La Belle Dame Sans Merci

In the poem a medieval knight recounts a fanciful romp in the countryside with a fairy woman la belle dame sans merci which means the beautiful lady without mercy in french that ends in cold horror.

La belle dame sans merci. Related to this focus on death and horror keats wrote the poem months after his brother tom died of tuberculosis. O what can ail thee knight at arms alone and palely loitering. The sedge has wither d from the lake and no birds sing. La belle dame sans merci.

Ballads generally use a bouncy rhythm and rhyme scheme to tell a story. Think about an event that has happened to you recently and try to tell it in ballad form. Keats s life and conflicts his love for his neighbor fanny brawne and his awareness of impending death are written like code into the predicament of a dying medieval knight the poem s principal character. La belle dame sans merci the beautiful lady without mercy is a ballad produced by the english poet john keats in 1819.

La belle dame a compact ballad is wound as tightly as a fuse. La belle dame sans merci is a ballad by john keats one of the most studied and highly regarded english romantic poets. La belle dame sans merci is a ballad one of the oldest poetic forms in english. The speaker of the poem comes across a knight at arms alone and apparently dying in a field somewhere.