3.3 LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

UNIT III POETRY

 3.3 LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

                                                – JOHN KEATS

ANSWER IN A PARAGRAPH

1. Why does the narrator find the condition of the knight so strange that he has to ask him that he has to ask him  what ails him?

The knight looks pale like winter. He seems to have no purpose. His paleness has something to with what is ailing him. Paleness is associated to death. So death and his heart break seem to have engulfed his whole being and thus reflect on his face. The colour of his face had gone from rode red to lily white signifying complete thrall. This paleness startles the narrator since there seems no evidence of any war or attack about the calm place where the narrator found the knight. He thus presumes that there could be something else that could have made the knight death pale.

2. Describe how the knight fell in love with the beautiful lady and declared his love and passion for her.

The knight instantly fell in love with the lady. Her delicate fairy like stature, her long hair, light feet, wild eyes in short her  beautiful looks sweeps him off his feet the very moment he saw her. He makes flower garlands for her hair and bracelets too for her picked freshly from nature. Both look at each other with a lot of love. He takes her on his teed and ride on it the whole day. He heard her beautiful singing that sounded like a fairy’s song. He relished her words when she said she loved him. At the elfin grot he kisses her eyes that sobbed heavily and he fell asleep as she lulled him asleep.

3. What happened at the elfin grot?

The beautiful lady wept her heart out. It is unknowingly why she cried. The reason for her taking him to her ‘elfin grot’ is also vastly criticized. She probably casts her magic spell on the knight. Her crying induces the knight to calm her with kisses on those beautiful eyes that shed copious tears. Two kisses on each eye pacify her. She puts him to sleep gently. She had already cast her spell on beauty on him. That made him love her with all his heart. Now she further casts her spell on him to end the dreamy love sequence by putting him to sleep. It is probably not sane to continue the love story. Everything mortal has to come to an end and every immortal dream should wake to reality. This is what it probably means to lull him to sleep to wake up to reality. The whole love affair ought to be a dream. But he actually dreamt of kings, princes and warriors who gathered about him shouting that the beautiful lady had deserted him, throwing him into much danger and misery. They all looked pale like death as they shrieked his misfortune. While the whole love affair had been in summer, this dream seems to be in winter since their lips were ‘pale’ and ‘starved’ either to personify the thrall the knight is in or depicting the wretchedness of the season which has emanated from summer. This could possibly connote the doom of the knight.

4. What lines are repeated in the ballad and to what purpose?

The lines ‘o what can ail thee,/ knight at arms’ has been repeated twice to signify the immense paleness the face of the knight bears. His face seems to be fully thrall struck and its lack of colour startles the narrator. The line is also repeated to make the ballad effective: to make it sound appealing while sung. It is rhythmic to suit its purpose. The lines ‘alone and loitering?/ The sedge has withered from the lake,/ and no birds sing’ have been repeated twice once in the beginning of the poem and once at the end. The lines in the first stanza denote the end of the dream that has led the knight deep into winter which could mean that his paleness/ his misery has increased. His battered soul ceases to comprehend the pain it has to go through. The lady has deserted him for reason unknown. The lines repeated in the final stanza denote how he became pale and how the season has affected him indirectly. The reason for his paleness that has just slipped from summer beauty into wintery paleness. It connotes the starvation and desperation of his heart just like the gruesome winter. Its repetition is to also satisfy the balladic feature of lyrical rhythm. The word ‘dream’ is repeated twice which makes readers wonder if the knight wants to insist that the vision he saw was infact a dream and not a real event. The harsh repetition of the ‘th’ sound in the line ‘hath thee in thrall’ has possibly been used to wake the knight up from his dreamy sleep. In the next stanza he sees their mouth open, as if in yawning, after having ‘cried’ their warnig and then he wakes up.

ANSWER IN 200 WORDS

1. Narrate the sad tale of the knight at arms.

Keats sets his simple story of love and death in a bleak wintry landscape that is appropriate to it: “The sedge has wither’d 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 reader’s imagination as what he puts into it. La belle dame sans merci, the beautiful lady without pity, is a femme fatale, a Circe like 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 “faery’s 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.

2. Bring out the romantic, medieval and supernatural elements in the poem.

“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 wither’d 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 reader’s imagination as what he puts into it. La belle dame sans merci, the beautiful lady without pity, is a femme fatale, a Circe like 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 “faery’s 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.