La Belle Dame Sans Merci (essay improvement)

Explore the ways in which Keats depicts power in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’

Jess Cornelius

Keats represents power in an ambiguous way in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Although Keats uses a traditional ballad form, used to depict the story in the most archaic way possible, the way he depicts powerful people are not commonplace of those who were powerful in his time – for example, the Knight is portrayed as being weak and lonely while the kings, princes and warriors are ‘deathly pale’. The fact that the beautiful woman the narrator describes who ‘shows no mercy’ is interesting because although she is the supposedly most powerful in the poem, she is a mysterious character who cannot be translated easily in the poem – we are unaware of who she truly is and why she has such a powerful effect on the hapless knights, kings, princes and warriors. At the time, Keats was experiencing his own conflicts that perhaps created the foundation of the poem. For example, Keats was said to have been ‘on fire poetically, in love, growing ill and suffering from depression’.  Keats had begun to show symptoms of tuberculosis after nursing his brother, which could have possibly influenced the weak portrayal of the knight and of the dying, bleak and ‘withering’ scene that is portrayed in the first stanza.

Keats begins ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ with a question and response form in order to structure the narrative. In this question and response ‘interrogation’, we begin to get an idea of where this narrative is set and captivate the supposedly difficult situation the knight has found himself in. Because the narrator’s questions to the knight ‘oh what can ail the, knight – at – arms’, are repeated in the first two stanzas, we are constantly reminded of the dire situation the knight is in and how hopeless and powerless he is. The question also becomes pitying the second time it is used, because we as the reader are aware of how at odds this knight is within society and how unlike a knight he is due to the adjectives and nouns used such as ‘alone and palely loitering’, ‘so haggard and so woe-begone’.

The repetition of the words and phrases used in the first two stanzas are also used in the last stanza, such as ‘alone and palely loitering’ and ‘the sedge has withered from the lake’ not only creates a cyclical structure in the poem but it suggests the incapability of the powerless to move forward or to escape anything. Those who are powerful, which in this case is ‘a lady’ who is ‘fully beautiful’ entraps ‘pale kings … pale princes…and pale warriors’ on a ‘cold hill side’.  From this, we can infer that only those who possess beauty, who are ‘full beautiful’ are the most dominant, while those who lack this sense of beauty and majestic power only become powerless like those ‘on the cold hill side’, who are ‘death – pale…starved lips in the gloam’.

Keats also represents power and control by the way he structures the poem and the rhyme scheme he uses. For example, although Keats uses a traditional ballad with the traditional quatrain to appropriate the form to its medieval  story, Keats controls the way in which the sentences are structured to move the narrative forward. He alternates between tetrameters & trimeters which creates an almost ‘sing – song’ pace, however Keats compresses the lines by using three tetrameters followed by a final short line of 5 or 4 syllables therefore hastening the poem’s rhythm. He does this to cause disruption in this natural ‘sing song’ flow of the poem, reflecting the disruption that is experienced by the knight.  As a result of this, stanzas 1, 2 and 13 sound more abrupt such as ‘no birds sing’, ‘and the harvest’s done’, gives us a sense of the knight’s fate. We get an vivid image of desolation and we as the readers feel as though we can almost ‘see through the eyes’ of the knight – we feel a sense of loneliness, helplessness and vulnerability as the setting gives us the sense of the predicament of the knight.  By controlling the rhythm, Keats highlights the disruptions the Knight faces in this poem which subsequently makes him less powerful – for example the fact that he is ‘alone and palely loitering’ and ‘so haggard and woe-begone’ gives us the image that he is lost and lacks control in a unknown place suggesting that he is a weak knight.

It also important to note that when the mysterious lady appears, rhyme appears to become more constant, evolving into more of a full rhyme than some of the half rhymes that are used such as ‘loitering’ and ‘sing’ and ‘begone’ and ‘done’ when the knight is the main focus in the narrative. When the lady is the main focus of the narrative in stanza 4 appears, rhyme seems to become more constant and Keats begins to use full rhymes more frequently, such as ‘child’ and ‘wild’, ‘dew’ and ‘true’ and ‘all’ and ‘thrall’. This highlights the power this mysterious lady has over the knight who is ‘alone and palely loitering’, a deliberate technique Keats uses in order to make the lady seem like an enchantress and something of the supernatural – for example she is described as being a ‘faery’s child’ and living in an ‘elfin grot’ as well as being able to ‘lull’ the knight to sleep- this portrayal of the lady makes her seem subhuman – she lacks human characteristics but she possesses magical or supernatural powers that makes her powerful.

However, the way in which Keats chooses certain characters to depict them as being powerful is not stereotypical and is unusual for his time. From the very beginning to the very end of the poem we are almost disappointed by the knight because he does not show any heroic actions which we would expect from a knight – even when he does appear to show a little more power in stanza 5 by making ‘a garland for her head’, and therefore essentially objectifying her, she is still more powerful not just to the knight when he is ‘lulled to sleep’ but also to the atmosphere of the poem – we as readers almost forget the miserable bleak scene, as ‘no birds sing’ and the ‘sedge has withered from the lake’ which is being described at the start of the poem because in her presence things seem to be ‘fragrant’ and ‘floral’. Not only that, but the fact that this lady has the ability to entice the most powerful and the most elite who are all terrified of the lady when they cry ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci/Hath the in thrall!’ makes her seem not only the most powerful but it intimidates us as the readers. 

The poem demonstrates a parallel between the Knight’s situation and Keats’ conflicts with the pains of love. It could therefore be said that the lady is symbolic for this love and subsequent pain Keats had felt  - Keats is the knight who ‘meets’ the lady (or in his own life, has fallen in love) and as a result comes into conflict with the pains of love (paralleling with the knight’s own difficult situation when he is left on ‘a cold hill side’ and is ‘alone and palely loitering’).  This is demonstrated in an extract of a letter from Keats to Fanny Brawne, his fiancée, when he was living in the Isle of Wight – he says  ‘if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me I have never known any unalloy’d  Happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of someone has always  spoilt my hours’. Keats had experienced much grief and sadness in his turbulent life – for example, his father’s sudden death and his mother’s subsequent marriage two months later, followed by both his mother’s and brother’s death from tuberculosis meant that ‘death or sickness of someone’ had ‘always spoilt’ his life. If this is the case, and if the lady is supposed to be symbolic of love, then Keats is trying to tell us that love is much more dangerous than grief. It has captivated and destroyed the ‘pale kings…princes … and warriors’ and had left the knight, weak and vulnerable therefore somewhat unheroic as he himself is destroyed by ‘love’ or the lady. As a result, we can infer that Keats’ experience with love in his life is more destroying than the griefs of sickness and death in his life, therefore making love a more powerful, more stronger emotion, something that Keats in his own life was experiencing himself.