"La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats
"La Belle Dame sans Merci," seems to depict a knight-at-arms who has been seduced and abandoned by an unpredictable fairy. Told in the form of a dialogue, the poem tells the experience of loving wholly and the sting of abandonment, along with the solitude of faithfulness. At the beginning and end of the poem, the knight remains on "a cold hill's side," a world devoid of happiness or beauty, waiting for his love to return. However self-destructive intense love may be, the lover has no voice in the matter. Also, the more one entertains feelings of beauty and love, the more alone and painful the world can become.The poem has two parts of dialogue, each blends into the next so smoothly it may be hard to tell where one stops and the other begins ("I said," "he said," etc.). Because of this, the identity of the first speaker, whose speaks in the first twelve lines, remains unknown. He says nothing about himself but simply asks the night "O what can ail thee". Though he (or, perhaps the she he mentions) tells us who the second speaker is, the knight-at-arms. The first unknown speaker may not let us know who he is but he does give plenty of information about the situation of the poem. From what he says, we know it is in the fall o
The loud voices of the kings and princes shouting "La belle dame sans merci", is a prominent sound. In his own mind, he starts to lose control and the woman takes control. We also know what emotional state of mind the knight has. The woman takes the knight out of his state of loneliness and shows him love. This could have been more like a shriek since their warning is said to be: "with horrid warning gaped wide". In the strangers vision of the knight one could feel the pain and anguish he must have felt. There is the sound of the stranger's voice as he asks the knight: O what can ail thee, knights at arms". As the knight places her on his "pacing stead", there is the knowledge of the sound of the horse's hoofs as he prances impatiently. When he says: "I set her on my pacing steed," he speaks with a strong and powerful voice. The knight is in complete control of the situation; he is no longer the weak helpless person he really is, but is able to act in order to assert himself. Does the use of "betide" on page 507 mean that it was fate that he would be sitting alone "on a cold hill side"? Where it says, "death-pale were they all" mean his dreams were visions of dead worriers or were they his own hopes of happiness that is dead?. Keats calls the woman's eyes "wild" more than once in this tale of sorrow. The "lily on thy brow" could mean the knight has been in anguish for a long time. However, when he meets the woman, he has a sense of renewed strength. When the couple arrived at her "elfin grot", there was the weeping and sighing done by the beautiful woman.
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