John Keats is a spell binding poet, who lived a short life of 25 years, but left behind a towering legacy in the Romantic period. His work “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is an imaginative masterpiece written in 1819, which was near his death in 1821. During the time he wrote the ballad, his brother died of tuberculosis; an ailment that swept over many members of his family, including him. He also became devoted to young woman, Fanny Brawne, but struggled with his continuous meager ownerships. The time of darkness, disease, and depression were close reflected in the ballad, where love and death both reign as did in his personal life. The central idea in the writing was risking everything for a pleasure that can be intoxicating, and can aid in one’s own demise. A spontaneous obsession radiates from the ballad, leaving Keats readers under a mysterious trance. These romanticism ideas were a clear break from the pressing restraints of society in the nineteenth century.
The ballad is a darker postmortem on romance (Wolfson 275). It’s an enticing story on the arrival of knight who appears “haggard, and loitering” in an autumn setting. He shares his perplexing dream like story, where he meets a “faery child” in a mysterious meadow. The knight courts her and prances her around on his stead, obsessed by his new captivating pleasure. He finds that she speaks a strange tongue, but believes she speaks of loving him. With a few kisses and a lulling sleep, he dreams of pale kings with warning signs that she is a merciless beautiful woman. But it’s too late to heed to the warnings because he is now palely loitering on the cold hill side among loneliness.
Once you enter in the mystifying ballad of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” you are captivated b...
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...cy, is stated to be an allegory of Keats and Fanny (Keats and his love), or one of Keats and tuberculosis (Keats and death) (Almeida 97). I find it a mixture of both. The ballad carries the aspects of a setting of dark, unwanted death, but also that of a medieval love of beauty and enchantment.
Works Cited
Almeida, Hermione de. Critical Essays on John Keats. Boston, G.K. Hall & Co., 1990. 97-327.
John Keats, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Poetic Works, 1884, Bartleby.com: Great Books Online, ed. Steven van Leeuwen, 2002, 5 May 2002 http://www.bartleby.com/126/55.htm.
Murry, John Middleton. Keats and Shakespeare; a Study of Keats’ Poetic Life from 1816-1820. London, Oxford University Press, 1925. 82.
Wolfson, Susan J. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithics: Cornell University Press, 1986. 275-301.
The Breton lai, Milun is the ninth among twelve lais in the collected works known famously as the Lais of Marie de France. It is a narrative about a courtly love and family bond that become divided by an overpowering marital system. Written in England, the lai of the legendary medieval poet, Marie de France, can be traced back to the 12th century. Virtually nothing is known of the writer. Any information identified, including her name and geographical background, has been discovered through her manuscripts. While her poems focus primarily on the observance of love, distinctiveness of each character, and vibrancy of words, Marie’s lai, Milun, had a sense of realism involved that impacted me personally. The fictional tale corresponds to my life in a meaningful way that made me feel connected to the female character in the story. Marie’s style of writing provoked me to respond through my own life experiences and emotions of loving secretively, mothering a child, and the pain of separation.
... Works Cited Everett, Nicholas. From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton.
Keats’ poetry explores many issues and themes, accompanied by language and technique that clearly demonstrates the romantic era. His poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Bright Star’ examine themes such as mortality and idealism of love. Mortality were common themes that were presented in these poems as Keats’ has used his imagination in order to touch each of the five senses. He also explores the idea that the nightingale’s song allows Keats to travel in a world of beauty. Keats draws from mythology and christianity to further develop these ideas. Keats’ wrote ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ as an immortal bird’s song that enabled him to escape reality and live only to admire the beauty of nature around him. ‘Bright Star’ also discusses the immortal as Keats shows a sense of yearning to be like a star in it’s steadfast abilities. The visual representation reveal these ideas as each image reflects Keats’ obsession with nature and how through this mindset he was able
= === La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a ballad which means the language is simple, bare and direct. The poem starts off with a kind of narrator. for the first few paragraphs.
Time is endlessly flowing by and its unwanted yet pending arrival of death is noted in the two poems “When I Have Fears,” by John Keats and “Mezzo Cammin,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Keats speaks with no energy; only an elegiac tone of euphoric sounds wondering if his life ends early with his never attained fame. He mentions never finding a “fair creature” (9) of his own, only experiencing unrequited love and feeling a deep loss of youth’s passion. Though melancholy, “Mezzo Cammin,” takes a more conversational tone as Longfellow faces what is commonly known as a midlife crisis. The two poems progressions contrast as Keats blames his sorrow for his lack of expression while Longfellow looks at life’s failures as passions never pursued. In spite of this contrast, both finish with similar references to death. The comparable rhyme and rhythm of both poems shows how both men safely followed a practiced path, never straying for any spontaneous chances. The ending tones evoking death ultimately reveal their indications towards it quickly advancing before accomplish...
Wilberg, Jonah. "Keats to Autumn Analysis." Humanities 360. N.p., 8 Jan. 2011. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.
As a child, I typically considered mystery to be a good thing and filled with promise. However, in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Year of the Cat,” the dark side of mystery emerges. Mysteries to me were always Scooby Doo shows and the Boxcar Children books, but as I grew up, I started to realize that mysteries are potentially not as fun and pleasurable as a child makes them out to be. There will be ones that will not or cannot be solved. As I began to read more advanced books, both for leisure and school, my eyes opened to the dark side of mystery – a kind of mystery that leads into destruction. The femme fatales in both the poem and song are portrayed out of a similar tradition, but in actuality are quite different; in Keats poem, the woman is depicted as seductive and ruinous, while in Stewart’s song, the woman is characterized as more mysterious and compulsive.
Keats, John. “The Eve of St. Agnes”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic
Keats begins with the poem with a question, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?”. He does this to ask the “knight-at-arms” what has made him this weak, this pale, dying in a field somewhere and the knight’s answer takes up the rest of the poem. The imagery in my visual representation depicting a heart broken and weakened by the icy, deceptive lips of ‘femme fatale’ is both powerful and highly symbolic because it expresses the coldness and the deviousness of the deceptive witch that has weakened the knight. The icy cold lips of the witch symbolise her deceptive nature, and the way she tricks the knight into a deathly sleep, which is also visualised in my representation. His deathly sleep is also represented in a ‘before/after’ representation in which an image of the beautiful woman in the meadows is shown, and after his nightmare, the icy cold, desolate and dark hill side upon which the knight awakes is shown in the neighbouring image. The speaker says that the "sedge" have all died out from around the lake, and "no birds sing”. We can deduce that it 's autumn since all the birds have migrated, and the plants have “withered." 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.
“la belle dame sans merci” was written April 21, 1819 by John Keats. A Romantic poet who despite his reputation as being one of the most beloved poets of all time, was not well received during his short lived life. In fact Keats reputation didn’t grow till after his death near the end of the nineteenth century. He is now considered one of the key figures in the second generation of the romantic movement. Keats major works did not focus on religion, ethnics, morals, or politics. He wrote mostly of sensational experiences about the richness of life. Though experiences may be pleasurable at first they don’t always have fairytale endings, sometimes the pleasures of life can become overwhelming, such is the theme of Keats ballad “La belle dame sans merci”.
Although these poems are both centered around the theme of love, they each contain a different meaning. Lord Byron's “She Walks in Beauty” is dedicated to conveying love through the use of metaphors. Keats' poem, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” on the other hand, tells a story about how love can be deceiving. Despite their differences, these poems have similarities as well. They each have three parts that progress a story along through the use of literary techniques. Each poem was also written in the early 1800's. These poems both implicate the reader to make a connection to everyday life by relating possible experiences of love.
Arguably one of John Keats’ most famous poems, “Ode to a nightingale” in and of itself is an allegory on the frail, conflicting aspects of life while also standing as a commentary on the want to escape life’s problems and the unavoidability of death. Keats’ poem utilizes a heavy amount of symbolism, simile and allusion to idealize nature as a perfect, almost mystical, world that holds no problems while using imagery taken from nature, combined with alliteration and assonance, to idealize the dream of escape from the problems life often presents; more specifically, aging and our inevitable deaths by allowing the reader to feel as if they are experiencing the speaker’s experience listening to the nightingale.
Keats, John. “Letters: To George and Thomas Keats.” The Norton Anthology: English Literature. Ninth Edition. Stephen Greenblatt, eds. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 967-968. Print.
While Coleridge describes the process of creating Romantic poetry and encourages poets to use the combination of nature and imagination in this process, Keats is more focused on reality and is well aware of the limitations of the Grecian urn. With the poets’ admiration of nature present in both poems …… to be completed.
White, Keith D. and John Keats. John Keats and the Loss of Romantic Innocence, Volume 107. Rodopi, 1996. Print.