{"id":325,"date":"2023-03-11T03:55:36","date_gmt":"2023-03-11T03:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/?p=325"},"modified":"2023-03-11T03:55:36","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T03:55:36","slug":"the-beautiful-lady-with-a-high-sex-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/2023\/03\/11\/the-beautiful-lady-with-a-high-sex-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beautiful Lady (with a high sex drive)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear readers,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

John Keats REALLY loves love\u2026and death. They go hand in hand with each other, of course. In his poem \u201cLa Belle Dame sans Merci\u201d, Keats presents a classic: A knight is seduced by a fairy because she\u2019s beautiful and falls in love with her. Aw. Then the knight dies. Yikes. Through a dialogue format and a number of other poetic devices, Keats portrays this tragic romance which not only takes on a dark twist but also raises questions over love.<\/span><\/p>\n

Composed of 12 quatrains, the poem is moved along by iambic tetrameter which is in the first 3 lines of each stanza. Thus, the repeating tetrameter both stresses words and sets up a cadence resembling a ballad of music. Aiding this, we also have end-stopped lines in the form of repeating commas, exclamation marks, question marks, periods, and semicolons. Having established the rhyme scheme, readers, let’s move onto the tone. In the first stanza of the poem, we read: \u201cO what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing.\u201d (1-4) Here, we get a sense that the knight in question is miserable and the speaker wonders why he suffers in his described paleness and loneliness. After the speaker repeats this question \u201cO what can ail thee, knight-at-arms\u201d in line 5, the knight responds and explains how he came upon a fairy who was \u201cFull beautiful\u2014a faery\u2019s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild.\u201d (14-16) This detailed fixation on the fairy\u2019s beauty, specifically body parts, is further emphasized by the consonance of \u201cf\u201d and \u201cw\u201d and \u201cl\u201d. Readers, is it possible that this section also serves to display the male eye of desire based on the focus on physical beauty and further evidence in the poem.<\/span><\/p>\n

For one, notice how further in the poem that the knight reveals: \u201c I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long,..\u201d (21-22). This is a sexual innuendo implying that the knight had sex with the fairy \u201call day long.\u201d So far, the knight is infatuated with the fairy purely based on how she pleasures his eye and his body. Furthermore, the knights recalls how \u201csure in language strange she said\u2014 \u2018I love thee true\u2019. \u201d (27-28) \u201cSure in a language strange\u201d?? If the fairy is speaking in a language \u201cstrange\u201d, how does the knight understand exactly what she\u2019s saying? Is this meant as love is a universal translator or that the knight is completely disillusioned with his obsession over the physicality of this fairy who can apparently have sex all day?<\/span><\/p>\n

Another device I noticed was what I thought were allusions to the femme fatale. The first red flag is when the knight characterizes the fairy to have \u201cwild\u201d eyes. Wild beings that are beautiful are often deadly, is my thought. In addition, after the sex part, the knight explains that the fairy \u201cfound me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna-dew,..\u201d (25-26) and she \u201clulled me asleep\u201d (33) in \u201cher Elfin grot\u201d (29). Following the knight falling asleep, he dreamed of \u201cpale\u201d (37-38) kings, princes, and warriors who cry \u201c ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci Thee hath in thrall!\u2019 \u201d (39-40) Hmmm, knight conveniently falls asleep after having sex all day and then being fed roots he somehow knows the names of\u2026 Not to mention the dream of the \u201cpale\u201d men who warn the knight that the fairy has him in \u201cthrall\u201d. The repetition of pale and the unionized warning very clearly indicates that the men are ghosts who were victims of the fairy. So now the question remains: Did the fairy kill the night with energy-sucking sex like a succubus or did she poison him with the roots? Either way, I think Keats is warning us\u2026 Love can be fatal. It can even end up killing you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sincerely, Alucard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear readers,\u00a0 John Keats REALLY loves love\u2026and death. They go hand in hand with each other, of course. In his poem \u201cLa Belle Dame sans Merci\u201d, Keats presents a classic: A knight is seduced by a fairy because she\u2019s beautiful and falls in love with her. Aw. Then the knight dies. Yikes. Through a dialogue … Continue reading The Beautiful Lady (with a high sex drive)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4770,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2023"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325","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\/4770"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}