Comparing Love In La Belle Dame Sans Merci And Sonnet 116

In the literary world, the theme of love is complex and varied, and different poets perceive and portray “love” differently in their works, as in La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats, My Last Duchess by Robert Browning and Sonnet 116 ‘Let me not to the marriage...’ by William Shakespeare, where a wide variety of poetic devices and different forms and structures are employed. La Belle Dame sans Merci, one of John Keats last works, is written as a ballad, which tells the story of a knight who fell in love with a fairy who was without mercy. Keats wrote this poem because he was trying to mourn over his unfulfilled love for Fanny Brawne. His emotions were reflected towards the end of the poem, which was not a happy one. The short lines and the romantic longings featured in this poem clearly tells the story and the emotional breakdown of the knight when the fairy left him. It brought out the human desire for eternal love that outruns death and mortality. Keats uses the medieval setting as a symbol of his search for true love. Love is an exotic desire that humans long for, which is often burdened with high expectations in their course of pursuit. In the poem, the fairy is a very important symbol, representing how rare true love is. Since fairies do not exist in the human world, it seems that Keats thinks that true love does not exist at all. Besides, “fairy”, “grot” and “meads” mentioned in the poem also symbolize perfection as they are often related to Mother Nature and