Romanticism In La Belle Damens Merci

The first time I was introduced to Romanticism in this course, I thought that I would be reading a lot of love poems and novels. But soon enough I realized how wrong I was and understood the real concept of Romanticism. It is a movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that reacted against the rules in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics at that period. Romantic writers meant to break out of what was usual and write about the things that no one dared to talk or write about. It also gave voice to the voiceless like children, women, and the low-class. The Romantic period lasted until the Victorian age arrived, but it made many changes that made life easy for a lot of children and women. Most of the genres that the Romantic writers used were Supernatural, Fantasy, and Gothic.

Writers like; John Keats, William Wordsworth, and William Blake all wrote about problems that people used to ignore and never try to fix and presented it in both direct and indirect way by picturing feelings with the nature surrounding it in a simple language. La Belle Dame sans Merci is a romantic poem because the knight meets a beautiful person that he thinks he falls in love with at first sight. Little does he know that she has cast a spell on him. Before the spell is cast he makes her a garland of flowers, a bracelet and a belt. She brings him goods to eat. But the beautiful woman leaves him all alone after he sees a dream of many men before him telling him that they were fooled by her, just like she fooled him. According to the knight they have fallen in love at first sight, but the beautiful woman has no pity for men and leaves him with his heart in his hands and all alone. To that extend one would consider "La Belle Dame sans Merci" to be a romantic