La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

In his poem, "La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad," Keats does two things in particular that intrigue me. Firstly, he twists literary tropes that are traditionally meant to suggest femininity so that they instead suggest decay, or at least decline. Below is an image from Charles Berger's "The Extravagant Shepherd." The image is "a literal portrait of a beauty" using the actual metaphors that were popular for describing female beauty in the 17th century. The image shows just how silly some of these metaphors actually are if you think about them. In Keats' poem, though, he uses a "lily on thy brow" to describe the knight's anguish (9). This is a new way of using the old-school flower image that usually described a woman's pale, beautiful skin. Keats turns a flower trope on its head again in the stanza when he writes that "a fading rose" was withering on the knight's cheeks (11). While roses traditionally suggest love and robust beauty, here the rose is actually suggesting decay. Keats' use of the flower images in this third stanza (as well as throughout the rest of the poem) set up a link between this love story and natural growth. But, because Keats alters the trope, he seems to set up a new link within the initial setup; this new link is between obsession and decay.

The other part of this poem that caught my eye was the fact that the last line of each stanza is shorter than the others and quite definitive, too. This shift in meter draws attention to the final point in each stanza, so I tended to focus more on these than anything else. While the other details in the poem were pretty masterfully crafted and quite lovely to both see and hear, the last lines fell like a thud through this beautiful veil and hinted all along that danger was coming. Take, for example, the first three last lines: "And no birds sing," "And the harvest's done," and "Fast withereth too" (4, 8, 12). It is clear that peril is looming.