Ode To A Nightingale And La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Merci from John Keats
John Keats was a poet in the Romantic Period ("John Keats"). While he worked in a hospital, he became fascinated with poetry and began to write his own. His poetry featured popular milieus of the period, such as youth, beauty, and love ("Ode to a Nightingale", "La Belle Dame sans Merci"). John Keats, with his themes of youth and innocence in the poems "Ode to a Nightingale" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," is an icon of the Romantic Period. In his poem “Ode to a Nightingale”, John Keats begins by stating that his heart aches and he feels numb, as if he had consumed a lot of alcohol or drank from the River Lethe, a river located in the Underworld that made all who drank from it forget their memory (The River Lethe was one of five rivers in the Underworld. The River Mnemosyne was the river of memory, and the newly dead were encouraged to drink from it (Britannica)). The River Lethe is in Greek mythology, which he will reference throughout his poem. Keats calls the bird a “winged dryad” and states he is envious of the bird’s ability to sing about summer easily. Summer often represents times of happiness, joy, and life in poems. Romantic poets often alluded to folklore, such as

It is unclear who this speaker is until the other speaker begins to speak. The unknown speaker comes across a “knight at arms” in a seemingly desolate area “The sedge has wither'd from the lake/And no birds sing.” The speaker asks the knight what makes him look so sick. Because the speaker uses words such as “lily” and “fading rose” to describe the knight’s complexion, the reader can infer the knight is sick because of emotional trauma or hurt rather than the normal causes of an illness (“La Belle Dame sans Merci”). Another aspect of Romantic poets is a heavy focus on nature and vivid descriptions of said nature. John Keats has both of the aforementioned, making him an icon of the Romantic