summary of the poem La belle Dame ssns merci
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Literature
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Shakescleare
La Belle Dame sans Merci Summary & Analysis
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“La Belle Dame sans Merci” is a ballad by John Keats, one of the most studied and highly regarded English Romantic poets. In the poem, a medieval knight recounts a fanciful romp in the countryside with a fairy woman—La Belle Dame sans Merci, which means "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy" in French—that ends in cold horror. Related to this focus on death and horror, Keats wrote the poem months after his brother Tom died of tuberculosis.
Read the full text of “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
“La Belle Dame sans Merci” Summary
What’s the matter, knight in shining armor, standing alone, looking rather ill? The plant life by the lakeside has shriveled up and the sound of birdsong is absent.
Again, tell me, what’s the matter? You look extremely distressed and sad. The squirrels have gathered their provisions for winter, and we humans have harvested our fields.
Your forehead is pale like a lily and moist with the sweat of a painful fever. The color in your cheeks, once bright and lively as a rose, is fading extremely quickly.
I, the knight, met a woman in the meadows. She was so enchantingly beautiful I assumed she was the child of fairy. She had long hair, she moved so gracefully she seemed to hover over the earth, and she had a mysterious wildness in her eyes.
From flowers, stems, and leaves I wove a crown for her to wear. I also wove her bracelets, and a belt strong with the scent of the flowers I used to make it. Having received my gifts, she looked at me—it was the look of someone falling in love—and she moaned sweetly.
I sat her behind me on my trotting horse, yet that whole day I saw nothing but her—as we trotted along, she would lean forward and around me, singing a mysterious fairy song.
When we stopped, she dug up sweet, nutritious roots for me. She served me wild honey, and a substance so heavenly in taste it reminded me of manna, the food that kept the Israelites alive on their journey out of Egypt. In a strange language that I nevertheless understood, she said, “I truly love you.”
Next she took me to her enchanted cave, where, overwhelmed with emotion, she wept and sighed—something pained her. I shut those wild eyes of hers by kissing her four times in an attempt to soothe her.
Next, she lulled me to sleep, and I fell into a deep dream—it still fills me with sadness and despair to remember it! That was the last dream I ever had, in that cave, which was located on a cold hillside.
In it I saw pale kings, princes, and warriors gathered around me. I saw the color of death in all of their faces. They told me that La Belle Dame sans Merci—The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy—had taken me as her prisoner.
I saw their love-starved, life-starved lips in the dying light. These lips widened as they warned me about the trouble I’d gotten myself into. Then I woke up, and found myself here, on this cold hillside.
So that's the answer to your question—that's why I linger here alone, looking rather unhealthy, even though, as you say, the plant life by the lakeside has shriveled up and the sound of birdsong is absent.
Answer:
La Belle Dame sans Merci: summary
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’ ‘The woman is beautiful, but merciless.’ Keats’s title, which he got from a 15th-century courtly love poem by Alain Chartier (La Belle Dame sans Mercy), provides a clue to the poem’s plot: in summary,the poem begins with the speaker asking a knight what’s wrong – this knight-at-arms is on his own, looking pale as he loiters on a hillside. This knight-at-arms has a lily-white forehead (i.e. he’s pale), and a rose-coloured cheek. But symbolically, this rose is withering: love has gone rotten.
It’s at this point that the voice in the poem shifts from this first speaker – the one questioning the knight about what’s up with him – to the knight-at-arms himself. The knight then tells us his story: he met a beautiful lady in the meadows, who the knight believes was the child of a faery – there was something fey or supernatural and otherworldly about this woman. She had wild eyes, which imply an unpredictability in her nature.
The knight tells his interlocutor how he was inspired to shower this ‘faery’s child’ with gifts: a garland or wreath for her head, bracelets for her wrists, and a sweet-smelling girdle for her waist. The woman looks as though she loves these gifts, and moans sweetly. The knight puts the lady up on his horse and rides all day without taking his eyes off her – not a pursuit we’d recommend when riding a horse. As the lady delicately rides his horse side-saddle, as befits a lady, she sings a ‘faery’s song’.
As if to complement the three gifts (garland, bracelets, ‘zone’ or girdle) the knight gave her, the belle dame sans merci gives the knight three sweet gifts: sweet relish, wild honey, and manna-dew (implying something almost divine: ‘manna’ was the foodstuff that fell from heaven in the Old Testament). In a strange language, the lady tells the knight she loves him. She takes him to her Elfin grotto, where she proceeds to weep and sigh; the knight silences her with four kisses. The lady, in turn, silences the knight by lulling him to sleep – presumably with another ‘faery’s song’ – and the knight dreams of men, pale kings and princes, crying that ‘La belle dame sans merci’ has him enthralled or enslaved.
In the evening twilight, the knight sees the starved lips of these men – men who have presumably also been enthralled or bewitched by such a belle dame sans merci – as they try to warn him, and then the knight awakens and finds himself alone on the hillside where the poem’s original speaker encountered him. And that’s how he ended up here, alone and palely loitering.
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