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Writing Ideas. 1. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is a ballad —one of the oldest poetic forms in English. Ballads generally use a bouncy rhythm and rhyme scheme to tell a story. Think about an event that has happened to you recently and try to tell it in ballad form. 2.
A ballad by the Romantic poet John Keats, who died of tuberculosis shortly after writing it. It tells the story of a knight who falls in love with a fairy woman and wakes up to a nightmare world of death and horror.
- Summary
- Meaning
- Structure and Form
- Tone and Mood
- Literary Devices
- Analysis, Stanza by Stanza
- Themes
- Historical Context
- About John Keats
- Similar Poetry
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‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ by John Keatsis a beautiful poem about a fairy who condemns a knight after seducing him with her singing and looks. The first three stanzas introduce the unidentified speakerand the knight. The speaker comes across the knight wandering around in the dead of winter when “the sedge has withered from the lake/ And no birds s...
Keats’ ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ describes the short encounter between a knight and a fairy lady. The title of the poem is interesting as it isn’t Keats’ own invention. He adopted the title of Alain Chartier’s French courtly poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Mercy’. In French, the phrase means “A Beautiful Lady Without Mercy”. Readers can see the va...
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is after the form of the lyrical ballad. Many well-known poets of the Romantic era used this form in their written works. This particular ballad has a meter and rhyme schemethat produces a flow that engages the reader. The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, which simply means that the stress falls on four words per lin...
The tone and moodof this poem are also designed to help the readers to identify with John Keats’ feelings as he nears the end of his life. One could argue that the Knight in this poem is Keats himself. Although there are some differences between his life and the knight’s story, there are certainly plenty of similarities that would suggest that he u...
Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’contains several literary devices that make the emotional story of the “knight-at-arms” more heart-touching to the readers. These include but are not limited to: 1. Anaphora: The poem begins with an apostrophe. Using it, the poet introduces the knight as well as evokes his spirit into the poem. 2. Metaphor: In “squi...
Stanza One
In the opening stanza of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ the speaker sets up the scene and the subjectof this poem. The speaker comes upon a knight. He knows that this man is a knight upon seeing him, but he quickly reveals that this knight is not behaving as one might expect a knight to behave. The character does not seem brave and valiant. Rather, he is alone and “loitering.” He seems to be wandering about aimlessly. The speaker wonders why, and he asks. He also remarks about the time of year a...
Stanza Two
With this stanza, the reader can grasp the full picture of what the Knight looks like. The speaker describes him as “alone”, “pale”, “haggard”, and “woe-begone”. The setting is also described. It seems that the harvest is done. Therefore, the reader can imagine the bare, dry ground and the silence of nature after the birds have already flown south. Overall, this description gives ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’a very gloomy tone. The subject is downtrodden, and nature itself seems stripped of all...
Stanza Three
In this stanza, the speaker informs the knight that he looks very ill. He tells him that his face is as pale as a lily and that his face looks moist with sweat, as if he had a fever. All of his colors are fading quickly from his cheeks. It appears the speaker is very concerned about the knight’s health. He speaks to the knight to make sure he is aware of how ill he is. In the following stanza, the knight answers him.
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ contains several themes, such as dejection in love, heartbreak, sadness, death, and illusion vs reality. The most important theme of the poem is dejection in love. There is a sense of separation in the knight that makes him appear lifeless. His loitering in the wild without any hope depicts the need for love in his life. ...
John Keats wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’in the summer of 1819 when he was dying from tuberculosis. Then he was in Wentworth Palace, the home of his friend Charles Armitage Brown. Their neighbors at Wentworth Palace were Fanny Brawne and her mother, and because they lived in the other half of Wentworth Palace, they saw each other daily. After a w...
Sadly, John Keats, one of the best 18th-century British poets, died at the young age of twenty-five. Having studied some medicine, Keats knew his symptoms well enough to know that his time was limited. Just as Keats had found love, best just as his poetry was beginning to be noticed, he faced his early death. Being fully aware of his symptoms and t...
Like Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, here is a list of a few poems that similarly talks about a lady’s unmerciful attitude towards a devoted lover. Readers who enjoyed this poem should also consider reading more John Keats poems such as ‘When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be,’‘Ode to Psyche,’‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,’et...
Learn about the meaning, structure, and themes of Keats' famous ballad, inspired by a French poem. The poem tells the story of a knight who falls for a fairy lady and suffers the consequences of her curse.
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Read the full text of Keats's famous poem about a knight who falls under the spell of a beautiful and deadly fairy. The poem explores themes of love, loss, and the effects of the French Revolution on the people.
“La Belle Dame sans Merci” was written in the heat of his passion for Fanny, the fever of death hanging over him. He was on fire poetically, in love, growing ill, and suffering from depression. By the end of May 1819 Keats finished the poem:
Learn about the plot, metre, and themes of Keats’s famous ballad, inspired by a medieval French poem. The poem tells the story of a knight who falls under the spell of a beautiful but merciless lady in the woods.
"La Belle Dame sans Merci" ("The Beautiful Lady without Mercy") is a ballad produced by the English poet John Keats in 1819. The title was derived from the title of a 15th-century poem by Alain Chartier called La Belle Dame sans Mercy. Considered an English classic, the poem is an example of Keats' poetic preoccupation with love and death.
