Keats is one of my favorite Romantic poets, and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" was one of my favorite poems. The first time I read it, in high school, I thought that it was just a "mood" poem about a Siren. It was in further reading that I began to see it on a deeper level, as a story about the danger in living in fantasy, and not accepting reality.
Keats opens with an unknown speaker addressing a knight, who is "loitering" around a hill. He says the knight looks "haggard and woe-begone," describing his physical and mental states. The speaker may or may not be soemone who is simply concerned for the knight. In his statements he offers the knight two choices based on his behavior and appearance: the first is death, symbolized by the "wither'd lake"; the second is life, seeing that "the squirrel's granary is full," or that there is the presence of normal, natural life. We also know that from the footnotes he perceives the knight's melancholy is due to lost love--lily symbol for death and rose for love or beauty. What we find from the knight, however, is that his love was not for a person, or at least a real one, but for the fantasy life that she allowed him to be a part of.
In the knight's telling of his tale, Keats mixes details that are normal to us, and some that are otherworldly, like the knight himself versus the lady, who speaks in "language strange," or the reference to manna which the lady prepared for him, a "miraculous dew" to create a sense of mystery. Keats use of word choice like "a fairy's child", her "elfin grot", reinforce the idea of something imaginary. Also, we can see where the lady, a symbol of fantasy or imagination, has taken control of the knight in the seventh stanza, where the knight switches from use of "I" to "She." In the fifth stanza, the knight has taken her onto his horse, and "nothing else saw all day long; for sideways would she lean...". She is blocking his view of the world, enticing him to accept her enthrallment, which he does.
When he falls asleep with her, he dreams of her previous victims, all "kings, and princes too,/pale warriors..." Keats seems to imply that men of power may live in a fantasy land too, being out of touch with reality, or how real people live. This vision proves terrifying to the knight, and forces him back to a waking state. It is upon waking, though, that the knight seems even more lost. He is not loitering, or merely hanging out, but "sojourn(ing)," implying a stay, again avoiding the real world, but not letting go of his fantasy world either. The trouble is one can not survive in a fantasy; nor can one ignore reality and live. At the end, the knight echoes the lines of the questioner, "That is why I sojourn here/Alone and palely loitering,/Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,/And no birds sing." In doing so, and in using the symbology of the withered lake, the knight is telling us that he has chosen death. He is dying from an inability to let go of his fantasy world, which though deadly to him, explains why he wouldn't leave the hillside after waking; conversely, not leaving the hillside will surely kill him as well because he can not live actively.
Keats opens with an unknown speaker addressing a knight, who is "loitering" around a hill. He says the knight looks "haggard and woe-begone," describing his physical and mental states. The speaker may or may not be soemone who is simply concerned for the knight. In his statements he offers the knight two choices based on his behavior and appearance: the first is death, symbolized by the "wither'd lake"; the second is life, seeing that "the squirrel's granary is full," or that there is the presence of normal, natural life. We also know that from the footnotes he perceives the knight's melancholy is due to lost love--lily symbol for death and rose for love or beauty. What we find from the knight, however, is that his love was not for a person, or at least a real one, but for the fantasy life that she allowed him to be a part of.
In the knight's telling of his tale, Keats mixes details that are normal to us, and some that are otherworldly, like the knight himself versus the lady, who speaks in "language strange," or the reference to manna which the lady prepared for him, a "miraculous dew" to create a sense of mystery. Keats use of word choice like "a fairy's child", her "elfin grot", reinforce the idea of something imaginary. Also, we can see where the lady, a symbol of fantasy or imagination, has taken control of the knight in the seventh stanza, where the knight switches from use of "I" to "She." In the fifth stanza, the knight has taken her onto his horse, and "nothing else saw all day long; for sideways would she lean...". She is blocking his view of the world, enticing him to accept her enthrallment, which he does.
When he falls asleep with her, he dreams of her previous victims, all "kings, and princes too,/pale warriors..." Keats seems to imply that men of power may live in a fantasy land too, being out of touch with reality, or how real people live. This vision proves terrifying to the knight, and forces him back to a waking state. It is upon waking, though, that the knight seems even more lost. He is not loitering, or merely hanging out, but "sojourn(ing)," implying a stay, again avoiding the real world, but not letting go of his fantasy world either. The trouble is one can not survive in a fantasy; nor can one ignore reality and live. At the end, the knight echoes the lines of the questioner, "That is why I sojourn here/Alone and palely loitering,/Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,/And no birds sing." In doing so, and in using the symbology of the withered lake, the knight is telling us that he has chosen death. He is dying from an inability to let go of his fantasy world, which though deadly to him, explains why he wouldn't leave the hillside after waking; conversely, not leaving the hillside will surely kill him as well because he can not live actively.
posted by stevepeano at 10:24 AM
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