La Belle Dame Sans Merci (A Ballad)

John Keats

AO3

• Lilies

  • Associated traditionally with funerals and death

  • allusions to white

• Long hair

  • Represents femininity

  • in some religions, the longer the hair, the more pure the individual

• Roots

  • Folklore + fables

  • consuming food is a form of entrapment

• Mana-dew and wild honey

  • Food of Gods

  • What God provided to the Israelites

  • Honey = alludes to the promised land for the Jews

  • Great chain of being - can kill Kings - more powerful than God

AO3

• Keats - youngest of the Romantics

  • natural imagery

  • encouragement of love

  • awareness of its downfalls

  • anti organised religion

• Family history of Tuberculosis

  • Went to Italy to prolong his life

  • Wrote ‘La Belle Dame’ with the shadow of death hanging over him

• Engaged to Fanny Brown

  • Kept apart due to finances and his illness

• Died at 25

  • only just starting to write his best poetry

  • awareness that his life was too short to reach his potential

AO3

• Title

  • comes from 15th Century poem by Alan Chartier

• Original poem

  • 100 stanzas of dialogue between a man and a woman

  • dialogue framed by the narrator poet grieving for his recently lost love

  • Male lover = alone on horseback, driven to wander by Sadness, robbed of feeling by Death

  • Lady eventually refuses to return his feelings of love

• beautiful lady without pity

  • Popular character

  • appears in folklore, classical literature, ballads, Renaissance and Medieval poetry

  • Circe-like figure - Femme Fatale, sirens, only function is to entrap

AO4

• Comparing the fairy to Titania

• Porphyria’s lover

  • Lulling to sleep

  • hair

AO4

• Destructive, painful love

  • Who so list

  • Ae fond kiss

• Love and gender

  • She walks in beauty

  • The ruined maid

• Gatsby

  • ‘sing a faery’s song’

  • ‘That voice was a deathless song’

  • ‘So haggard and so woe-begone’

  • ‘he was one of these worn-out men’

AO5

• Person - feminist

  • ‘Daisy is more victim than victimiser’

  • La Belle Dame is paradoxically presented as passive and powerful

  • depersonalised vision of her and the innuendo implies sexual violence

  • reasoning behind her physical and emotional violence

• Opposes Daisy in her autonomy

AO5

• Paulson, psychoanalytic

  • ‘The odd vacuum placed just at the point where Gatsby finally reaches and possesses the unattainable woman’

  • the vacuum = the dream of the male speaker

  • idea of unattainable women

    • Dictated in contrasting ways

    • La Belle Dame - chooses how accessible she is

    • Daisy - inaccessible because of Tom but still can choose infidelity (which is doomed to fail)