A* Notes on 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'
Themes
Deception
Love
Death
Femme fatale
Context
Keats died from tuberculosis in 1821 and was very ill towards the end of his life -> haunting morbidity in the poem and repetitions of ‘pale'
Inversion of medieval courtly love ballads -> sinister corruption of courtly love, where the chivalric knight saves the lady
Title is a reference to mediaeval Romance by French poet Alain Chartier
In the 19th century, long hair was associated with sensuality and sexuality
The succubus as a pervading threat in the 18th century
Contrapuntal readings of lily -> symbol of hope and spring, but during Victorian era (although Keats predates this) lilies used for funerals as a symbol of death
Critical interpretations... to engage with, argue for, argue against
Keats 'struggled to reconcile his boyish conception of women as goddesses with the mature notion of their "realities’ (Jordan, L.)
'Nature withdraws from the scene abandoning the knight to his plight, unable to comfort him, it reflects only his desolation’ (Sandy, M.)
‘Keats criticises the narcissistic love of his male protagonists who tend to objectify and idealise women into mere idols of beauty and admiration for their own personal gain.’ (Schulkins, R.)
'Keats presents ‘supernatural female predators in La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Lamia’ (Joshi, S. T.)
Structure, language, form... + analysis
Iambic tetrameter except from last line of quatrains -> adds an abruptness + breaks fluidity
Concentrated caesuras at opening -> slows pace and creates a dragging sensation that mirrors the knight’s tedious wait and crawl towards death
Pathetic fallacy with autumnal setting -> summer is coming to an end, which reflects the knight’s near demise
Archaic language -> evokes a grandeur that fits with the antiquated chivalry of the knight
Poem begins in present tense with a witness narrator encountering knight -> adds an intensity because of the proximity of the knight’s death
Shift in tense and voice in 4th quatrain -> knight retrospectively recounts his experience with the lady + first person narrator adds an intimacy
Metapoetic, ‘No birds sing’ -> disrupts the melody + stark silence because doesn’t follow iambic tetrameter pattern
Depiction of knight -> contrasts against stereotypical expectations of bravery + strength. Instead we find a dreary, melancholic knight.
Floral motifs in 3rd quatrain -> creates an image of beauty and vitality that jarringly juxtaposes against the knight’s actual withered state
Introduction to the lady with supernatural allusions and listing of her physical attributes -> gives us a sense of her otherworldly capabilities + suggests narrator is consumed/ fascinated by her physical appearance
Implicit peripeteia/ turning point -> shift and inversion in power dynamic, from knight assuming active verbs of ‘I set her’ to the lady taking agency and control, ‘She took me’ + ‘she lulled me’
‘I made a garland for her head’ -> commodified like a doll for decorative purposes
‘And there I shut her wild wild eyes’ -> repetition of wild foreshadows her duplicitous nature + verb ‘shut’ demonstrates knight is trying to control her with a saviour complex, assuming the traditional role of the chivalric knight in medieval courtly love
‘She lulled me asleep’ with its soft assonance + gentle verb juxtaposes against the matter encountered in the dream with the ‘pale kings, princes, pale warriors, death pale’ -> plosives contrast against previous soft l consonance
In last quatrain beginning is repeated in cyclical structure -> sense of entrapment + that death is inevitable