John Keats
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (1820)
Steve Clark
Though ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is one of Keats best-known and most-anthologised lyrics, it is actually a
comparatively late addition to the canon. It was written on 21April 1819, and first published in The Indicator in 10
May 1820 what is usually regarded as a much inferior version. It was not included in any published collection in his
lifetime, but reappears in Richard Monckton Milnes, Life Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats in 1848, to later
become hugely influential on the Pre-Raphaelite schools of both poetry and painting.
One can place the self-conscious medievalism of the poem in the context of the ballad revival inspired by Percy's
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry; see it as a late version of Spenser's primal scenes with demonic enchantresses; and
also relate it to the well-known source text in Addison's Spectator 413 of the ‘knight on the heath’ awakening to a
bleak and lifeless world.
I would prefer to look at the poem prospectively rather than retrospectively, and emphasise its military-imperial
dimension. The Victorian reception of Keats almost uniformly transformed him into an unworldly aesthete, whose
poetry offered escape from the political and social world; in Yeats's famous image in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, ‘I see a
schoolboy when I think of him, / With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window’. This captures something of the
succulent quality of Keats's ‘deliberate happiness’, but only at the cost of infantilising him as socially ostracised and
perennially immature.
Against this, one can stress such biographical facts as his pugnacity as a child; his praise for the energies shown in a
street quarrel; and his respect for Ben Jonson based on having killed an opponent in a duel. His uncle was a serving
naval officer, and he himself contemplated enlisting as a surgeon in a ‘dunderheaded Indiaman’. One of the less
quoted examples of the ‘chameleon imagination’ is ‘I am with Achilles shouting in the trenches’. In response to a
condescending reviewer, he comments ‘O he is quite the little poet this is abominable - you might as well say
Buonparte is quite the little soldier’. His final letters repeatedly compare the approach of death to a military campaign:
he must ‘endeavour to go through with it with the sensation of marching up against a Battery’ or ‘must either voyage
or journey to Italy as a soldier marches up a battery’. From these rather disparate references, one can make the
transition to the most famous soldier in Keats,
O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering ―
The alternative version of the Indicator version addresses a ‘wretched wight’ which elides the military context: a
knight-at-arms however, and a ‘pacing steed’ would be a highly effective weapon until the mechanised slaughter of
World War I.
O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
So haggard and so woe-begone
One might posit he is suffering the equivalent for the 20 years of Napoleonic wars of shell-shock, or in more recent
terminology, post-traumatic stress syndrome. The third stanza can be read as a series of blazons applying to the lady,
but also, perhaps more evocatively to the knight:
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
‘Anguish moist and fever-dew’ are appropriate to the long-term effects of military campaigning, which would ‘fast
withereth’ both physical and moral complexion of a young conscript into a ‘fading rose’.
I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a fairy's child,
This encounter seems a seduction ― ‘She looked at me as she did love, / And made sweet moan’ ― which condemns
the knight to eternally ‘palely loitering’ in the forlorn hope of another visitation. I would suggest an alternative
reading: the ‘faery's child’ symbolizes that which the knight believes he is fighting for. If he loves what has betrayed
him, it is not a consequence of lapse from manly duty but of internal contradictions within that ethic of duty itself. The
lady offers not only the ‘sweet moan’ of love-making but also the specific material rewards of ‘roots of relish sweet, /
And honey wild and manna dew’; the luxury commodities of the global trade underpinning imperial expansion:
And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed ― Ah! Woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill side
The ‘latest dream’ has the sense of ‘last’, final ultimate; but also can be read in the sense of ‘recent, topical’ (OED
2). ‘Woe’ loops back to the earlier phrase in stanza two, ‘woe begone’, with ‘betide’ become predictive and
imperative (‘the expression of a wish’ OED 1c). It is a vision of the future not the past that has transfixed the knight:
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, all death pale were they all;
They cried ― ‘La belle dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!’
If the phrase ‘pale warriors’ evokes the feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages, it may also be read as referring forward
to the warriors of the coming imperial century of Pax Britannica: Wellington, Gordon, Rhodes, Kitchener. The poem
anticipates a time when these apparent victors will themselves have passed away: ‘All death pale they were’.
I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill side.
‘Gloam’ is a Keatsian coinage for post-imperial twilight, redundancy, reckoning, implying gloom but also loam,
corpses rotting in the soil of the battlefield. The ‘horrid warning’ is that of a time after empire (reminiscent of Wilfred
Owen's famous pronouncement that in wartime ‘all a poet can do now is warn’).
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
From the very beginning of the poem, there is a partial merger between narrator and figure encountered; through
listening to the story, the narrator wakes into the dream of the knight. In reading his text, the reader becomes similarly
beguiled, and in the final stanza all three are equally transfigured and entrapped in awaiting what Endymion terms the
‘death-day of empires’.
Recent criticism has strongly and in my view rightly resisted the assumption of other-worldliness for Keats, insisting
that his work should not be seen as refuge from history but a complex negotiation with its shaping pressures. One only
has to read the final letters to realise the impertinence of the charge of evasion of the realities of human suffering;
indeed the ethic of heroism that is so acutely analysed in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ may perhaps be seen in its
purest and most intense form in the implicit biographical narrative offered in his correspondence. One might indeed
speculate that, with Keats as with Chatterton, it was a good career move to die young. In little more than five years he
produced a collected poems several hundred pages long. If he has lived longer the sheer bulk of his work would have
undoubtedly rivalled those of the great and garrulous unreads of Victorian poetry such as Tennyson and Browning.
With Keats less is more.
© 2007 The University of the Air, Japan