La Belle Dame sans Merci

Question 1

Form

Answer 1

• Ballad - Traditionally about love and death
• Therefore it has musical and narrative qualities, showing how he is retelling the events with regret and dolefulness
• It allows us to hear it as a story which is unfolding

Question 2

Main themes

Answer 2

• Love (unreciprocal)
• Control
• Loss (he lost his honour, chivalry and vitality)
• Manipulation
• Temptation

Question 3

Title

Answer 3

• Allusion to a medieval French courtly romance
• It shares many elements with romances and has an archaic feel
• However he changes the theme takes many ideals of romantic novelists at the time and reverses them, for example giving nature an element of evility to it

Question 4

Stanzaic structure

Answer 4

• 12 stanzas, each one a quatrain
• Creates the appearance of chapters in a story

Question 5

Metre

Answer 5

• Iambic tetrameter
• However the last line of each stanza is a dimetric (has two feet instead of four) though remains iambic
• It creates the sense that his vitality is slowly being drained but also that the end is dissatisfying (representative of the end of his story overall being dissatisfying)

Question 6

Rhyme scheme

Answer 6

• Consistent ABCB rhyme scheme
• Creates a musical tone, but also creates a sense of a story unfolding which has happened many times before (allusion to the previous victims of the woman)

Question 7

Lots of anastrophe

Answer 7

Creates an archaic tone and end-stops certain words for emphasis

Question 8

‘O what can ail thee’

Answer 8

• Ecphonesis and archaic language
• Creates a medieval setting
• Creates the sense that the other man had simply come across him, showing his helplessness and how lost he is

Question 9

‘Knight-at-arms’

Answer 9

• Juxtaposition to ‘O what can ail thee’
• Creates a sense of suprise that somebody so chivalarous and noble would be stranded like he is, making him seem more helpless and making us wonder why he is there

Question 10

‘Alone and palely loitering’

Answer 10

• Lexical field of isolation
• Make him seem lonely and helpless
• Loitering is end-stopped to make him seem aimless

Question 11

‘The sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing’

Answer 11

• Objective correlative
• The death of the environment around him symbolise his internal death caused by what just happened
• It being on the brink of winter symbolise him being on the brink of death

Question 12

‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms’ in the second stanza

Answer 12

• Repetition of question structure
• Shows how the narrator is still wondering how he ended up like this due to how it belied his chivalric identity

Question 13

‘So haggard and woe-begone’

Answer 13

Further contrasts with the expectations of a chivalric knight

Question 14

‘The squirrels granary is full, and the harvest’s done’

Answer 14

The safe and secure tone of a full granary and completed harvest juxtaposes the knight’s helpless state

Question 15

‘I see a lily on thy brow’

Answer 15

• The lily is a metaphor for purity and renewal
• The lily being on his dying body is symbolic of the women having polluted the purity of his masculinity with her feminine impurities

Question 16

‘With anguish moist and fever-dew’

Answer 16

• The anguish and the fever represent a juxtaposition between his lasting fear and his declining vitality
• The fever-dew foreshadows the disease and poison the women gives to him in the form of her ‘mana-dew’

Question 17

‘And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast withereth too’

Answer 17

• The fading rose is a metaphor
• It represents his deteorating chivalry an vitality

Question 18

‘a faery’s child’

Answer 18

Connotations of being supernatural

Question 19

‘Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild’

Answer 19

• Tricolon of similar clauses
• All are descriptions which have connotations of promiscuity and licentiousness

Eyes were wild potentially foreshadows that she is dangerous

Question 20

‘I made a garland for her head, and bracelets too, and fragrant zone;’

Answer 20

• Personal pronoun ‘I’ show that he is currently in control
• ‘Garland’, ‘bracelet’ and ‘fragrant zone’ have connotations of entrapment (though potentially adoration) and that he is in control now

Question 21

‘She looked at me as she did love and made sweet moan’

Answer 21

• Sexual undertones
• The women’s submission is likely an attempt to lure him in

Alternative reading of the entire poem - There is a suggestion that potentially at this stage he is the one in control of her and she is not genuinely happy (and she later lures him in and almost kills him in protest)

Question 22

‘I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long’

Answer 22

• Personal pronoun ‘I’ shows he is still in control
• However ‘seeing nothing else all day long’ suggests he is become entranced and is losing his control

His unrestrained behaviour juxtaposes his supposed chivalry

Question 23

‘For sidelong would she bend, and sing/A faery’s song’

Answer 23

• Allusion of the common trope of women singing to lure men
• Shows how she too is currently alluring him

Question 24

‘She found me roots of relish sweet And honey wild, and manna-dew’

Answer 24

• Pronoun change to she shows how she has gained control, bringing him items of nature in a tricolon which makes her seem wild
• ‘Manna-dew’ is a juxtaposition, as ‘manna’ the food from heaven, is corrupted by the ‘dew’ which makes this food only make him hungrier for more

Question 25

‘I love thee true’

Answer 25

• End-focusing on true
• Shows how she her perfidious nature

Question 26

‘She took me to her elfin grot’

Answer 26

• Grot has yonic symbolisms
• This shows how she is sexually alluring him

Question 27

‘And there she wept and sighed full sore’

Answer 27

This is only to be duplicitous and make him feel guilty to allure him in even further

Question 28

‘And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four’

Answer 28

• The return of the personal pronoun shows he now thinks he is in control but he has been deceived, shown by the affection he exhibited through ‘with kisses four’
• ‘Wild wild’ is epizeuxis, showing how he has lost his composure and control and is lustfully admiring her promiscuous look

Question 29

‘And there she lulled me alseep’

Answer 29

At this point she has beaten him and he has fully lost his autonomy

Question 30

‘And there I dreamed - Ah! woe betide!’

Answer 30

• Volta - he is now describing the negative, that being his bad dream and his waking up on the hill side
• ‘Ah!’ is ecphonesis to show his regret

Question 31

‘On the cold hill side’

Answer 31

• Objective correlative and sensory image
• Juxtaposition to the warm, safe ‘grot’
• Shows her inimical nature despite being comforting at first

Question 32

‘I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors’

Answer 32

• Lexical field of powerful roles for men
• Shows her propensity for taking control of men with status and nobility
• This creates the impression she may have wanted power for herself

Question 33

‘Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;’

Answer 33

• Repetition of pale, and addition of ‘death’ on second pale
• Plosive alliteration creates a sense of harshness
• Shows how he is moving closer to death’

Question 34

‘I saw their starved lips in the gloam’

Answer 34

• ‘Gloam’ is another name for twilight which is a liminal time
• This shows the woman’s insidious effect on her victims and how they slowly die, just like the knight is doing now
• This is corroborated by the suffering portrayed through ‘starved lips’

Question 35

Repetition of words from the first stanza at the end

Answer 35

• It shows how he has now answered the question of the other man
• It provides an explanation to the question (which was asked twice) by the man about why he is now so weak and is about to die on the hillside and a conclusion to the poem