La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1819) Flashcards
Author?
John Keats
Story
2 first persons speakers
A knight narrates his encounter with a femme fatale character and how this lead to his live sickness/death
Themes
Love
Death
Enchant meant
Tone
Super natural
Melancholic
Deathly
Form and structure
Ballad-love song
Last line is cut short-knights life is cut short
Regular rhyme and cyclical nature-death is investable and inescapable
Language
Archaic language-helps with the medieval setting “ail thee” “steed” “thy”
Repetition of pale-knight is dying “palely loitering” “pale” “death pale”
Metaphors of death-knight is dying “I see a lily in thy brow” “fading rose”
Pathetic fallacy-foreshadowing knights death “the sedge has withered from the lake” “no birds sing”
Context
Keats knew he was dying of TB in his 20’s while writing the poem his brother died of TB two years earlier
“A Faerys song” could depict the woman as a siren from Greek mythology- as they would suffice sailors with songs and would die in the water trying to swim to them
What does “alone and palely loitering” mean
Sets up a dilemma for the start of the poem
It’s also a rhetorical question
“No birds sing” meaning
This is the last words of the poem this means that all the hope and happiness is gone as birds represent hope
“I set her on my pacing steed”
All one part of his story as he explains what he does with the girl show is on his horse having fun
What does the title mean?
The beautiful woman without pity
The poems rhyme scheme is
Abcb
The two literary genres that Keats blends here
Romance and gothic
Where the poems changes narrative perspectives
Stanza 4
The connotations of the lily flower
Deat, but also purity
