Critical Analysis Of 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'
La Belle Dame sans Merci in French means "The Beautiful Lady without Mercy”. It is a ballad written by the English poet John Keats. This poem is considered an English classic, similar to other of Keats ' works. Even though it has a simple structure, it avoids simplicity of interpretation. At only a short twelve stanzas, of only four lines each, with a simple ABCB rhyme scheme, the poem is nonetheless full of enigmas, and has been the subject of numerous interpretations. And that is the sole reason why I have chosen this ballad as a subject of analysis.
"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is highly appreciated by the Romantic poets. Keats uses the ballad stanza. To carry the story forward, Keats invents a swiftly moving variation .Throughout the poem,
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With the belle dame playing a figure of love and fantasy and the agent of death and decay to the knight, it is as though Keats feels himself to be the knight.The poem very clearly indicates the life that Keats was living. There were a lot of emotions that influenced him to write this sensational ode. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was 14; his brother, whom he had nursed through his final months, died of the same disease in 1818. Even before his brother’s death, Keats too would begin to show signs of the disease, returning from his rigorous tour of Scotland and Ireland with a harsh cough and an ulcerated throat. Thus he depicts his life after a few years towards the end of the poem by bringing the knight to a tragic death. He lived a lonely life with his family suffering from tuberculosis and this explains the wandering, desolate and hapless nature of the knight, longing for some company. Fortunately (or let’s call it unfortunately) he also fell in love with Fanny Brawne and soon realized that he would never get to be with her. He was suffering from a disease which would kill him really soon enough. Throughout his life, he had been alone and when he finally found a companion for life, he was deprived of life itself. The pain, the sorrow and hard comings are brought out in this wonderful ballad. “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
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