La Belle Dame Sans Merci Flashcards
What is the romantic period?
Not just about love and stories, but a political and social movement as well has a literary one. Romantics were reacting to an 18th century obsession with order, rationality and scientific precision. Romantic writers felt that these Enlightenment era thinkers missed the point about what is means to be human.
What words were written on his grave? And why?
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water”
Because he felt as if he didn’t live up to his potential and his poetry was like words written in water, life too short to be memorable
Summary of “la belle dame sans merci”
Speaker comes across a “”knight at arms, alone and dying in a field. He asks him what’s going on and the knight takes up the rest of the narration. He says he meta. Beautiful fairy lady in the fields. He started to hang out with her, made flower garlands fir germ letting her ride on his horse a d generally flirting. Finally she invited him back to her dairy cage. But after they finishing kissing she “lulled” him to sleep and he had a nightmare about all the knights and kings and princes she had previously seduced - they were all dead. And then he woke up alone, on the side of a hill somewhere.
