La Belle Dame sans Merci
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"La Belle Dame sans Merci" ("The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy") is a ballad produced by the English poet John Keats in 1819. The title was derived from the title of a 15th-century poem by Alain Chartier called La Belle Dame sans Mercy.
Considered an English classic, the poem is an example of Keats' poetic preoccupation with love and death. The poem is about a fairy who condemns a knight to an unpleasant fate after she seduces him with her eyes and singing. The fairy inspired several artists to paint images that became early examples of 19th-century femme fatale iconography. The poem continues to be referenced in many works of literature, music, art, and film.
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Overview
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 they went together to her "elfin grot", where they began to make love. Falling asleep, the knight had a vision of "pale kings and princes", who warn him that "La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall!" ( The Lady without pity has you in her charm!). 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. More recent feminist commentators have suggested. 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". 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.
In Other Media
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.
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. Patrick Hadley also wrote a version for tenor, four-part chorus, and orchestra.
