Among the Great Odes of 1819 was this curious and fragmentary ballad, a work that Keats scholar, Robert Gittings, has rightly called ‘a magical poem’. And any analysis, he notes, must begin with the following warning: ‘that nothing one says either about its origins or its effects can fully explain it.’
La Belle Dame sans Merci (The Beautiful Lady without Pity), by John Keats, is one of the most well known ballads of the English language, and certainly of the English Romantic tradition. As must be clear to anyone who has read Keats to any extent, much of his poetic inspiration came from the natural world. According to Keats scholar, Robert Gittings, it was his walking tour along the Scottish isles of Iona and Staffa, in the middle of 1818 in particular, which ‘gave him more of the raw materials of poems than any other places’. Indeed, in these islands ‘lay for him the seeds of the full poetic growths of the following year’ of 1819, which included his Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, and Ode to a Nightingale (Gittings, 338). Among these great odes is the curious and fragmentary ballad, La Belle Dame sans Merci, a work that Gittings has rightly called ‘a magical poem’. And any analysis of this poem, he notes, must begin with the following warning: ‘that nothing one says either about its origins or its effects can fully explain it.’ (Gittings, 439, emphasis added). How apt! Its content is mysterious indeed.
What chiefly interests me about this poem is its blend of the historical and the fantastical, or in this case the medieval and the faery. Graham Handley notes that this story of unhappy love appears to be one of ‘romantic agony’, and even a ‘demoniac possession’ (Handley, 57). The ballad is comprised initially of a kind of question-and-answer structure. The speaker has chanced upon a knight-at-arms, presumably in a meadow or forest area, (‘at-arms’ is to denote that this knight was both mounted, and armed with a weapon, most likely a sword). This knight is ‘Alone and palely-loitering’—gorgeous consonance!—and this speaker wonders what could be the matter. He is not only loitering, appearing aimless and lost, but is also pale and apparently unwell. These details are apparently the chief concern of the speaker. And the surrounding environment seems to share in the knight’s woe in a kind of subjective landscape projection, with the sedge (a grassy plant) having ‘wither’d from the lake’, while ‘no birds sing’.
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