Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci - Essay Example

It is a poem filled with puzzles and, therefore, is prone to innumerable elucidations. Keat’s sonnet depicts the situation of an anonymous knight who has come across a mystifying lady described as the ‘fairy’s child’. It begins with a depiction of the knight in a desolate land. He explicates to the reader how he encountered a strange woman with extraordinarily wild eyes. The lady is portrayed as a reasonable woman who told the knight that she truly cherished him. The knight takes her to her ‘elfin grot’, but on reaching there, she bawled and moaned full sore.

The knight is left baffled, and before he comprehends, the inexplicable maiden sets him to sleep. While sleeping, the knight has dreams of pale emperors and princes who sob, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci ’. He awakes to see himself on the chilly hill’s side. He persists to linger while palely lurking. The following discourse confers the repercussions of love as Keats expresses them in his sonnet (Symons, p. 89). The premise of the sonnet is lucid since it explains how the knight suffers the spasms of humiliation while allowing himself to be overtaken by his fondness towards the enthralling woman.

This depicts a situation of unrequited affection. As illustrated, the knight’s love was superior to that of the mysterious maiden. As explicated in the sonnet, he supposed that the fairy lady is smitten and; consequently, he falls intensely for the maiden too. The sonnet depicts the knight falling for an extremely attractive lady, who he met in the meads. At the beginning of the poem, the knight is portrayed to be in a desolate condition. He progresses to recount what transpired when he encountered the ‘fairy lady’ who disappeared in the night.

His desolation and humiliation is described by the utilization of the sedge that has shrunken from the lake, and the absence of birds playing. As elucidated, the lady’s disappearance is a harsh upshot of unreciprocated love. The knight is left in torment since his affection for the ‘fairy child’ unreturned. The shrunken sedge and the milieu of no birds chirping depict how heart-broken he is and how empty he feels within. Love is believed to be a two way phenomenon. The portrayal of the strange maiden disappearing without a sign illustrate how love can turn out when one adores someone who is not smitten as much as they are (William, p.68). Moreover, the knight’s anguish for his deep affection for the ‘fairy child’ is seen where he is unaccompanied and palely lurking.

It describes the situation he is in after the maiden heartlessly left him on the chilly hill side. His distress is illustrated by how he palely lurks alone on the hill side speculating what to do. His misery is also portrayed by ‘nature fading’ around him leaving him void. This somehow leaves the knight lifeless. The beauty of the fairy woman lures the knight to her, and this same loveliness destroys him. Another upshot of ‘fake love’ is the knight being robbed of his heart. He is attracted by her magnificence not knowing that she is a mystical being.

The knight’s misery after his mystical encounter is elucidated by a contrast of his paleness to the vanishing rose. It elucidates that his despair could result in his demise. In addition, the ‘fairy maiden’ destroys the knight’s life as portrayed in the poem. This is explained by knight’s vision of influential rulers, combatants and princes whose lives were also devastated by the