Love and Death in Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci

“since feeling is first” can be defined literally and figuratively. The poem literally talks about a man who is deeply in love. An example would be stanza 1, where the man is trying to show how much he loves his women by telling her that feelings come first and if someone were to pay attention to trivial things then the feelings are not considered to be something deep. On the other hand, the poem figuratively talks about life being sensible if we were to go with the flow, and not thinking about reasons for everything that’s happening in life. For instance ; stanza 1, emphasizes how a person should consider his feelings first to entirely live his life. If he pays attention to minute details in life he may leave a major part in life. If you want to make sense of everything you do, you will fail to understand the true meaning of it. It also compares our life to a paragraph (line 15). In paragraph the ideas should be coherent, but in life there is no logical order. Sometimes lines can overlap in life. The same thing can be repeated over again. The last line “And death i think is no parenthesis”, tells us that death is not an interruption. In paragraphs, parenthesis are interruptions that come in between but in life the only parenthesis is death and it’s a full stop. Death is final and we can’t refrain from death.

The poem is written in a unhappy tone somewhat similar to “The Seafarer”. “The Wanderer shows loneliness and a generally dark view of the world. Just like “The Seafarer” the speaker gives many images such as frost and cold weather to show “The Wanderer’s” sorrow. Both “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” use weather to show how the character feels in the poem. Likewise of the common things in “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”,” The Wife's Lament” also has some of the same similarities

Poetry is considered to be a representational text in which one explores ideas by using symbols. Poetry can be interpreted many different ways and is even harder to interpret when the original author has come and gone. Poetry is an incredible form of literature because the way it has the ability to use the reader as part of its own power. In other words, poetry uses the feelings and past experiences of the reader to interpret things differently from one to another, sometimes not even by choice of the author. Two famous poets come to mind to anybody who has ever been in an English class, Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings. Both of these poets have had numerous famous pieces due to the fact that they both

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Two themes the poem has is death and time. The poem displays the theme of time, because it starts out telling the story of a man who is from, and raises his children in, a noble and rich family. As his children get older, 2 of them died, and the others, to quote the poem “all were gone, or broken-winged or devoured by life”. He had lost, essentially all of his children, and as we find out his wife. The poem shows how he went from a great man with a happy family, to a lost man who is all alone. The next theme the poem shows is death. Death is all throughout the poem. It starts with a man living a good life, but as it goes on his first child leaves, his next 2 children die, and the next 3 become incredibly unsocial and that’s not even it! Near the end his wife, the mother of all 6 children, dies. “I sat under my cedar tree, till ninety years were tolled.” The poem ends with the man dying, after everything he had lost; he died in his favorite place to be, under his cedar tree.

But, we should first and foremost put this sonnet back in its context. We can easily presume that it is autobiographic, thus that Keats reveals us his own worries. In 1818, he is aware that he has short time left to live due to the fatal illness

The poem as a whole appear to be a metaphor for, or symbolic of the depression and loneliness felt by the speaker . In the very first line “I have been one acquainted with the night” (I. 1), tells that the speaker knows of the ‘night’ (a metaphor for loneliness and depression). The speaker also personifies the night by being ‘acquainted’ with it. In the second line, the usage of the word ‘rain’ is a metaphor for life’s problems, which the speaker seems to be immersed with . In the third and fourth lines, the speaker uses hyperbole when he says “I have outwalked the furthest city light/ I have looked down the saddest city lane” (I. 3; II. 1), a feat not humanly possible, because the farthest city light would suggest the end of the city, and the word ‘saddest’ is a relative emotion. The words “city light” is also symbolic of a community and friends, which the speaker is trying to

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The poem at first comes off as a simple poem about spring and winter, but there are many hidden meanings as well. As well as the fear of the end of the world.

The poem mentions that God will come down to save the world from dying while Satan leaves the world, however, modernism always rejected religion, so mention God and Satan went against the norm of society in that time period. In the current day, however, religion is widely accepted in poetry unlike before. The poem also discussed an imaginary love story as it relates to the author, Sylvia Plath, as she wrote this poem after she fell into depression due to her husband cheating on her. Throughout all these poems from modernism, love and death seem to stand out as two big reoccurring themes. Each poem mentioned losing a loved one in shape or another which brings up the question, why did these authors these poems detailing their lives instead of keeping it

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The sadness in La Belle Dame Sans Merci is unexpected, whereas the sadness in When We Two Parted is anticipated right from the start. Both authors express emotions well and both leave an impression with the reader, but Keats expresses more varied types of feelings.

Poems are just another way to voice the opinions that the authors have. You will find poems that have point of view of soldiers from both side describing events that happened on the battlefield or you have poems that voice the hurt that the union felt when the south secced. You also find poems that talk of loss and sorrow

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There are many different themes that can be used to make a poem both successful and memorable. Such is that of the universal theme of love. This theme can be developed throughout a poem through an authors use of form and content. “She Walks in Beauty,” by George Gordon, Lord Byron, is a poem that contains an intriguing form with captivating content. Lord Byron, a nineteenth-century poet, writes this poem through the use of similes and metaphors to describe a beautiful woman. His patterns and rhyme scheme enthrall the reader into the poem. Another poem with the theme of love is John Keats' “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” meaning “the beautiful lady without mercy.” Keats, another nineteenth-century writer, uses progression and compelling