Introduction
La Belle Dame Sans Merci was written at a painful moment in Keats’s life: his brother had died of tuberculosis
the year before, he himself had had the first symptoms of the same disease and this cast a shadow over the
love he felt for a young woman he had recently met, Fanny Brawne. In addition, Keats was torn between his
love for the girl and his devotion to poetry. The conflict between love and poetry, the sense of death in life,
the inexorable passing of time and the awareness that poetic inspiration may be short-lived are all present
in this poem. However, Keats avoids the danger of egocentricity and achieves considerable impersonality,
especially by using the ballad form.
The title of the poem means “the beautiful lady without pity” and was borrowed from a Medieval poem by
Alain Chartier. Although it is a literary ballad, it maintains many aspects of the folk ballad. It begins in media
res, carries the narrative forward with questions and answers in direct speech, and ends on a note of fateful
(profetica) certainty. In addition, the Mediaeval setting and the motif of the journey into the Greenwood,
add to the poem impersonality, transforming feelings and intuitions that Keats must have felt very close to
his heart into a mysterious and beautiful poem.
Summary
An unidentified speaker asks a knight what afflicts him. The knight is pale, haggard (smunto; dall'aria
smarrita), and obviously dying. "And on thy cheeks a fading rose / Fast withereth too — ." The knight answers
that he met a beautiful lady, "a faery's child" who had looked at him as if she loved him. When he set her on
his horse, she led him to her cave. There she had sung him to sleep. In his sleep he had nightmarish dreams.
Pale kings, princes, and warriors told him that he had been enslaved by a beautiful but cruel lady. When he
awoke, the lady was gone and he was lying on a cold hillside.
Analysis
"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad, a medieval genre revived by the romantic poets. Keats uses the socalled ballad stanza, a quatrain in alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. The shortening of the
fourth line in each stanza of Keats' poem makes the stanza seem a self-contained unit, gives the ballad a
deliberate and slow movement, and is pleasing to the ear. Keats uses a number of the stylistic characteristics
of the ballad, such as simplicity of language, repetition, and absence of details; like some of the old ballads,
it deals with the supernatural. Keats' economical manner of telling a story in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is
the direct opposite of his lavish (fastoso; sontuoso) manner in The Eve of St. Agnes. Part of the fascination
exerted (esercitare) by the poem comes from Keats' use of understatement. (affermazione troppo blanda)
Keats sets his simple story of love and death in a bleak (desolato; brullo; spoglio) wintry landscape that is
appropriate to it: "The sedge has wither'd from the lake / And no birds sing!" The repetition of these two
lines, with minor variations, as the concluding lines of the poem emphasizes the fate of the unfortunate
knight and neatly encloses the poem in a frame by bringing it back to its beginning.
In keeping with the ballad tradition, Keats does not identify his questioner, or the knight, or the destructively
beautiful lady. What Keats does not include in his poem contributes as much to it in arousing the reader's
imagination as what he puts into it. La belle dame sans merci, the beautiful lady without pity, is a femme
fatale, a Circe-like figure who attracts lovers only to destroy them by her supernatural powers. She destroys
because it is her nature to destroy. Keats could have found patterns for his "faery's child" in folk mythology,
classical literature, Renaissance poetry, or the medieval ballad. With a few skillful touches, he creates a
woman who is at once beautiful, erotically attractive, fascinating, and deadly.
Some readers see the poem as Keats' personal rebellion against the pains of love. In his letters and in some
of his poems, he reveals that he did experience the pains, as well as the pleasures, of love and that he
resented the pains, particularly the loss of freedom that came with falling in love. However, the ballad is a
very objective form, and it may be best to read "La Belle Dame sans Merci" as pure story and no more. How
Keats felt about his love for Fanny Brawne we can discover in the several poems he addressed to her, as well
as in his letters.
MacEachen, Dougald B. CliffsNotes on Keats' Poems.
</literature/k/keats-poems/john-keats-biography>.
La belle dame sans merci (1)
O what can ail (2) thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake, (4)
And no birds sing.
Merci. Pietà.
2 ail.
3 palely
loitering. Che ti aggiri pallido.
4 The
sedge is wither’d.
Il carice (pianta checresce in terreni paludosi)
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone5?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew, (6)
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
Tormentare, rattristare.
è secco.
5 So
haggard and so woe begone.
Così smunto e addolorato
.
6 moist
and fever dew. Madido del sudore della
malattia.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; (7)
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan (8)
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
7 fragrant
8 moan.
Lamento.
9 pacing
10 would
zone. Fascia di fiori.
steed. Destriero al passo.
she bend. Soleva sporgersi.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.
She took me to her Elfin grot, (11)
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide ! (12)—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
11 elfin
grot. Grotta degli elfi.
12 woe
betide. Ci fu una maledizione.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’ (13)
13 Thee
I saw their starved lips in the gloam, (14)
14 starv’d
hath in thrall. Ti ha in suo potere.
lips in the gloam. Bocche spalancate
With horrid warning (15) gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
nell’oscurità.
15 warning.
ammonimento
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
A. The poem can be divided into four parts. Identify them and write a heading for each section.
WHAT season is described in this ballad?
WHO is the speaker? What and who does he describe?
ANSWER the following questions.
1 Is there any correspondence between the landscape and the knight?
2 What musical device is used in lines 1–2, 5–6 and 46–48?
3 Who is the dominant character in the fourth and sixth stanzas?
4 Where does a shift in dominance occur?
5 What does the Lady symbolise?
6 Why is it possible to state that the poem has a circular movement?
7 What atmosphere characterises the whole poem?
8 What is the theme of the poem?
9 What features does this ballad share with the old Medieval ballads?
La belle dame sans merci
Che cosa ti tormenta, armato cavaliere
che indugi solo e pallido?
Di già appassite son le cipree del lago
e non cantan gli uccelli.
Che cosa ti tormenta, armato cavaliere,
cotanto affranto e così desolato,
riempito è già il granaio dello scoiattolo,
pronto è il raccolto.
Vedo sul tuo cimiero un bianco giglio,
umida angoscia, e del pianto la febbre
sulle tue gote, ove il color di rosa è scolorito
troppo rapidamente.
Una signora in quei prati incontrai,
lei, tutta la bellezza di figlia delle fate aveva,
chiome assai lunghe, e leggeri i suoi piedi,
ma selvaggi i suoi occhi.
Io feci una ghirlanda pel suo capo,
e pur bracciali, e odorosa cintura;
lei mi guardò com' avria fatto amore,
dolcemente gemette.
Io mi stetti con lei, sul mio cavallo
al passo, e nessun altro vidi in tutto il giorno;
seduta di traverso modulava
un canto delle fate.
Lei procurò per me grate radici,
vergine miele e rugiadosa manna,
e in linguaggio straniero poi mi disse:
- Io t'amo veramente.
Nella grotta degli elfi mi condusse,
e lì lei pianse, e sospirò in tristezza,
ma i suoi barbari occhi io tenni chiusi,
con quattro baci.
Ivi lei mi cullò, sino a dormire,
e lì sognai: sia maledetto l'ultimo sogno
fantasticato lì sul declivio
del freddo colle.
Vidi principi e re, pallidamente,
scialbi guerrieri smunti, color morte erano tutti
e gridavano a me: - La bella dama che non ha
compassione, t'ha reso schiavo!
Le lor livide labbra scorsi nella penombra,
che m'avvertivano: - L'ampia voragine orrendamente
s'apre! - Allora mi svegliai, e mi scopersi qui,
sopra il declivio del freddo colle.
Questo è accaduto perché qui rimasi
solo, senza uno scopo ad attardarmi,
pur se appassite fosser le cipree
e gli uccelli del lago non cantassero.
(John Keats)