La Belle Dame sans Merci

Like many of Keats’s later poems, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” can be considered a meditation on mortality and death. The external landscape of the poem—the lake, the dried grass, the meads, the elfin grot—enacts the poet’s deepest fears about illness and end. The fundamental and unanswerable question with which the poem wrests is how to live when death is near and a given. From his very introduction, the knight is presented as pale and rudderless, almost paralyzed by what contemporary readers may recognize as panic and anxiety. The reader recognizes the knight is in crisis. To know the exact nature of this crisis, the knight takes the reader on a journey through his storytelling. The knight paints a vivid picture for the poem’s anonymous speaker—the stand-in for the reader—and thus acts as a creative force. In this state, the knight is in his full glory, identified with vitality and spring. The landscape at the start of the knight’s journey is radically different from its current state. It is a landscape of meads, garlands, “honey wild and manna-dew” (Line 26), all symbols of spring, summer, and bounty. The knight is in the prime of his youth. As his journey advances, the knight is led by the lady into the elfin grot, a faery cave.