La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Question 1

Medieval Chivalric Romance.

Answer 1

is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The tradition usually involves a love-struck knight pursuing a remote, perfect ‘lady’, who is idealised, so that little of her own inner life is revealed. The knight often has to prove himself on a quest or perform acts of courage to win her. Tragic rather than happy endings were often the outcome. Here, we can assume that the knight’s adventures are curtailed; the poem homes in on the point where the knight is dying and we can assume he will go no further.

Question 2

Ballad Style

Answer 2

However, Keats did not choose the usual alternating three and four metrical iambs or feet per line. He chose instead three lines of four iambs each followed by a short, choppy catalectic line. These latter shortened lines vary rhythmically, but the use of emphatic one syllable words, for example, ‘I love thee true’ could be described as spondaic. This gives an unusually springy rhythm. In each stanza lines two and four are rhyming.

Question 3

Refrains

Answer 3

repeating lines like ‘And no bird sings’ to give rhythm and emphasis. This is typical of the ballad genre.

Question 4

Archaic Language

Answer 4

Keats uses the type of archaic language of the Medieval romance, for example ‘full beautiful’ for very beautiful, and ‘ails thee’ and ‘woebegone’. In romances there are, for example, references to flowers, usually roses, as in ‘I made a garland for her head’, and references to mystical music, as in the ‘faery’s song’. Sadly, in this gentle parody, the knight’s dream of happiness is not realised.