John Keats La Belle Damn Sans Merci Analysis free essay sample

The poem begins with a forlorn and heartbroken narrator suffering from both physical and emotional pain, ‘So haggard and woebegone’ (l 6) who meets a beautiful maiden. La Belle Dame sans Merci appears to portray to readers the universal anomaly of what is known as unrequited love. In conjunction to love felt equally by two parties, unrequited love occurs when the love felt by one person is far greater than that felt by the other who is loved. The term unrequited literally means ‘not returned or rewarded’. This denoted the unfairness in the balance that one expects in a love relationship when the love that one feels for another is not reciprocal. In the poem, Keats shows this by describing the Knight’s disappointment would be less severe if he did not believe that from the beginning of their love affair that the maiden love of him was equal. In line 19 and 28 the maiden appears to have fallen in love with the knight just as he has fallen for her, â€Å"She look’d at me as she did love†¦she said, I love thee true. We will write a custom essay sample on John Keats La Belle Damn Sans Merci Analysis or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page (l 1928) This can be interpreted that despite her inherent nature, she seemed true feeling for the knight at the time. She even takes him back to her home, her â€Å"elfin grot† (cave) (l 29) and makes him comfortable. At this point, it’s only natural for the knight to believe that the love his felt for the maiden was exactly proportional to what she was feeling, and their ‘wild’ romance would continue when he awakes. However, as he awakes from his slumber, he found that the maiden was nowhere to be found. He was all alone and the his expectations of the romance was shattered. It then dawned that his suffering disappointment stemmed from the realization that she never really loved him the way he thought she did. At this point the knight is lonely and hopeless, but he does not show anger towards her. This shows his understanding that in love there is despair. Even though the love he feels for her is pure and true, she did not have the same feelings. The only clues in La Bella Dame sans Merci that depicts whether or not the love felt by the maiden towards the knight is true, comes from the dreams of the knight when he was sleeping. In his dream he comes to the realization that the maiden is pitiless and she has no mercy. His dreams can be interpreted as if the knight subconsciously knew that the love wasn’t real and that the maiden had already left him, and his mind has already started shifting the blame towards her. This mentally prepares the knight for the harsh reality that he has to face as he awakes. The dream might just be his rationalization; a way of making her out to be evil in order to cope with the pain of learning his love is unrequited, and in love there is despair. Despair is the state of having lost all hope, of finding oneself unable to believe life will ever be good again. The knight in La Belle Dame sans Merci falls into despair when he learns a relationship that seemed to be just starting has abruptly ended. His situation is clear from the very first line, when a stranger finds him out in the forest and can tell just by looking at him that something is gravely wrong. The stranger sees how pale he is and, noticing he has chosen to live by a dead, frozen lake, wants to know what ails him, by which he means what has made the knight so sick in spirit. In the middle stanzas of the poem, the knight describes the romance, which meant more to him than anything that happened before it or since. The brief romance ended with the lady lulling him to sleep. Readers can assume that, comfortable and happy beside her, he expected their love to continue and even to grow when he awoke. In the real (as opposed to magical) world, the knights despair would take time to develop, because he would not know for sure that the woman he loved was gone forever. In the magical world of this poem, though, he is visited in his sleep by pale figures of noble men who describe the woman as merciless. When he wakes to find her gone, he readily believes her absence confirms the damning things the figures said about her. The poem does not have the knight looking for his lady or trying to find out why she has left; he is as certain she had no intention of staying with him just as surely as he knows he loves her. There is no hope they will be reunited, and therefore there is no hope that he can ever be happy again. His life is doomed to despair. La Belle Dame sans Merci is a ballad, a medieval genre revived by the romantic poets. Keats uses the so-called ballad stanza, a quatrain in alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. The shortening of the fourth line in each stanza of Keats poem makes the stanza seem a self-contained unit, gives the ballad a deliberate and slow movement, and is pleasing to the ear. Keats uses a number of the stylistic characteristics of the ballad, such as simplicity of language, repetition, and absence of details; like some of the old ballads, it deals with the supernatural. Keats economical manner of telling a story in La Belle Dame sans Merci is the direct opposite of his lavish manner in The Eve of St. Agnes. Part of the fascination exerted by the poem comes from Keats use of understatement. Keats sets his simple story of love and death in a bleak wintry landscape that is appropriate to it: The sedge has witherd from the lake / And no birds sing! The repetition of these two lines, with minor variations, as the concluding lines of the poem emphasizes the fate of the unfortunate knight and neatly encloses the poem in a frame by bringing it back to its beginning. In keeping with the ballad tradition, Keats does not identify his questioner, or the knight, or the destructively beautiful lady. What Keats does not include in his poem contributes as much to it in arousing the readers imagination as what he puts into it. La belle dame sans merci, the beautiful lady without pity, is a femme fatale, a Circelike figure who attracts lovers only to destroy them by her supernatural powers. She destroys because it is her nature to destroy. Keats could have found patterns for his faerys child in folk mythology, classical literature, Renaissance poetry, or the medieval ballad. With a few skillful touches, he creates a woman who is at once beautiful, erotically attractive, fascinating, and deadly. Some readers see the poem as Keats personal rebellion against the pains of love. In his letters and in some of his poems, he reveals that he did experience the pains, as well as the pleasures, of love and that he resented the pains, particularly the loss of freedom that came with falling in love. However, the ballad is a very objective form, and it may be best to read La Belle Dame sans Merci as pure story and no more. How Keats felt about his love for Fanny Brawne we can discover in the several poems he addressed to her, as well as in his letters.