La Belle Dame Sans Merci

(The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy)

Context
• This poem suggests that a perfect, romantic relationship is impossible to achieve.
• Keats was part of the Romantic Movement. The Romantic poets often used knights and maidens in
their poems, in order to explore ideas about love, duty and honour.
• The Romantics were also drawn to supernatural and magical themes as this allowed them to
investigate ideas such as reality, and illusions.
• Keats had tuberculosis while writing this poem: this influenced the poem’s tone and subject.
• He was also undecided about whether to enter into a relationship with Fanny Brawne, whom he
loved but whose friends disapproved of Keats.
LANGUAGE
• There is a lot of floral imagery in the poem created by the words ‘lily’, ‘fading rose’, and ‘garland’.
Lillies are a common choice of funeral flower and thus, is connected to death and loss. Roses are
usually associated with romance but since it is ‘fading’, it suggests the Knight is ill or that his romance
is dying.
• Flowers are delicate, which is in contrast to the image of a knight who is supposed to be strong and
protected by armour and weapons. Therefore, the floral imagery emphasises the idea that anyone
can fall victim to love, whether you are strong or weak.
STRUCTURE
• The poem starts and ends with the same imagery of the ‘withered sedge’ and the lack of birdsong.
This gives the poem a cyclical structure, which reflects how the knight is trapped and cannot move
forward in life.
• The repetition of the ‘withered’ plants and the lack of birdsong begins and ends the poem with an
atmosphere of death and suggests that the knight is doomed by his encounter.
• The use of repetition is consistent throughout the poem and forms a web-like structure, which can
symbolise a trap used by the fairy to catch the men.
FORM
• La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a ballad, a form often used for poems with a strong narrative.
• Ballads were traditionally passed down in spoken form (spoken or sung) and therefore have strong
rhyme schemes to help make them memorable.
• This poem has an ABCB rhyme scheme which is typical of a ballad. In this poem, lines 2 and 4 of each
stanza rhyme and this is consistent throughout the poem, giving it a lyrical quality, like a song.
• This poem has 4-line stanzas called Quatrains, which is typical of a ballad.
 Comprehension Questions
1. What is wrong with the Knight in the poem?

2. Who is the lady in the poem?

The woman who is named as ‘Fairies Child’, with long hair, white skin. Attracted the knight. At the beginning
of the poem, saying that she is the daughter of the Fairy, but after she met the knight, she took him to the
Elven Grotto. Conclusion: she Fairy or Elf

3. Find 2 examples of nature in the poem.

‘I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and a fragrant belt,’

4. What ‘gifts’ does the speaker give to the woman?

The knight made a wreath for her, put the bracelets on his hands on a horse and did not see anything else

5. What do the people in the Knight’s dream warn him about?

They warned that she would attract him and bring him to death.

6. What happens to the speaker at the end of the poem?

After the Fairy took him to the Elven Grotto, she burst into tears, he closed her Wild Eyes, after she
put him to sleep, he saw kings there, princes who were bewitched by her, they said that he was a
captive and he had to get up, if he did not, then he would die.