La Belle Dame sans Merci is a poem written by author John Keats during the Romanticism movement. Because of this, the poem largely has aspects of subjectivity and it almost seems to view the world in a more glamorized way than it actually is – or was at the time, at least. John Keats was a writer and poet whose work originated during this movement and therefore was very focused on nature and softening the harsh realities of the world around him. Keats used elements of fairytails and other fantastical aspects to portray his work in a way that differed from other romantic writers. Perhaps his most significant contribution to modern day literature was his creation of the concept of “negative capability,” something which suggests how one should be willing to embrace uncertainty and bask in the glory of peace and amibiguity. A poem which most broadly reflects this concept is La Belle sans Merci.
La Belle Dame sans Merci is a poem where a man (or woman) – unnamed – comes across a knight by a lake. He questions the knight, and asks him what causes his anguish. The knight responds with a story about falling in love with a woman he had met in a meadow. He describes her beauty, her elegance, the way she speaks. He then tells the man or woman about how he falls asleep and dreams of the woman enslaving and cursing the princes and kings and when he wakes up, the woman is gone.
This poem deeply reflects a sense of tension between imagination and reality through its style, structure and deeper meaning. Throughout the poem, Keats explores the tension that the knight faces between what is real and what is merely a figment of his imagination. This is especially the case when the knight falls asleep and dreams of the beautiful woman he meets enslaving and cursing the princes who she brings to her home. Primarily in this poem, readers are able to notice that the tension between imagination and reality is caused when the knight falls asleep which connects to the concept of dreaming versus reality. The transition in La Belle sans Merci comes when the knight falls asleep…
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
This can portray the woman’s “taste,” in men and how she seems to lure in knights, kings, princes until they fall in love with her and then captures them as her own. Of course, readers still fight to figure out whether or not the entirety of the story the author tells is even real, or is simply a figment of his imagination.
Furthermore, it is also clear that the knight wishes to escape reality where “the sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing.”