painting which depicts the love affair as perfect, romantic, and otherworldly, Keats spends more time describing and capturing the grief and distress of the knight <\/span>after<\/span><\/i> the lady abandons him. The knight seems to undergo a metaphorical death, or at least he is close to it when the speaker finds him. Heartbroken, sickly, and alone, the knight\u2019s tale seems to warn against the dangers of obsessive love.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first introduction to this poem was the absolutely gorgeous painting of the same name by Frank Bernard Dicksee. I love it so much that it is hanging in my dorm room, and now having read the poem in this class (finally), the painting takes on a whole new meaning. While Dicksee depicts the romance … Continue reading An Ode to \u2018La Belle Dame Sans Merci\u2019<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4989,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2023"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4989"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}