Keats-La belle dame sans merci

Question 1

‘And no birds sing’

Answer 1

This natural imagery (romanticism) ‘birds singing’ shows that life of the Knight is now lonely. Possibly mentally he is not ok, all happiness is sucked from him because of the faerys child

Question 2

And I awoke and found me here

On the cold hill’s side’

Answer 2

end of poem.The Knight woke from a nightmare and was left literally cold and alone. This shows the demise of the noble hero.

Question 3

‘And nothing else saw all day long ‘

Answer 3

Blindness is a trope of tragedy and keats. It can be the idea that what is going to hurt you cannot be seen. The knight is blinded by the beauty of the fairy and so he cannot even function, he is impaired because of his ‘blindness’. Blindness is also commonly used in Lamia

Question 4

‘I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death pale were they all’

Answer 4

There is no resolution (Aristotle) for victims of tragedy by the fairy, it is a cycle, the knight is not the first and it is not clear whether he will be the last. Maybe he is also trying to justify that even nobler men than him have been affected.

Question 5

‘eyes were wild’

‘wild wild eyes

Answer 5

Wild is an interesting, if not slightly strange way to describe a woman’s eyes. They arent beautiful? They are wild, there is something captivating about them. The fairy has a hold on him and is in power of the situation. Femme fatale

Question 6

‘She looked at me as she did love,And made sweet moan.’

Answer 6

These lines are usually interpreted as a sex scene. The knight and the lady here consummate their love. At least, they’re consummating her love. Notice that she’s the subject in this sentence: she’s the one doing all the “look[ing],” “lov[ing],” and “moan[ing].”

Question 7

‘I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gaped ‘

Answer 7

The knight has finally come to realise what has happened to him and that he is now a victim of her
Anagorisis

Question 8

‘And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering

Answer 8

Poem ends in a cyclical structure. The question from the start has been answered- kind of. There is a high level of ambiguity of what really happened. Reader left with questions