Poem:-La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats

La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats

La Belle Dame sans Merci.’ ‘The woman is beautiful, but merciless.’ Keats’s title, which he got from a 15th-century courtly love poem by Alain Chartier (La Belle Dame sans Mercy), provides a clue to the poem’s plot: in summary,the poem begins with the speaker asking a knight what’s wrong – this knight-at-arms is on his own, looking pale as he loiters on a hillside. This knight-at-arms has a lily-white forehead (i.e. he’s pale), and a rose-coloured cheek. But symbolically, this rose is withering: love has gone rotten.

It’s at this point that the voice in the poem shifts from this first speaker – the one questioning the knight about what’s up with him – to the knight-at-arms himself. The knight then tells us his story: he met a beautiful lady in the meadows, who the knight believes was the child of a faery – there was something fey or supernatural and otherworldly about this woman. She had wild eyes, which imply an unpredictability in her nature.

The knight tells his interlocutor how he was inspired to shower this ‘faery’s child’ with gifts: a garland or wreath for her head, bracelets for her wrists, and a sweet-smelling girdle for her waist. The woman looks as though she loves these gifts, and moans sweetly. The knight puts the lady up on his horse and rides all day without taking his eyes off her – not a pursuit we’d recommend when riding a horse. As the lady delicately rides his horse side-saddle, as befits a lady, she sings a ‘faery’s song’.

The knight gave her, the belle dame sans merci gives the knight three sweet gifts: sweet relish, wild honey, and manna-dew (implying something almost divine: ‘manna’ was the foodstuff that fell from heaven in the Old Testament). In a strange language, the lady tells the knight she loves him. She takes him to her Elfin grotto, where she proceeds to weep and sigh; the knight silences her with four kisses. The lady, in turn, silences the knight by lulling him to sleep – presumably with another ‘faery’s song’ – and the knight dreams of men, pale kings and princes, crying that ‘La belle dame sans merci’ has him enthralled or enslaved.

In the evening twilight, the knight sees the starved lips of these men – men who have presumably also been enthralled or bewitched by such a belle dame sans merci – as they try to warn him, and then the knight awakens and finds himself alone on the hillside where the poem’s original speaker encountered him. And that’s how he ended up here, alone and palely loitering.