La Belle Dame Sans Merci as Medieval Romantic Poem
La Belle Dame Sans Merci is the glory of romantic poetry. In it the medieval revival which constitutes one of the most significant aspects of romanticism reaches its culmination. Keats was ever enamoured of the Middle Ages. But it was the external glitter and glamour of the Middle Ages that captivated him. Their weird spirit — the elements of their magic and marvel hardly stirred his imagination.
In La Belle Dame Sans Merci Keats not only reproduces the medieval pomp and chivalry, but also creates the typical medieval atmosphere of enchantment and marvel. The picture of the knight-at-arms with which the poem opens at once transports us into the medieval days of knight-errantry. The beautiful fairy lady who bewitched the knight and ultimately led him to his spiritual doom recalls the medieval vampire woman who sucked men’s blood with cold. The reference to elfin grot, “honey wild and manna dew”, dream-vision of the skeletons of kings, princes and warriors diffuse over the whole poem the mood of awe and wonder that is associated with the medieval mind.
Again in the treatment of medievalism Keats, like Coleridge relies more on subtle suggestion than on description. Nothing is said definitely and in detail. Everything is left to the imagination of the reader. Nothing is said about the nature of the “fairy’s child” or about the fate that awaits the knight. The poem is truly a masterpiece of horror-stricken reticence. George Saintsbury rightly says:
“He (Keats) could have known extremely little of medieval literature; yet there is nothing anywhere which catches up the whole of the true medieval romantic spirit as does the short piece of La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
Like a romantic poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci gives a faithful description of nature. It portrays the winter landscape with its barrenness and desolation:
“The sedge has wither’d from the lake
And no birds sing.”
La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a superb example of the ballad. The story of a mortal creature being bewitched by an enchantress and carried to an elfin world is a fairly recurrent theme in ballad literature. The poem has all the simplicity and directness, the weird beauty and imaginative intensity of the best ballads. L. Hearn rightly says:
“The theme, the phantom woman whose love is death, is almost as old as the world; thousands of poems have been produced upon it. But in simple weird beauty I do not know of anything in all English literature exactly like this.”
Originally published in https://www.eng-literature.com/2020/06/la-belle-dame-sans-merci-medieval-romantic-poem.html
