Talk:La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

La Belle Dame sans Merci is actually another name for opium. The writer was, at the time, addicted to opium. So the poem is simply a metaphor for the drug. The man wants to keep seeing the fairy, so he can have a wonderful time, but he knows he will end up in a depressing state if he does.

No, it's not.

The opium theory is plausible. Dark Ladies have often been used as a symbol of destructive self-indulgence (Shakespeare sonnets, Swinburne Dolores). The use of opium was common in Bohemian circles of that day. Keats' contemporary, De Quincy, was a self-advertising opium addict.

-- I think, however, that if he were ever addicted to opium, we'd have heard about it. Opium would have been hard to get away from, as it was for Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Surely Keats would have written about it in his letters and it would have affected his work...and if he's writing the poem from an addict's standpoint, I find that hard to believe. None of his other work would give credibility to that.