La Belle Dame sans Merci

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1819

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Keats uses popular figures and ideas from faery tales and medieval folklore in “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” The poem is constructed as a ballad, which is an old, traditional form of narrative folk poetry. The poet presents the narrative in a story-within-a-story structure or the frame tale, common in medieval literature. For example, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval classic Canterbury Tales (1400), the stories of the various characters of the narrative are told through the speaker. Other elements from medieval romance seen in “La Belle Dame sans Merci” are the questing knight, his transformative journey, and the faery queen. The faery queen is a staple of the folklore and ballads of the British Isles. An enchanting figure, the queen of fairies can be both benevolent and destructive, depending on the context. Queen of the Faeries was a popular figure in orally narrated British and Irish folk stories and songs. Edmund Spencer used the queen-of-faeries figure as an allegory for Queen Elizabeth I in his famous poem The Faerie Queen (1590). Traditional ballads like Tam Lin too feature a faery queen who wants to trap a mortal man in her company.

The title “La Belle Dame sans Merci” has a literary antecedent as well. Keats took it from a 15-century French poem by Alain Chartier and used it in a line in his long poem “The Eve of St Agnes” (1819). While Keats used the ballad form and medieval elements in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” he adapted these to his unique vision, influenced by the time’s Romanticism. Romanticism was an influential philosophical and literary movement that arose at the end of the 18th century. Romantic poets and artists focused on the primacy of nature, the imagination, and individual freedom. Keats is among the youngest generation of Romantics, along with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. This does not mean the poets were writing as a group; indeed, in his time Keats was somewhat isolated from highbrow literary society.

He was of course heavily influenced by the ideas of the first generation of Romantics, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The influence can be seen in his emotional descriptions of nature, attention to feelings, and his depictions of the otherworldly. Yet, Keats’s Romanticism is also unique, as is evident in “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” In the poem, the depictions of nature, beauty, and love are all dualistic, containing a foreboding about death. More than any other Romantic poet, Keats explored the dilemma between art and mortality, reality and imagination, practical demands and creative vocation. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” doesn’t offer the reader any easy resolution to these impossible questions. Keats’s particular genius was in pursuing these questions, knowing they had no solution. In this sense, he was already pushing the boundaries of a more optimistic Romanticism. In its philosophy, if not language and imagery, some critics have considered Keats’s later poetry as one of the early precursors of modern literature.

Biographical Context

Because of its strange, wonderful setting and mysterious characters, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” lends itself to many different readings. The poem is allegorical, in that it contains many hidden meanings. One of these allegorical readings has a clear relationship with the poet’s life. The poem was written shortly after Tom, Keats’s younger brother, died of tuberculosis. Tom was only 19 when he died from the then fatal disease tuberculosis. Within the Keats family, the running joke was that tuberculosis was the family disease. Their mother Frances had also died of consumption (tuberculosis) when Keats was just 14 years old. In 1819, Keats knew he had himself contracted the dreaded illness. Tuberculosis is a treatable disease in contemporary times, but in the 19th century, the bacterial illness was often a death sentence. The antibiotics that are the staple of tuberculosis were yet to be discovered (penicillin, the first antibiotic, would be discovered only in 1928). Known as consumption, because it seemed to consume the sufferer, tuberculosis involved debilitating fevers, weight loss, and a sickly, pale pallor.

At the time Keats wrote “La Belle,” memories of caring for Tom were raw in his mind, as was the fear he would meet the same fate. These fears are explored in the poem, with the knight repeatedly described as “pale,” and his visage moist with the dew of fever. The lady is the personification of death by tuberculosis, and all the pale warriors in her thrall, other victims of the disease. These victims have “starved lips in the gloam” (Line 41), a reference again to the emaciated state the disease leaves its sufferers. They have no release from the lady’s thrall, much like Tom and others who died of consumption.

At the poem’s heart is a doomed, dangerous romance, which too may be inspired by biography. In 1819, Keats’s courtship of the writer Fanny Brawne was flowering. Yet, the poet was aware that he was possibly running on borrowed time, which would cut short his period of idyllic joy. Thus, love was tinged with heartbreak and loss, the emotions that are united in the knight’s adoration of the lady and her abandonment of him. Though Keats would become engaged with Brawne, he died in 1821, before the young couple could marry.