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. He used the title of a 15th century poem by Alain Chartier, though the plots of the two poems are different.[1] The poem is considered an English classic, stereotypical to other poems of John Keats, a Romantic poet. It avoids simplicity of interpretation despite simplicity of structure. At only a short twelve stanzas, of only four lines each, with a simple ABCB rhyme scheme, the poem is nonetheless full of enigmas, and has been the subject of numerous interpretations.
Keats' poem describes the condition of an unnamed knight who has encountered a mysterious woman who is said to be "a faery's child." It opens with a description of the knight in a barren landscape, "haggard" and "palely loitering". He tells the reader how he met a mysterious but very fair lady whose "eyes were wild." The damsel told the knight that she "loved him true" and took him to her "elfin grot," but upon arriving there, she "wept, and sigh'd full sore." Having realized something that the knight does not yet understand, the mysterious maiden sets the knight to sleep. The knight has a vision of "pale kings and princes," who cry, "La Belle Dame sans Merci [the beautiful, pitiless damsel] hath thee in thrall!" He awakes to find himself on the same "cold hill's side" on which he continues to wait while "palely loitering."
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"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 satirized in the December 1, 1920 edition of Punch magazine.
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. Patrick Hadley also wrote a version for tenor, four-part chorus, and orchestra.
In the 1946 American film, Margie, while at the ice skating rink, Margie’s boyfriend compliments her performance in the school debate competition, saying, "While you were speaking, you looked so sort of intense and full of fire; you made me think of this poem: 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.' That's you Margie."