let rettelse

The title La belle dame sans merci means the beautiful woman without mercy and is written in a ballad form. Some of the things which characterize this as a romantic poem is the inferences to the supernatural and the Knight’s understanding of the true and reality. The story is probably in the medieval period in the autumn which we can se in stanza one line 3-4. We can also here see that the Knight’s is very sad, forlorn and lonely. He meets a beautiful lady, who persuade him with hers beauty and charme. She force him to take her with him as her profound beauty and attendant charms renders him oblivious to all around him. She sings for him and serves his hunger with relish of roots and wild honey. But later she choose to tell him that she really loves him and now he is captured in his own fantasy. He goes with her to the “Elfin grot” which we can see in stanza 8 which also is the climax in the poem. Here he fall in sleep and dreams about kings, princes and warriors and it’s all about powerful men. He sees them in a very bad condition and their paleness connect them with the loitering pale knight and with death. But the men in his dreams tells him that he his in danger of servitude to her beauty. (The poem returns to where it started) Then when he wakes up, the beauty woman is gone and then he is once again alone.

Now I would like to tell you something about the symbol and the style
- The flowers are usual used to describe something very beautiful, but this poem says in stanza three “a fading rose” which is a metaphor for the end of a romantic relationship. But in the same line the poem says “ on thy cheek“ which means that the rose metaphor has a double meaning. It’s describe his fading love affair and his pale complexion.

In lines 37 we hear the word pale three times, where the knights describes the dream he had about the “pale kings” and “pale worries” . They are death pale witch means that paleness is associated with dead.

The poem is written in a kind of a dialogue between to speakers but the speaker used the same language . The unnamed speaker who ask the Knights many questions in the first three stanza, and then he answar at the questions in stanza 4 to 12. It’s not easy to see that there is two speakers and therefore you have to pay attention to see that the word “I” in stanza 4-12 is different from stanza 1-3.
The language in the poem is not difficult to understand but you have to read between the lines, because there is many words which symbolize or describe something else.

La belle dame sans merci is a ballad poem, which is an old-fashioned folksy style which often tells a story and they also use a easy language so everyone can read it. Ballads is a orally story, which people would memorize and tell them to each other by memory, rather than a book. La belle dame sans merci is divided into 12 stanzas and it’s a poem with pattern ABCB, which we can see in stanza one.
“Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing”