La Belle Dame Sans Merci And The Dark Side Of Mystery

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’ femme fatale is seductive and ruinous because her actions of luring him into her enslavement turn out to be a catastrophe for the man. In this poem, the woman takes advantage of the “haggard” and “woe-begone” man (6). The woman is described as “Full beautiful – a faery’s child” (14). Her appearance itself is enticing. The phrases “faery’s child” (14) and “eyes were wild” (16) hint that the woman is somewhat unearthly, different, and not just a typical woman. She begins to lure him in, leading the man on as she pretends to love him. The woman looks at the man lovingly – “She look’d at me as she did love” (19) – which gives the man the idea that she does truly loves him. The statement “as she did” (19) shows uncertainty. Eventually, there is an erotic scene in the next line where the woman “made sweet moan” (20). It is not certain if the man and woman are engag...

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...he leads him on – fascinated with her secretive ways.

Throughout “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Year of the Cat,” there are shared destructive elements that also appear throughout The Odyssey. For example, the women in both the poem and song are femme fatales, much like Helen, Calypso, Circe, and Penelope in The Odyssey. In Keats’ poem, the woman captures the man in her thrall just like Calypso and Circe did to Odysseus. A similar element that comes up are the enchantresses in all three works. Keats’ and Stewarts’ femme fatales are both enchantresses like Helen. A third element is journey. Throughout each of the works, the leading man of the piece of writing makes a journey. At some point in each of their journeys, they are captured by a femme fatale. In some ways, they are all different, but one thing remains the same. All three men are wrecked by a fatal woman.