La Belle Dame sans Merci

Like many of Keats’s later poems, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” can be considered a meditation on mortality and death. The external landscape of the poem—the lake, the dried grass, the meads, the elfin grot—enacts the poet’s deepest fears about illness and end. The fundamental and unanswerable question with which the poem wrests is how to live when death is near and a given. From his very introduction, the knight is presented as pale and rudderless, almost paralyzed by what contemporary readers may recognize as panic and anxiety. The reader recognizes the knight is in crisis. To know the exact nature of this crisis, the knight takes the reader on a journey through his storytelling. The knight paints a vivid picture for the poem’s anonymous speaker—the stand-in for the reader—and thus acts as a creative force. In this state, the knight is in his full glory, identified with vitality and spring. The landscape at the start of the knight’s journey is radically different from its current state. It is a landscape of meads, garlands, “honey wild and manna-dew” (Line 26), all symbols of spring, summer, and bounty. The knight is in the prime of his youth. As his journey advances, the knight is led by the lady into the elfin grot, a faery cave. The outdoors is replaced by an enclosed space. A cave is not typically a sunny or warm place, and thus this transition foreshadows a narrowing of the possibilities before the knight.

The lady begins to behave differently in the cave. Earlier laughing, willing to be placed on the knight’s horse, and bewitching, she now weeps and sighs with an unnamed sorrow. It is almost as if she knows what is to come for the knight and mourns his fate. The knight’s dream symbolizes his possibilities shrinking even further; from the confines of the cave, he falls into a nightmare-space where the only people he encounters are those already dead. This is the point that can be interpreted as the knight contracting a fatal illness, the “thrall” (Line 40) of the “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (Line 40), who can be read as a personification of death, fate, or even tubercular disease. Awakened from this dream, the knight finds himself by a chilly lake. His summer has given way to a post-autumnal time. The change in seasons symbolizes his approaching death, since winter is often associated with old age. The poignancy of the poem is that the knight is not really in his winter, winter has been imposed upon him by fate. This points to a life cut short not by the natural progression of ageing, but a cruel trick of fate. The lady symbolizes this aspect of fate.

Fate cannot be argued with, death cannot be prevented. Yet, the lady also cries before lulling the knight and does provide him with love and succor. This dualistic portrait of the lady shows that the knight does accept his fate. He knows the lady is not acting out of particular spite towards him; after all, she has many pale knights and warriors already in her thrall. This suggests that death comes for everybody, sooner or later. The brief beauty the knight enjoys—and vividly describes—is the one unsure antidote against death. On a metatextual level, Keats the poet knows he cannot keep away death. At the same time, he can create immortal beauty through his poems. The poems are not an alternative to a healthy life—which is why Keats often expresses his struggle with poetry, with delving too long in the imagination—but they are stories, and stories help people cope with impossible questions.