La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Revision
Title
• • "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" means "the
beautiful woman without mercy."
• It is the title of an old French poem by Alain
Chartier - the secretary and court poet of Charles
VI. and Charles VII. of France, written in 1424.
• This title had caught Keats's fancy.
• "Merci" in today's French is "thank you".
• Keats probably knew a current translation
which was supposed to be by Chaucer.
• In Keats's poem "Eve of Saint Agnes", the lover
sings this old song as he is awakening his
beloved.
Stanza One
• • The poem begins with a question which
it will proceed to answer.
• The question is asked by the poet and
addressed to a knight-at-arms.
• The question is: “What can ail thee?”
• The knight is both alone and palely
loitering.
• The landscape is also pale; “The sedge
has withered from the lake.”
• The usual beauties of nature – bird song
– are absent.
Stanza Two
• The first line of the poem is repeated to become
the first line, also, of the second stanza.
• The knight’s unhappy predicament is
emphasised by calling him both haggard and
woe-begone.
• The winter aspect of the landscape in shown
in the squirrel’s granary and the harvest being
complete.
• The granary and harvest provide images of
abundance against which the knight’s
desolation is measured.
Stanza Three
• • This stanza concentrates on the knight's physical
appearance, which is associated with dying and with
flower imagery.
• The lily is a traditional symbol of death.
• While the rose is traditionally an image of beauty, the
rose in this poem is fading and withering, images
appropriate to the knight’s predicament.
• The moisture and the “dew” or perspiration on his
forehead suggests the knight’s misery.
• His anguish, the causes of which the poem will
explain, is also introduced.
Stanza Four
• • The narrator changes. The knight takes up the
story.
• He will provide an explanation of how he
became the way the first narrator, the poet,
found him.
• He introduces the “belle dame” of the title and
emphasises her beauty.
• Calling her a “faery’s child” introduces the
supernatural element into the poem.
• Calling her eyes “wild” introduces an element
of danger into the poem.
Stanza Five
• • This stanza describes his pursuit and her
response.
• The emotions of the knight are positive,
happy and loving, at this point in the poem.
• His gifts to her are many.
• Introducing the word “as” in the third line
hints at her deception.
• Her “sweet moan” is her response to his
pursuit.
Stanza Six
• • The loitering of the first stanza is offset here by
the pacing steed and the movements of love.
• The romantic image of her riding and singing
through the landscape emphasises the knight’s
happiness at this central point in the poem.
• The fact that he saw “nothing else” all day long
shows how much in thrall he is to her impression.
• “Sidelong” means she is sitting sideways on the
horse, a typical traditional pose for a woman on
horseback.
Stanza Seven
• • If her beauty seduces the knight, he is
also seduced by the food and drink she
offers him.
• This food and drink is the product of the
natural world – roots, honey and manna.
• The strangeness of “la belle dame” is
evident in her strange language.
• The simplicity and brevity of her statement
– “I love thee true” – adds to its effect.
Stanza Eight
• • The setting of the poem moves from the outdoors into
her “elfin grot,” the grotto or cave where she lives.
• Her weeping and sighing add an ominous note of
sadness and darkness to the poem.
• They are also intended to have an effect on the knight.
And they do.
• Repeating the word “wild” from stanza four
reintroduces the element of danger.
• The romantic nature of the knight is emphasised by his
“kisses four.”
• Why four? See Keats’s explanation in the Comments
section below.
Stanza Nine
• • The repetition, over two stanzas, of the
phrase “And there” keeps the momentum of
the poem going at a regular pace.
• The word “lulled” shows how the knight is
seduced by the “faery’s child.”
• The mood of the poem changes with the
phrase “Ah! woe betide!”
• Repeating the word “dream” and
complimenting it with “the cold hill side”
introduces an ethereal unreal mood.
Stanza Ten
• • The contents of his dream or nightmare are
revealed in this and the next stanza.
• The repetition of the word “pale”
reintroduces the death motif first developed in
stanza three.
• Bring kings and princes into the knight’s
dream shows the widespread power for
destruction and desolation of “la belle dame.”
• We now know why she is “sans merci.”
• We also know how she has so many in her
“thrall.”
Stanza Eleven
• • The nightmare ends with a gruesome
“horrid” image of the mouths of the dead or
ghostly figures.
• The word “starved” suggests they are
starved of more than food. A woman who
initially seemed to promise so much starves
them of love.
• The dream ends when the knight awakes
from the heat of love to the cold hill’s side.
He is no longer in the grotto or domain of “la
belle dame.”
Stanza Twelve
• • The concluding stanza offers an explanation for the
opening stanza by repeating words and phrases.
• There is a variation from the “sedge has withered”
of stanza one to “the sedge is withered” in the final
stanza. This suggests the nightmare will continue
forever for the knight.
• The line “And no birds sing” has a much stronger
resonance in the last stanza than in the first. Now we
know why.
• The absence of birdsong becomes a powerful
image for the desolation of the knight’s predicament.
Point to Ponder:
• • There are four voices in the poem: that of the
poet; that of the knight; that of the lady; and the
unified voice of the pale kings and princes.
• The word “pale” is used repeatedly in the poem.
• Repeating the central question of the poem in
both the first and the second stanza is known as
incremental repetition and is a characteristic of the
ballad form.
• As in many ballads, the poem tells a story that is
both mysterious and dramatic.
• As in many ballads, there is widespread use of
dialogue.
•
• As in many ballads, there is much repetition, of
words, lines and even half-stanzas.
• The short four-line stanza, with its ABCB rhyme
scheme, is characteristic of the ballad form.
• Lines 3 and 4 of the first stanza provide a direct
contrast with lines 3 and 4 of the second stanza.
• Lines 1, 2, and 3 of each stanza generally have four
feet and eight or nine syllables. However, the last line
of each stanza is a shorter line; it has only two or
three feet and only four or five syllables.
• The poem’s narrative begins with the voice of the poet
in the first three stanzas. The knight's narrative
consists of three sections: stanzas four to seven
describe the knight's meeting and involvement with
the lady; stanza eight presents the climax (he goes
with her to the "elfin grot"); the last four stanzas
describe his sleep and expulsion from the grotto.
• Eight and a half lines of this poem are devoted to his dream
(the poem itself is only 48 lines long) and the last six lines are
about the consequences of the dream.
• The men he dreams about are all men of power and
achievement (kings, princes, and warriors).
• Their paleness associates them both with the loitering pale
knight and with death; in fact, we are told that they are "deathpale."
• Whereas the impact of the lady on the knight is clear, her
character remains shadowy.
• We see her only through the knight's eyes, and he never got
to know her.
• The lady belongs to a tradition of "femmes fatales." She
seduces the knight (and others) with her beauty, with her
accomplishments, with her avowal of love, and with her
sensuality ("roots of relish sweet, / And honey wild, and
manna dew"). The vision of the pale men suggests she is
deliberately destructive. This destructiveness of love is a
common theme in the folk ballad.
• Because the knight is associated with images of
death— lilies, faded, withering, - he may well be dead
or ghostly. He is clearly doomed to remain on the
“cold hill’s side”, but the cause of his fate is a mystery
that adds to the poem’s aura.
• Words from the first stanza are repeated in the last
stanza. The poem, consequently, has a circular
movement, reinforcing the connection of the opening
and the ending.
• The poet Robert Graves considers the poem to be
about the poet’s destruction by his muse.
• Others have seen the poem as a comment on his
own unsuccessful love life, particularly his complex
relationship with Fanny Brawne.