La Belle Dame Sans Mercy

John Keats

Pity the short, tragic life of poet John Keats. Abandoned, orphaned and impoverished as a child, he was pulled from school and forced into a medical career he didn't want by an unscrupulous guardian. He found the courage to pursue a literary career at the age of 21, but by then his life was already approaching its end. He suffered from bad reviews, then depression, and then tuberculosis, the last of which proved deadly. He died in 1821 at the age of twenty-five, leaving behind a broken-hearted fiancée, a handful of poems and a legacy as one of the great poets of the Romantic age. 

Critics were so hard on Keats during his lifetime that his friends believed that he died from the stress of his negative reviews. An autopsy of his tuberculosis-ravaged lungs debunked that theory. Yet Keats' reputation has proved to be more enduring than the names of any of his critics. Today, Keats' lines are part of our collective consciousness. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - these lines and more come to us courtesy of John Keats. He never achieved old age, but he arrived at immortality.

La Belle Dame Sans Mercy

The speaker of the poem comes across a "knight at arms" alone, and apparently dying, in a field somewhere. He asks him what's going on, and the knight's answer takes up the rest of the poem. The knight says that he met a beautiful fairy lady in the fields. He started hanging out with her, making flower garlands for her, letting her ride on his horse, and generally flirting like knights do. Finally, she invited him back to her fairy cave. Sweet, thought the knight. But after they were through smooching, she "lulled" him to sleep, and he had a nightmare about all the knights and kings and princes that the woman had previously seduced – they were all dead. And then he woke up, alone, on the side of a hill somewhere.

• The poem opens with a question: an unnamed speaker asks a "knight at arms" what's wrong, or what's "ailing" him.
• Something is clearly wrong with the knight – he's "loitering" by himself around the edge of a lake, and he's "pale."
• The speaker says that the "sedge," or marsh plants, have all died out from around the lake, and "no birds sing." So we're guessing that it's autumn or even early winter since all the birds have migrated, and the plants have "withered."
• The presence of the "knight at arms" reminds us of medieval fairy tales with knights and ladies in towers. We think that this is the response Keats intended
• The first part of the stanza echoes the first line of the poem word-for-word. Apparently the knight doesn't answer immediately, so the unnamed speaker has to repeat the question.
• This time, we get two more adjectives to describe the knight: he's "haggard," or worn-out and tired-looking, and "woe-begone." The knight is obviously both sick and depressed.
• The last two lines of the stanza do more to set the scene: the squirrels have finished filling up their "granary," or storage of food for the winter, and the crops have already been harvested.
• We can now safely assume that it's late autumn.
• The speaker continues to address this sick, depressed "knight at arms." He asks about the "lily" on the knight's "brow," suggesting that the knight's face is pale like a lily.
• The knight's forehead is sweaty with "anguish" and with "fever," so he's obviously sick.
• The last two lines of the stanza describe how the healthy color is rapidly "fading" from the knight's cheeks.
• This stanza changes point of view.
• All of a sudden, the knight answers the unnamed speaker's questions. So now the "I" is the knight, rather than the original speaker.
• The knight says that he met a beautiful, fairy-like "lady" in the "meads," or fields.
• She had long hair, was graceful, and had "wild" eyes. We're not sure what "wild" eyes would look like, but apparently the knight thought it was attractive.
• The knight made a flower wreath, or "garland," for the lady, along with flower "bracelets."
• The "fragrant zone" is a belt made of flowers.
• We get the idea that the knight decks out the maiden with flowers.
• "Fragrant zone" could also be a reference to her lady parts, which would make sense, given where the next two lines go.
• And where do the next two lines go? Well, the lady is "looking" at the knight while "loving" and "moan[ing]," so we think that they two are having sex.
• The knight puts the lady on his horse his "pacing steed" to take a ride. Yes, there might be sexy connotations to this line, too.
• The knight is so absorbed with his erotic encounter with this fairy lady that he doesn't notice anything else "all day long."
• The lady leans "sidelong," or sideways off of the horse and sings "fairy songs" to the knight.
• The knight says that the fairy lady found him tasty roots, honey, and manna to eat "of relish sweet".
• "Manna" is the food that the Jewish scriptures say that the Israelites ate when they were wandering around the desert after Moses freed them from slavery in Egypt. It's supposed to be food from heaven, so this word makes the fairy lady seem supernatural, if not actually divine.
• Alternatively, the association could be with the slavery from which the Israelites had just been freed. After all, the knight does become enslaved to the beautiful fairy lady. This allusion becomes even more potent when it's associated with the "honey wild" that the fairy lady fed the knight. The Israelites were trying to find the Promised Land, which would flow with "milk and honey."
• The fairy lady tells the knight that she loves him, but she says it "in language strange."
• He doesn't say what language it is, or how he's able to understand her. Maybe he's just hearing what he wants to hear, or maybe her magical influence has enabled him to understand her "language strange."
• The fairy lady takes the knight to her "elfin grot." "Elfin" just means having to do with elves, as any Tolkien fans probably figured. And a "grot" is a grotto, or cave.
• Once they're back at her fairy cave, she cries and sighs loudly. The knight doesn't say why she's crying, and we never find out – it's left to our imagination.
• The knight kisses her weepy eyes four times. Why "four" kisses? Isn't "three" usually the magic number in fairy tales?
• Again, her eyes are described as "wild," and this time it's repeated twice.
• The fairy lady "lulls" the knight to sleep like a baby in her cave, and he starts to dream something.
• He interrupts himself with a dash – in line 34, and exclaims "Ah! woe betide!" because even the memory of the dream is horrible as he repeats it to the unnamed speaker.
• "Woe betide!" is an archaic exclamation used to express extreme grief or suffering. It was old-fashioned even when Keats was writing.
• The knight's use of this expression emphasizes the medieval romance setting.
• The knight's dream in the fairy cave is the "latest," or last, dream he'll ever have.
• The knight describes the dream he had: he saw "kings," "princes," and "warriors, and they were all "death pale." In fact, he repeats the word "pale" three times in two lines.
• This procession of "pale" men could be an allusion to the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse that gets described in the Book of Revelation in the Christian bible. The fourth horseman is Death, and he rides on a pale horse.
• The pale warriors, princes, and kings all cry out in unison that "La belle dame sans merci" has the knight "in thrall," or in bondage.
• Line 39 has the title of the poem in it, so it's time to translate it. The title is French and it translates to "the beautiful woman without mercy."
• If you want to know more about the title, go to the "What's Up With the Title?" section, and then come back.
• The knight continues to describe the pale warriors from his dream – in the "gloam," or dusk, all he can make out are their "lips."
• Their mouths are "starv'd" and hungry-looking, and their mouths are all open as they cry out their warning to the knight.
• The word "gloam" just means dusk or twilight, but it's no accident that Keats uses it – after all, "gloam" sounds a lot like "gloom."
• The knight wakes up from the dream alone and cold on the side of a hill.
• The knight has finished his story. He tells the original, unnamed speaker, that this is why he's hanging out  by himself, even though it's so dismal outside.
• The knight repeats the unnamed speaker's words from the first stanza, so that the poem ends with almost exactly the same stanza with which it began.