La Belle Dame sans Merci
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Introduction------------------------------------Sam
Paraphrase-----------------------------------Cecile
Vocabulary-----------------------------------Cecile
Diction-----------------------------------------Jamie
Speaker/Listener----------------------------Kate
Structure--------------------------------------Sam
Special patterns----------------------Sam&Jamie
Metaphor,Contrast, Imagery-----Christine
Romantic imitation of antique forms& Ballad----Bewing
Conclusion-----------------------------------Cecile
Introduction
• The Title:
• The title was taken from an old French court poem
by Alain Chartier. Keats wrote the poem on April
21,1819. It appears in the course of a letter to his
brother George. At the time, Keats was upset over
a trap that had been played on his brother. He was
undecided about whether to enter into a
relationship with Fanny Brawne then. All these
experiences probably went into the making of this
powerful ballad.
• http://www.kobec.ac.jp/~watanabe/seminar/1998/yamamura.htm
• The Story:
• The questioner meets a knight. The man has been
hanging around there for long, and is obviously pale.
The knight says he had met a beautiful, wild-looking
lady in a meadow. He pleased her with flowers. She
looked as if she loved him. He gave her his horse to
ride, and he walked beside her. He cared about
nothing but her, because she leaned over in his face
and sang a mysterious song. She spoke a language
he could not understand, but he was confident she
said she loved him. He kissed her to comfort her,
and then fell asleep. He dreamed of a host of kings,
princes, and warriors, all pale as death. They cried
out a terrible warning—she is the beautiful lady
without mercy. And now he was her slave. After he
woke up, the lady was gone, and the knight was left
on the cold hill side. Finally, he kept on wandering
around palely.
Paraphrase
• O knight-at-arm, what can cause pain to you, hanging
around alone and palely?
• The reed has withered from the lake, and there is no
bird singing.
• O ! knight-at arm, what can cause the pain to you, so
pale and so in your countenance? The squirrel ‘s
barn is full, and the harvest has finished.
• I see your brow just like lily, with painful moist and
fever dew, and on your cheeks, like a rose is fading
fast.
• You said “
• I met a beautiful lady in the meadow, as a fairy’s
child, she has long hair, light footsteps, and her eyes
are wild.
• I made a garland for her head, bracelets, and fragrant belt of
flower. She looks at me, her sweet moan made me feel that she
likes me.
• She sat on my horse, roaming around. She’s singing the fairy’s
song and bending on me, I couldn’t see anything all day long.
• She found some relish roots, wild honey, and sweet dew, then
she gave to me and said some strange words like this “ I love
you truly.”
• She took me to the elf’s cave, she began to wept and sighed
painfully. I closed her wild eyes and console her with my kisses.
• She calmed me and let me fell asleep. While sleeping, I had a
terrible dream, on the cold hill side.
• In the dream, I saw a kings and a princes, they told me with their
deadly pale face “oh, you are in the controlled of La Belle Dame
sans Merci”
• And I saw their starved lips telling me the horrid warning. Then I
woke, and you found me here, on the cold hill’s side.
• And this is the reason I stay in here, roaming here longing and
palely. Though the reed has withered from the lake, and there’s
no birds’ singing.
Vocabulary
•
1.
Knight’s description
Knight—a man given a rank of honor by a British king
or queen because of his special achievements, and who
has the right to be called “Sir”, or (in the past) a man of
high social position trained to fight as a soldier on a
horse.
EG. He hopes to be made a knight for his work at the Bank of
England. knights in black armor.
2. Arms—weapons and equipment used to kill and injure
people.
3. Fever—a state of great excitement.
EG. The whole country seems to be in the grip of football
fever.
4. Moist—slightly wet, especially in a good way.
EG. The path was moist with dew.
5. Woe—extreme sadness.
EG. Her face was lined and full of woe.
6. Begone—go away;exclamation OLD USE OR LITERARY
EG. ‘Begone!’ he shouted. “And never let me see you again.”
7. Woe betide—said when there will be trouble for
someone, or they will be punished, if they do a particular
thing.
EG. This is the second tome he’s been sent home from school
this week, so woe betide him if it happens again.
8. Haggard—looking ill or tired, often with dark skin under
the eyes.
EG. He’d been drinking the night before and was looking a
bit haggard.
9. Wither—to cause, to become weak and dry and decay.
EG. Grass had withered in the fields.
10. Gloam—gloom, twilight
11. Ail—to cause difficulty and problems for.
EG. The government seems to have no understanding of what
ails the country.
12. Loiter—to move slowly around or stand especially in a
public place without an obvious reason.
EG. A gang of youths were loitering outside the cinema.
13. Sojourn—a short period when a person stays in a
particular place.
EG. My sojourn in the youth hostel was thankfully short.
14. Thrall—slave.
EG. He’s the thrall of worldly wealth.
•
1.
Fairy’s description
Faery—an imaginary creature with magical powers,
usually represented as a very small person with wings.
EG. She used to think there were fairies at the bottom of her
garden.
2. Moan—to make a long low sound of pain, suffering or
another strong emotion.
EG. He moaned with pain before losing consciousness.
3. Sore—painful and uncomfortable because of injury.
EG. All the dust has made my eyes sore.
4. Relish—the enjoyment you get from doing something.
EG. I have no relish for hunting and killing animals.
5. Manna—(in the Bible) a food which dropped from
heaven and prevented Moses and his people from dying
of hunger in the desert.
• Other words
1. warrior—a soldier, usually one who has both experience
and skill in fighting, especially in the past.
2. Steed– a large strong horse used for riding. [LITERARY]
3. Squirrel—a small animal with a long furry tail.
EG. Squirrels live mainly in trees.
4. Granary—a large building for storing wheat or other
similar crops.
5. Elf—a small person with pointed ears who has magic
powers in children’s stories.
6. Grot—grotto, cave.
EG. Water trickles through an underground grot.
Diction
1.
1.
. & birds, squirrel’s granary & the harvest(1&2 stanzas)----1.sedge
the natural setting could attribute our imagination of the knight
much more.
2.lily & rose (3 stanza)------“By this absorption of the knight into the structural pattern of the
natural imagery, the movement from a suggested but unstated
relationship of man and nature in stanza one to an implied
interrelationship in stanza two has now been completed.”
Fading rose present in knight’s countenance, they are
interchangeable, and that makes the symbol more vivid.
3. fragrant zone & a faery’s song & language strange(5.6.7stanzas)---“ What Keats has woven into the narrative, it appears, is another
version of the pleasure thermometer, a series of increasing
intensities that absorb the self into essence: nature, song, and
love.”
To emphasize the knight’s surprising meet, the author uses the magical
words to describe what happened.
4. wild (4.7.8 stanzas)
The word in the poem is used four times to describe the beautiful lady
and impress us the magical power of her.
5. elfin grot (8stanza)--The vision is real thing originally, but it is totally changed into an
ethereal thing here.
6. cold hill side(9 stanza)----The word "cold"(36) implies the sinister reality which the knight
faces. Because hills are often where the fairies and elves live, it will give
us a better room of imagination.
7. warrior & kings and princes (10 stanza) ---Warriors mean the world’s ills and kings and princes mean men of
power. “ The knight’s inherent weakness in being unable to exclude from
his visions the self-contained and world-bound mortality dissipates the
ideal into which he has entered momentarily, just as the need for the
world of men and desire to materialize the ideal destroy the fairyland.”
“By withdrawing from the elfin grot, the knight has become a Man of
Power; the withdrawal is the act of reassuming his own self-containing
identity,
8. sojourn ( 12 stanza)
The knight uses the word "sojourn," which implies he will
be there or some time.
• http://www.kobe-c.ac.jp/~watanabe/seminar/1998/top
• M. H. Abrams, ed. English Romantic Poets,Oxford
University Press, 1970.
Speaker and listener
1st part: from stanza 1 to stanza 3.
Speaker:In the first three stanzas, the speaker is the
questioner(narrator) with a concerning tone. He is a stranger,
we don’t know his age, sex…
Function: The questioner wondered what had caused the
knight so palely and wandering no purposely, and described
the knight’s physical condition(“Alone and palely loitering”)
and his emotional state (haggard, and woe-begone). And he
also points out the season-winter, from “The sedge has
withered from the lake, And no birds sing…The squirrel’s
granary is full, And the harvest’s done…)it gave us the an
impression of loneliness. The function of this part is to rouse
readers’ curiosity that why and how this event had happened
and then bring out the story.
Listener: knight
• 2nd part: from stanza 4 to stanza 12.
Speaker: The knight
Function: To tell the whole event between he and the lady. From
his tone, we can see he is not frightened by his terrible future.
Stanzas 4-8, he speaks with a joyful tone and shows the details,
which reveals his strong affection to the lady. But from stanza 911, here he meets the king, princes and warriors in his nightmare,
and the atmosphere was mysterious and dark. “ And I awoke and
found me here, On the cold hill’s side”. The quote itself actually
shows how Keats brings out a cold feel to the poem at this point,
which is ironic when we like to associate cold temperatures with
loss. He was lost and becomes confused and worried; he knows
he will be like them, for his love for the lady. But eventually, from
the last stanza, he accepts his destiny, and he does not regret
falling in love with the lady.
Listener: The narrator
Structure
• The poem can be divided into two parts.
• The first part: from stanza one to three.
 The questions of the stranger to the knight.
 The work of the first three stanzas is to make the symbols
a living part of that reality; in other words, there suggests a
connection between men and nature.
• The second part: from stanza four to twelve.
 The knight’s reply to the stranger.
 From stanza 4-12, there introduce nine precisely balanced
stanzas containing the main narrative. The progress of the
knight in the first four stanzas (4-7) comes to the central
one (8) when he is taking into the elfin grot, and in the last
four stanzas (9-12), he withdraws from the grot.
•
M. H. Abrams, ed. English Romantic Poets, Oxford University Press, 1970.
Special Patterns
•
•
The first two stanzas have identical patterns: the
first half of each addresses a question to the knight-atarms about his spiritual condition; and the second half
comments on the natural setting. Also, the first pair
(sedge and birds) are the natural images themselves;
the second pair (the squirrel’s granary and the harvest)
are the materials of nature.
Two pairs of adjectives in the halves describe the
knight, the first pair exactly paralleling the natural
image: alone, no birds sing; palely loitering, the sedge
has withered. All these balanced details, equally
distributed to nature and the knight, then combine in
the third stanza.
• The completion of the circular movement was marked by
the fact that the last stanza echoes the first stanza and
answers the stranger’s questions in the introductory three
stanzas and brings the poem round full circle, so that the
final stanza may be an approximate repetition of the first.
• The meaningfully balanced patterns: within this main
narrative (4-12) the action is perfectly pivoted on the
central stanza (8), the narrative, the symbols, and the
grammatical controls symmetrically rising to and falling
away from this central point.the forst three stanzas(1-3)
and the last three stanzas (10-12) are prologue and
epilogue, the central six stanzas (4-9) being perfectly
balanced by the distribution of the opening patterns.
M. H. Abrams, ed. English Romantic Poets, Oxford
University Press, 1970
Metaphor
• Stanza 3:
lily, anguish moist, fever dew, and a
fading rose.
 Lily means paleness and fading rose
implies the knight’s pang.
 Moist and dew both show the anguish
which the knight suffers.
 all the nouns can make us imagine the
knight’s haggard look.
Contrast
• Stanza 1-2:
The sedge has withered from the lake/ And
no birds sing
The squirrel’s granary is full/ And the
harvest’s done.
→The knight is in an infertile spot, where the
reed has become lifeless; however, the squirrel’s
winter storage is full and the harvest has been
completed. Here contrasts two views of life.
Imagery
• Stanza 1-2:
O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,~And the harvest’s
done.
→ The knight’s haggard look is shown by the questioner’s
asking and description.
• Stanza 4, 8:
And her eyes were wild. And there I shut her wild wild
eyes
→Wildness of eyes is not usually used to describe a lady.
It seems that the lady has some mysterious power to charm
men, especially by her wild eyes.
→when we shed tears, we show sorrowful or joyful looks,
but we do not usually have wildness in our eyes. This kind
of expression in her eyes is no like a human being, so the
lady is thought to be an non-mortal.
• Stanza 7:
honey wild, manna dew.
And sure in language strange she said→ This kind of food is not easily got by human,
so the lady is probably a mysterious creature– a
fairy.
• Stanza 11:
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
→ The kings’ and princes’ starved appearances
seem to predict how dreadful and miserable the
knight’s future will be.
Romanticism
• The Romantic period in English literature is
considered from the mid 1780s to the mid-1820.
There are two generations in the Romantic
movement. The first generation included William
Blake and William Wordsworth. And the most
important and influential poets of the second
generation are Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly
and John Keats. Besides, the Romantic movement
arose mainly because of the French Revolution.
The effect of the revolution was extraordinary. At
that time, the whole social world is under a
unsteady condition. So, there are very important
common interests and concerns cared by the poets.
The writing style of the poets are unique.
Keats associated poems with dreaming. Moreover,
some traits of Romanticism we can find in Keats’
poem are that there are fascination of nature,
wandering, and the sickness as opposed to health.
Also, emotionalism is the trait of the poem, and it
means there is feeling expressed, not reason.
What’s more, the poem was written in antique
forms. He used his imagination, tried to elicit the
atmosphere of ancient times. And there came a
medieval type poem.
*陳鉊鵬, 濟慈和芳妮的心聲
*Kelvin Everest, English Romantic Poetry
Ballad
• Ballad is a poem (song) that tells a simple
story and every detail and every connotation
must be carefully considered. Besides, In
this poem, why they acted as described is
never discussed because it is also a
characteristic of Ballads.
• Ballads are written in four line stanzas, and
often the second and fourth lines rhyme.
* James Taaffe, Reading English Poetry
* Roland Gant, A Book of Ballads
Conclusion
The poem generates a kind of mysterious
atmosphere, what happened we can not figure out
clearly. It seems a love affair going to happen, but
suddenly, it falls into the pain and deathly pale.
The knight in his lifeless accountancies, roaming
around and purposeless, as a “knight-at-arms”, he
should like a “real man”, be strong or take
responsibility of protection or to fight enemy. The
image is he lost. He ever tasted the joy of falling
love, then the dream, the prediction reveal the
truth, the fairy’s cruel magic, and he was in her
control. Who is the “la belle dame”? “what did she
ever do to knight? Or others?” that is ambiguous.
The poem makes us feel the deeper power under
the love affair, something destructive, or frighten.
Work Cited
• http://www.nouveaunet.com/prbpassion/supemat1.
cfm
• http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/
cs6/belle.html
• http://www.pathguy.com/Ibdsm.htm
• http://www.kobec.ac.jp/~watanabe/seminar/1998/yamamura.htm
• http://members.truepath.com/onegirlarmy/Ibdsm.h
tml
• http://www.denison.edu/~hafiz_d/english214paper
2.htm