‘La Belle Dame’ is one of Keats’ most enigmatic of poems, detailing the love and loss of a certain ‘Knight at arms’ the nature of which we are never properly told. But beyond the individual pining of a man over his lost ‘Lady in the Meads’, is there a wider truth that Keats is trying to tell, concerning the direction of literature and the fate of his fellow Romantics as a whole?
Hello readers,
I have written of Byron and Shelley, the two literary figures that I studied the most during my time at academia. I have considered Coleridge and Wordsworth as well, both in my Scribblings and in my Essays. The prominent Lake Poet that I have not yet explored is John Keats, and following this past few weeks’ Scribbling sabbatical, I now intend to rectify that.
When regarding Keats, his two works ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ stand as glittering tentpoles for the Romantic tradition. Today, however, my mind is drawn to another one of his celebrated poems, whose ambiguity and mysticism have intrigued me since my first encounter.
On the surface, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ may appear a beautifully composed, yet relatively straightforward, tale of a man’s yearning for a love that he cannot hope to regain. It speaks of a ‘haggard’ ‘Knight at arms’, a figure from the literary Romances of old, whose countenance is withering away from the ‘anguish’ of heartache. This Knight speaks of an ethereal ‘faery’s child’ with whom he spent a short but blessed time in a revelry of nature, before she left him ‘on the cold hill side’; now that she is gone, he can only loiter along that same hill with the other ‘pale Kings and Princes’ in the lady’s ‘thrall’, but without her, nature itself appears to be withering away.
It should be quickly noted that Keats produced two versions of ‘La Belle Dame’ in his short lifetime, and this Scribbling shall consider the first. It is the superior version, and I believe is more true to Keats’ vision of the poem than the second (though naturally, I can only really guess at this).
This poem has captivated so many due to the multiplicity of interpretations one can take of its central characters. It can be read both as a fairy tale of sensual longing, a wistful celebration of the highs and lows of human emotion— or as a haunting nightmare, of ‘starv’d lips’ and ‘horrid warning’ to never allow oneself to be so completely overcome by their lust as the foolish Kings.
The poem’s title translates to ‘The Beautiful Lady without Mercy’, which is of course a judgement taken from the Knight’s perspective; we never receive a rebutting argument in the vein of Don Quixote‘s Marcela, explaining that actually the lady in question made it perfectly clear she had no interest in her suitors, and so their prolonged woe is no fault of hers. The paradoxical duality of the spurned Knights calling their love both ‘belle’ and ‘sans merci’, meanwhile, maintains the questions as to whether they now loathe or still lust over her; perhaps, in the convoluted and contradictory manner of so much human emotion, they do both.
That, then, is a more literal interpretation. What has always piqued my interest, however, is the fact that these two characters are not literal figures. The Knight at arms is clearly a figure from older literary type, an embodiment of a by-gone era’s chivalric tradition, whilst the ‘belle dame’ in question is only ever portrayed as some fleeting, transient sprite, a ‘faery’s child’ with hair long and eyes ‘wild’, who knows the secrets of nature’s bounty and takes her companion/captive to an ‘elfin grot’.
This seems not to be an interaction between two material individuals, but a clashing of philosophic ideals.
The youngest of all the leading Lake Poets, Keats was also perhaps the most sensitive and delicate of them— but also possessed a sensibility that allowed him to comprehend and articulate broader tendencies of the human condition, in a way that combined the personal musings of Wordsworth with the striving social designs of Shelley. The latter wrote as much in his ‘Adonais’, composed to lament the early death of Keats, who he described as one with the ability to teach ‘The love which was [his young spirit’s] music’ to the ‘passion-winged Ministers’ of ‘Dreams’ themselves. He was Shelley’s ‘extreme hope’ for the flourishing of the Romantic enterprise, and his tragic passing is likened to ‘petals, nipped before they blew/Died on the promise of the fruit’.
Regarding ‘La belle dame’, it seems to me that Keats is providing a commentary on his older Romantic companions as a whole. Their tradition was one that rejected the cold rationality of modernity, and instead kept longing eyes locked onto the mystical musings and revelries of the past— they turned up their noses at technological advancement and scientific enquiry and instead sought inspiration and comfort in the ancient, spiritual folds of nature’s embrace. They lusted for the spectre of an ideal that had already begun to fade, and had never really been fully graspable in the beginning. When illuminated by the thrall of its presence, they were ablaze with furious inspiration; when abandoned, they were left cold and dejected.
The work of all Romantic poets is imbued by a melancholy over the temporal nature of that state of lucid, poetic bacchanalia. Coleridge’s ultimate, anodyne-induced vision, that of the paradisal Kubla Khan, vanished as soon as it came into the haze of memory, and the poem is left fragmented by a frustration of not being able to depict with mere present words the majesty of his past hallucination. Shelley’s Spirit of Beauty, the redeeming natural presence that he believes can lead mankind into a better world, is characterised as much by the ‘awful shadow’ of its ‘inconstant wing’ as it is by the splendour of its company. Wordsworth’s blissful recollection of the ‘narrow lane[s]’ of youth, ‘Shagged by wild pale green tufts of fragrant hay’ and bursting with strawberries, have now dissipated into the ‘tall, green, silent woods and ruins’ of adulthood.
And Byron more than any seems to have been tormented by the impermanence of poetic glory; his poems creak under the Promethean weight of an idyllic past consumed by the wastes of the present, and his very final work bemoans that, even surrounded by the mighty historical richness of Greece, the once vivid blaze of his literary heart is now a ‘funeral pile’.
With this in mind, then, it seems that Keats’ Knight at arms takes on a new significance. When we read of this figure, plucked from Romances of old, delighting in the ‘roots of relish sweet’ and ‘honey wild and manna dew’ provided by this ‘Lady of the Meads’, it is reminiscent of his fellow poets innocently gorging on the bounties of nature’s inspiration. The knight is ‘lulled […] asleep’ by this ethereal, beautiful figure, but upon awaking from this ‘latest dream’ finds himself alone— nobody can deny that this charts almost exactly Coleridge’s agony over the loss of Kubla Khan.
The ’cold hill’s side’ left to the Knight upon the lady’s departure feels a similar state of desolation that we find plagues Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. Indeed, perhaps the ‘pale Kings, and Princes’ that the Knight sees haunting this wasteland, with their ‘horrid warning gaped wide’ about the lady’s damning allure, are the Romantic poets that came before him, likewise loitering in the hope that they will once again be revitalised by the glory of their transient muse.
Which, of course, implies that Keats himself can be identified with the Knight at arms. He was the final Lake Poet to follow in his companions’ footsteps, and yet the first to perish. In a shuddering act of premonition, the state of the bereaved Knight, with the ‘lily on thy brow’, ‘anguish moist and fever dew’ and the ‘fading rose’ on his cheeks, would’ve been very similar to the appearance of Keats himself in his final days, ravaged as he was by tuberculosis. ‘Consumption’, as it was called at that time, was so prevalent amongst contemporary artists that it was also known as ‘the romantic disease’; a collection of ‘Pale warriors, death pale’, all suffering from the same fate in their yearning.
‘La belle dame’, then, speaks to the wider futility and suffering of the Romantic endeavour— but it also strikes me as a perceptive analogical microcosm for the movement of literature in society altogether. The Age of Enlightenment had started civilisation on its slow and seismic shift away from the fantasies of archaic thought and towards the bleak and scientific rationalism of the future. Within literature, meanwhile, the likes of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding had pioneered the novel form, one focused on the accurate depiction of contemporary individuals, and shunning the established archaic types and formulas of traditions so important to the Romantics.
Despite their best efforts, the Romantics could not drag the public consciousness back from forward-reaching development and into the arms of the ancients. There was even crisis within their own ranks, as an aging Wordsworth forewent the radical flame of his youth and settled into the inoffensive comforts of a Conservative complacency. Many of his fellow poets viewed this as a treachery that shook the entire movement to its very core.
With Keats’ death in 1821, the others were soon to follow. In thirteen years, out of the most prominent Romantic poets, only Wordsworth would remain— Shelley would pass a year later, then Byron in 1824, Blake in 1827, and Coleridge in 1834. One by one, that last, defiant flame flickering against modernity was snuffed out by the winds of war, disease, and most cruelly, nature itself.
Once again, as a testament to Keats’ genius of divination, there is one other detail in ‘La Belle Dame’ that I find particularly heart-wrenching with the knowledge of what was to come for the Romantic poets. The opening stanza is largely repeated at the poem’s end, both embodying the circular futility of the Knight’s wanderings, but also to place emphasis on a certain detail. Keats speaks of how nature itself seems to have dimmed in the absence of that unforgiving yet faultless ‘faery’s child’; specifically, he twice repeats how ‘the sedge is withered from the Lake/And no birds sing’.
The voices of the birds, those skylarks and nightingales so essential to the poetry of nature’s voice, have been silenced. And, with the dwindling of each of the Lake poets, it seems that their beloved Lake has dwindled as well.
It is only in their works that their passionate flame can flicker on.
Thank you for reading,
The Watchful Scribe