Nick Bates' Canonball Draft

Brian Nicholas Bates

Canonball Project

“La Belle Dame sans Merci,” by John Keats is an example of lyric poetry and was completed in 1819 just two years before his early death at the age of 26.. “La Belle Dame” is a ballad that follows a regular metre and rhyme scheme, consisting of 12 quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme. The first three lines of each quatrain are written in iambic tetrameter while the final one is in iambic dimeter. This arrangement serves to emphasize the final line of each stanza by setting it apart from the others. On the surface, the poem describes a situation in which 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, only to be lulled to sleep by her and 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, completing his explanation to the unknown questioner and completing the narrative cycle.

“La Belle Dame sans Merci” should be in the class curriculum for a multitude of reasons. As an enduring piece by one of the more influential voices of the period, it exemplifies many of the characteristics that have been associated with Romanticism while its language and the framework of its narrative structure remain simple enough to recommend it to easy assimilation while yet remaining rich enough to support a variety of possible interpretations. Some of these have implications on Keats’ anxiety about his literary destiny and his relationship with the muse, echoing the tragic, fatalistic outlook he adopted in his last years. Further, it’s theme can be effectively compared to other works included in the syllabus and that could be, such as “Ode to a Nightingale,” while its stylistic strengths allow for an appreciation of the poem on its own artistic merit.

Although the focus on the so-called “big six” has waned in recent years, no serious inquiry into romantic literature would be complete without a comprehensive study of their more influential and definitive works. “La Belle Dame” is a work firmly entrenched in the canon of romanticism: For instance, it exemplifies strong emotion, here despair and loss. It was also influenced by medievalism, reaching back to a time before the enlightenment as so much of Romantic literature tended to do, in this case focusing on the familiar trope of a knight and fair maid. It also shows an obvious preference for the pastoral over the urban with its frequent mention of natural imagery such as flowers and shows a concentration on the power of poetic meter common to Romantic poetry.

This last point introduces another reason to focus on “La Belle Dame” is to gain an appreciation for the artistry of the poem itself which has captivated audiences as one of the most popular works of the period to the present day. There is a great deal on which to gain purchase in an aesthetic analysis of the poem. Where much of our readings and discussion have perhaps revolved around the content and ideology behind certain works, “La Belle Dame...” offers an opportunity to focus on the aesthetic quality of a definitive work of the aesthetically-minded Keats.

Additionally the poem is a fertile ground in which various interpretations abound; a close reading of “La Belle Dame...” offers the reader a number of possible interpretations. A given reader may be struck by the presence of romantic love in the poem, which could perhaps be extended to a discussion of gender relations of the time. One might ask, does the lady perhaps represent the romantic love that so consumed Keats’ dying days and that would ultimately be denied him? It is also possible to interpret the poem in light of Keats’ experiences with tuberculosis, the disease that claimed the lives of his mother, his brother and ultimately, his own. Could the lady’s enervation of the knight be indicative of the ravaging effects of tuberculosis, leaving him feverish and pale, wasting away, unable to capture the beauty of his dream imagery? Such images of paleness and fever would never have been far from his mind as he was intimately familiar with the disease.

The poem could also be seen to say something about the Romantic duality of the subjective and objective. Such a reading is 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. 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 a 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.

This leads us to another thought: perhaps the poem could represent a metaphor for the creative process. Could the relationship between the faery lady and the knight represent the artist’s relationship with the muse, or more specifically, Keats’ relationship with his own muse? The condition in which the lady leaves the knight could be a reflection of his fear at being left unremembered as he contemplates his own end, not having left his mark on the literary landscape. Perhaps it is a description of the writing process common to all artists, though, as the muse 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.

With this in mind, this work can readily be connected to the untimely demise of Keats, giving a greater appreciation for not only the tragedy of that, as felt by some of his contemporaries and his fans ever since, but also this connection may give greater insight into the work itself. Could be related to the idea in the 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 due to the nature of the muse as fickle, hard to grasp, leaving many starved for her attention over the years (pale kings, warriors, etc.). This, in “La Belle Dame” a fate feared by Keats - i.e. fading into literary obscurity.

Has lady failed to make the knight (Keats) immortal, introducing a theme of the harshness of reality against the backdrop of the imagined possibility of becoming immortal in his verse that Keats held so dear and feared would never come to pass with his name “written in water?” So, the muse is a harsh mistress, reflecting Keats’ anxiety about dying, never to be remembered as the poetic genius he strove to become?

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.