La Belle Dame sans Mercy (p.435)

In this poem John Keats tells a tale of a conversation with a “wretched wight” (line1) about a love affair with a beautiful woman.  It was a sad story of a brief but passionate relationship that ended with the passing of the woman and the narrator waking from a dream on “the cold hill side.”(line 44)  I thought Keats was telling a story through the use of symbolism.  The narrator bemoaned the end of a relationship and his waking on the cold hillside where “no birds sing.”  (line 48) I think the woman symbolized all the beauty and passion of youth.  The narrator was clearly enjoying the recollection of his youth in a sad way as though it was a dream.  Like so many sweet dreams, the narrator awoke to find himself an older, and sadder, man.  His place on the cold hill side is a direct contrast to his youthful place in his lover’s “elfin grot” (line 29) and where he “slumber’d on the moss.” (line 33)

            The narrator goes further in his description of his youth by describing his all-consuming pursuit of pleasure.  The passage, “I set on her my pacing steed/ And nothing else saw all day long;” (lines 17&18) convinced me that the narrator was so enthralled with the pleasures of youth that he was completely consumed in his hedonism.  That point was made even clearer to me when the narrator used additional symbolism of the physical intimacies he enjoyed with his lady, “I made a garland for her head, /And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;/ She look’d at me as she did love, /And made sweet moan.” (lines21-24)  Clearly, the pleasure filled days of the narrator’s youth were but a fleeting dream that closed with symbols of death and doom.  When the narrator dreamed of “pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cry’d-“La belle Dame sans mercy/ Hath thee in thrall!” (lines 39&40) it spoke of how old age and the winter of his life had pursued him and killed the love affair of his youth.  The enslavement to that youthful time was pointed out by the death riders and the “La belle Dame sans mercy” (line 39), or the beautiful lady without mercy, was gone like the premature ending to a sweet dream. 

            The poem closes with a stanza that spoke to me as though the narrator was giving a warning at the same time that he was enthusiastically recalling the best time of his life.  “And this is why I sojourn here/ Alone and palely loitering, /Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,/ And no birds sing.”  (lines 45-48)I took that final stanza together with the first two stanzas of the poem meaning the narrator was happy that he was able to enjoy a blissful youth but now was destined to await death alone and without pleasure or happiness.  It spoke to me that the narrator might even believe that he misspent his youth in the exclusive pursuit of pleasure since that pleasure offered no mercy.  The narrator believed others who had worked to stock their granaries and brought in a harvest borne of hard work and upright living, while possibly missing out on some of the youthful follies the narrator enjoyed, were happier and not out to wander the world awaiting death in a lonely state. 

            I’ve thought a lot about this poem.  While youth and romance are truly intoxicating, we grow older, and that is a sobering thought especially if we look over our shoulder when we arrive as adults wondering what we have left to live for.