Nick Bates' Canonball Final Draft

Brian Nicholas Bates

British Romantic Literature

Dr. Christopher Foss

Canonball Project Final Paper (Word Count: 1398)

( Rough Draft )

The Fickle Muse in Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” by John Keats was completed in 1819 just two years before his untimely death at the age of 25 and has stood the test of time as one of his most loved and read works. On the surface, the poem describes a desolate scene where an unnamed questioner asks a sickly, melancholy knight how he came to be in such a state and in such a place. The knight relates a tale of being met by a beautiful and wild woman who he romances for a day. When she lulls him to sleep, the knight is warned in a dream by her former victims that he has in fact been enthralled by the ‘Beautiful Woman without Pity.’ He awakens alone and seemingly drained of vitality, bringing about a complete narrative cycle. However, there is much more to be said about this poem than the mere fairy story at its surface. As an enduring piece by one of the more influential voices of the period, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is rich enough to support a variety of possible interpretations, some of which have interesting implications for a discussion of Keats’ anxiety about his literary destiny and his relationship with the poetic Muse. The poem is an important addition to the canon of BRL because, by engaging in a close reading of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” students will have the opportunity to sift through these many interpretations and think critically about the poem’s significance for Keats on a personal level while gaining a further appreciation for Romantic literature itself.

In examining the poem in which the central figure of the knight is swept away by visions of beauty only to be abandoned in the next moment, one of the perhaps more compelling interpretations is that the knight’s relationship to the lady is a metaphor for the creative process. Could the knight represent the artist’s, or perhaps more specifically Keats, with the lady embodying the fickle Muse? The state in which the knight is left after her abandonment would then describe the way in which the Muse can be generous in her attentions one moment, only to abandon her supplicant suddenly so that he is left alone only to feel her absence all the more keenly for having known her. The Muse, at times, deigns to occasionally grant aspiring writers the merest glimpses of beauty, only for it to be ripped away as if it were only a dream. Once the inspiration has passed, the writer may be left with a sense of beauty, but the harshness of reality is only made all the starker in its wake.

The condition in which the lady leaves the knight could also be a reflection of Keats’ fear at being left unremembered as he contemplates his own end, not having left his mark on the literary landscape. It echoes the tragic, fatalistic outlook Keats adopted in his last years as and allows for an effective comparison with his other works already included on the syllabus such as “Ode to a Nightingale.” This connection is reinforced by the poem’s interesting metrical arrangement. The first three lines of each quatrain are written in iambic tetrameter while the final one is in iambic dimeter which serves to emphasize the final line of each stanza by setting it apart from the others. The most conspicuous example of this is at the end of both the first and final stanzas of the poem with the duplicated line “And no birds sing” [4, 48]. This invites the comparison to the idea of the singing bird in his later poem, “Ode to a Nightingale,” which depicts a creature capable of such easy and beautiful song as to make the poets creative process seem laboring and slow by comparison. By this reading, the nature of the Muse as fickle, hard to grasp, leaving many, at least among mankind, starved for her attention over the years becomes an important theme in both poems. In “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” the “pale kings,” and “Pale warriors ” of stanza 10 could easily represent the past poets that loved the Muse only to be passed over by her charms, their “starv’d lips” [41] now forever denied a portion of the “manna dew” [26] from the hands of their shared mistress, the Muse. Here, again, is paralleled Keats’ own real life fear of fading into literary obscurity and the idea of the harshness of reality against the backdrop of the imagined possibility of becoming immortal. It was Keats’ fear that this literary immortality would be denied him with his name “written in water” to quickly fade away, as alluded to in the line he requested be inscribed on his tombstone. So, the lady without mercy is the embodiment of the Muse as a harsh mistress, reflecting Keats’ anxiety about dying, never to be remembered as the poetic genius he strove to become.

A further appreciation for the Romantic es entailed in studying “La Belle Dame sans Merci” in that it also presents a strong sense of Romantic irony in its juxtaposition of the unresolved conflicts between the dualities of dream and reality, the objective and the subjective. This offers a further connection to “Ode to a Nightingale” when one examines the final lines of that poem: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: -Do I wake or sleep?” [79 - 80]. Such a reading of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” can be obtained by examining both the structure of the narrative and the oppositions apparent in the text. As the story is told, the reader is taken through several transitions between waking and dreaming, reality and fantasy, such that the truth of the tale is left ultimately in question. The questioner at the outset of the poem is the objective grounding of the narrative. He is an impartial observer that initially takes stock of the knight who is “alone and palely loitering” [2, 46] in a “haggard and woe-begone” state [6] and asks how he came to be as such. The night responds with a story that begins in an idyllic manner as he delights in the company of a beautiful lady, but he is warned in a dream that he is in fact in thrall. This seems to imply that his senses were lying to him and he was in fact in the grips of an illusion, of a fantasy of sorts, from the moment he is said to have met the lady. Thus the narrative has moved from reality to fantasy as the knight begins his story. When he awakens on the cold hill, all trace of the lady and of her native environs are gone and the knight finds himself alone as described in the first stanzas of the poem, bringing us back into the real world. Lines 1-3 are identical to the final three lines of the poem, completing the narrative cycle. The narrative transitions from the reality of our outside observer to the illusory world of the bewitching Lady, to the dream within the illusion, to return to the harshness of reality. This structure parallels the knight’s journey, perhaps symbolic of the poet’s, of embracing the subjective reality of the impossibly beautiful and indeed otherworldly woman over that of the bleak, objective reality that he must ultimately confront. Yet the poem’s preference remains one that is unresolved, and the reader is left to further analyze the question after having read the poem.

In light of these points, “La Belle Dame sans Merci should be featured in the BRL curriculum. A student of Romantic literature should seek to understand why this particular product of one of the “big six” has so inspired the imagination of its readers to become one of the most popular pieces of the period. The poem is at once accessible and inaccessible. A surface reading of the poem is nearly effortless yet it lends itself readily to a variety of often mutually exclusive interpretations, making “La Belle Dame sans Merci” a fertile ground for the discerning reader n which various possible interpretations abound. Further, the poem offers an additional connection to the life of Keats through its symbolic parallels to Keats’ fears of literary obscurity while offering interesting points of discussion in a comparative analysis of the poem along side “Ode to a Nightingale.”