La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

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An alternative take on the concept of La Belle Dame sans Merci, from Punch, 1 December 1920

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" (French: "The Beautiful Lady without Pity") is a ballad written by the English poet John Keats. It exists in two versions, with minor differences between them. The original was written by Keats in 1819, although the title is that of a fifteenth century poem by Alain Chartier.

The poem describes the encounter between an unnamed knight and a mysterious fairy. It opens with a description of the knight in a barren landscape, "haggard" and "woe-begone". He tells the reader how he met a beautiful lady whose "eyes were wild"; he set her on his horse and she took him to her "elfin grot", where she "wept, and sigh'd full sore". Falling asleep, the knight had a vision of "pale kings and princes", who cried, "La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall!" He awoke to find himself on the same "cold hill's side" where he is now "palely loitering".

Although "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is short (only twelve stanzas of four lines each, with an ABCB rhyme scheme), it is full of enigmas. Because the knight is associated with images of death—a lily (a symbol of death in Western culture), paleness, "fading", "wither[ing]"—he may well be dead himself at the time of the story. He is clearly doomed to remain on the hillside, but the cause of this fate is unknown. A straightforward reading suggests that the Belle Dame entraps him, along the lines of tales like Thomas the Rhymer or Tam Lin. To continue, as knights are usually bound to vows of sexual chasteness, the poem may imply that this knight is doubly compromised — and, actually, now enchanted — as he dallies here with an ethereal creature. More recent feminist commentators have suggested^{[citation needed]}. that the knight in fact raped the Belle Dame, and is being justly punished — this is based on textual hints like "she wept, and sigh'd full sore". But this may be an unreasonable view, as the text indicates quite clearly that after assuring the knight of her love for him she brings him to a secluded site. The phrase, "she wept, and sigh'd full sore," may be, then, a comment on the occasion of the "fairy's child" losing her virginity. Ultimately, the decision comes down to whether Keats wrote the poem as a simple story, or as a story with a moral: given his other work, this may be more an evocation of feeling than an intellectual attempt at moralising.

[edit] Visual depictions

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" was a popular subject for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. It was depicted by Sir Frank Dicksee, Frank Cadogan Cowper, John William Waterhouse, Arthur Hughes, Walter Crane, and Henry Maynell Rheam. It was also satirised in the December 1, 1920 edition of Punch magazine.

[edit] Musical settings

The best-known musical setting is that by Charles Villiers Stanford. It is a dramatic interpretation requiring a skilled (male) vocalist and equally skilled accompanist. It has remained popular and is included on many anthologies of English song or British Art Music recorded by famous artists.