La Belle Dame Sans Merci — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
The poems
What you need to know
A knight found pale and alone by a lake at the end of autumn tells how a beautiful, wild-eyed woman enchanted him and left him on a cold hillside, where he dreamt of the kings and warriors she had already trapped.
How Keats's language creates enchantment and decay: the withered sedge and silent birds, the lily and fading rose of illness, the lady's wild eyes and strange language, and the starved lips of her earlier victims.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms', 'Alone and palely loitering', 'And no birds sing', 'Full beautiful – a faery's child', 'And her eyes were wild', 'I love thee true', 'And there I shut her wild wild eyes / With kisses four', 'La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!', 'I saw their starved lips in the gloam', 'On the cold hill's side'.
Form: a literary ballad of twelve quatrains rhyming ABCB, the shortened last line of each stanza, three stanzas of questions and nine of the knight's answer, and a circular ending that repeats the opening.
Context: Keats in 1819, his love for Fanny Brawne and the tuberculosis that killed his brother Tom and then Keats himself at 25 in 1821; the title taken from a 15th-century poem by Alain Chartier; and the Romantic taste for the medieval, the supernatural and the femme fatale.
Compares well with: My Last Duchess (power and danger in a relationship), Neutral Tones (lost love and a bleak natural setting), Love's Dog (love that delights and harms) and My Father Would Not Show Us (loss and death).
