Keats and the Painters
One prominent example of a poem that has moved numerous artists to paint in
response is John Keats’ “La belle dame sans merci.” Keats wrote the ballad in 1819
and published it in 1820. It describes a knight fatally enthralled by an elfin woman.
Keats spoke lightly of this poem, but it has elicited much attention and commentary.
Most critics follow Robert Graves (The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of
Poetic Myth, 1948) in asserting that the female figure in the poem represents “Love,
Death by consumption [...], and Poetry all at once.” She is the “Triple Goddess” who
mothers, marries and buries poets. Graves concludes that the poem is a celebration of
the poet's destruction by his muse. The ballad was particularly admired by PreRaphaelite poets and painters. It has been asserted that it was the seminal text from
which sprang all the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite group.
Below is the poem, followed by a commentary by Harold Bloom. Thereafter,
you will find Pre-Raphaelite paintings on the poem and a bibliography on the painters.
John Keats
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
'O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
'O what can hail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.
'I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.'
'I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
'I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
'I set her on my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery's song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild and mana dew,
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And sure in language strange she said,
“I love thee true!”
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore;
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.
'And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill's side.
'I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cried—“La belle Dame sans Merci”
Hath thee in thrall!”
'I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill's side.
'And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge withered from lake,
And no birds sing.’
From: The New Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1972; 1995), pp. 613-14.
From Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, rev. ed. (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 384-87.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
THE poet who writes incessantly of the Gardens of Adonis owes his vision a
rendering also of a Bower of Bliss. The song of Beulah land requires its contrary in a
song of Ulro. Heaven's lower counter-part is Earth, the hell we are never out of, but
the lower paradise finds its diabolic double in the false garden of desire simulated,
provoked, but never gratified—the bower of Acrasia, the world of Blake's Vala.
Against his perpetual epipsyche visions of Beulah, "Shelley set at last the deceiving
'Shape all light' of the cold hell of" The Triumph of Life. Keats's vision of Ulro is
more ambiguous and more modest: the terse and haunting ballad of La Belle Dame
Sans Merci.
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For Robert Graves, himself a great poet of the Ore cycle, a Worshiper of Vala
under her name of the White Goddess, Keats's poem is a celebration of the poet's
destruction by his muse. But Keats had a muse of his own making, Moneta, and she
did not destroy her poets, nor is she involved in this ballad. For Graves, La Belle
Dame is consumption, poetry, Fanny Brawne, love, death, and finally the Triple
Goddess herself, the blue-white hag who mothers, marries, and buries poets. This is
an undeniable and terrible vision, akin to Blake's Shadowy Female, though it takes
toward her an attitude opposed to Blake's.
The answer to the question that opens the ballad is the meaning of the poem:
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
What is his illness? He loiters by the lake, where all is withered and bird song is over.
Against the background of a completed and "full harvest, he is "haggard and so woe
begone." "The withering" flowers of his countenance reinforce the impression that he
is starved, though the landscape has yielded enough for all granaries. But the stigma
of his thralldom is his starvation, his putting aside "earthly food for the" "roots of
relish sweet / And honey wild and" "manna dew" that he can no longer obtain. His
vision on the cold hill's side had warned him of just such a fate:
I saw their starv'd lips in the gloom,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill's side.
He has had no other vision except this warning that he has become addicted to what
he can never again taste. The question next becomes, what has he eaten, and who gave
him to eat that he might become accursed?
Our clues are wonderfully, deliberately infinite, and defeat our antipoetic
reductiveness. But let us try a few. To a scholarly critic of Romanticism, it would
seem unnecessary to seek for literary sources for Keats’s ballad too widely afield.
Spenser's Acrasia and Phaedria we can feel here directly; Malory, Alan Chartier, the
Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer seem more remote. But Wordsworth and Coleridge are
very close; this poem is written in their diction and echoes their phrasing. It would
have found a place in the Lyrical Ballads, though it might have been moralized a bit
in the process.
I met a Lady in the Meads,
Full beautiful—a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
The movement of that is Wordsworth's, and the last line is of course palpably his. The
third and fourth lines have their quite obvious parallel in Coleridge's “the Night-mare
LIFE-IN-DEATH”:
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold.
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Kubla Khan ends with the vision of a youthful Promethean poet, an Orc with
flashing eyes and floating hair, who is best kept inside a magic circle away from us,
and whom holy dread forbids us to gaze upon,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
“Honey wild, and manna dew” comes close enough. The outcast, driven like the
Baptist into the Wilderness, lives on wild honey. The faithful, in the Wilderness, live
upon the miracle of manna. Keats, at the least, is both glossing Coleridge and
naturalizing the Bible for us. Like Nebuchadnezzar in the last plate of Blake's
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the knight at arms has been reduced to feeding like a
beast upon the grass, though earlier “she found me roots of relish sweet.” A close
analogue is in the most famous of Dante's “stony rimes,” “Al poco giorno e al gran
cerchio d'ombra” (“To the dim light and the large circle of shade”), where the poet is
at last reduced to crying:
che mi torrei dormire in petra
tutto il mio tempo e gir pascendo I'erba,
sol per veder do'suoi panni fann' ombra.
Who would sleep away in stone my life
Or feed like beasts upon the grass
Only to see her garments cast a shade.
In these shattering visions of the sudden descent of a too literal return to nature we
have one part of Keats's meaning; in the deification of the youthful poet at the close of
Kubla Khan we have another. The knight at arms has devoured, apparently under the
instructions of the Belle Dame, “a faery's child,” a natural food that has made him
both less than and more than human. Either way, he has little use for human food
again. He is in thrall forever. To whom?
We cannot tell, for we have only the knight's evidence, and he may be selfdeceived. He does not know her language, nor do we. Whatever her purpose, the
knight falls asleep, with the fated food within him, to dream of the truth and awaken
to find himself in a withered natural world, forever cut off from it. The clearest of all
Romantic analogues is Blake's The Crystal Cabinet, which follows the same pattern:
the protagonist coming out of his momentary earthly paradise (Beulah) to find
himself, not in the ordinary world of Generation from which he entered it, but in a
solitary hell (Ulro) infinitely worse than his state of being at the poem's onset.
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Paintings based on John Keats' La belle dame sans merci
John William Waterhouse. La belle dame sans merci. 1893. Oil on canvas.
Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt.
This painting illustrates the following lines:
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes So kiss'd to sleep.
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Frank Cadogan Cowper. La belle dame sans merci. 1926. Private collection.
Sir Frank Dicksee. La belle dame sans merci. Ca. 1902. Size unknown. Oil on canvas.
City of Bristol Art Gallery.
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