Outline For La Belle Dame Sans Merci

The Lais of Marie de France is a collection of poems that tell enchanting stories of handsome knights, kings, queens, and romance. Although the lais varied in content; the subject of romantic love is the common theme. Since romantic love is the central theme of the lais it is important to define the term. According to the article, The Social Psychology of Love and Attraction romantic love is defined as, “a love that is supposed to stand the test of time, enduring all hardship. Romantic love emphasizes being in love with a certain individual” (Braxton-Davis 1). In the lais Bisclavret, Equitan, Laustic there is a conflict between love and moral responsibility. Many of the characters experience love and tragedy; yet, Marie de France provides a witty insight into loves immoral issues. In the lais loneliness, greed, excitement, and lust are the motivations for many of the characters reckless actions. Marie de France demonstrates how these characteristics combined with romantic infatuation, passion, and a yearning desire; influences corrupt behavior. This behavior then manifested into character traits such as betrayal, adultery, and cruelty that are revealed throughout the lais.

In the tale, a knight does a bad deed and is sentenced to death. However, the queen allows him a pardon if he can tell her what every woman truly wants. He finds that the answer is, every woman wants control over their loved ones: “What women most desire is sovereignty (control) over their husbands or the ones they love, to have the mastery, to be above”. At the end of the tale Chaucer states that The Wife basically wishes for all women to outlive their husbands: “And then grace to outlive those we wed; I also pray that Jesus shorten lives of those who won’t be governed by their wives”. I also noticed; however, that Chaucer throws a curve ball in the story. He lets us know that men love a pretty face but ultimately peruse women who are loyal, “Choose now,” she said, “one of these two: that Be old and ugly till the day I die, And be true to you and humble wife, One never to displease you all your life; or if you’d rather, have me young and fair, and take your chance on those who will repair to your house now and then because of me (Or to some other place, it may well be). Choose for yourself the one you’d rather try. The knight gave it some thought, then gave a sigh, And finally answered as you are to hear: “My lady and my love and wife so dear, I leave to your wise governance the measure: You choose which one would give the fullest pleasure And honor to you, as to me as

This is evident when, “She looked at him as she did love, / And made sweet moan”. The noun phrase, “she did love” suggests the bias perspective of the knight, the woman may have only decided to have sexual intercourse with him to favour his sexual desires; thus do not represent her affection for him. The sudden change of meter from iambic tetrameter to iambic dimeter in the line “And made sweet moan” causes a sense of foreboding; hinting that the love between the woman and the knight will not last long. Nevertheless, through the negative consequences caused by the obsession the knight has for the woman, Keats aims to express obsessive love in a negative

“The courtly lady…possesses a curiously hybrid gender. While maintaining stereotypically female sexuality, she also holds, in principle at least, the status of a feudal lord.” Burns’ statement insinuates a reversal of power dynamics between man and woman in the courtly love lyric, implying that the woman’s stereotypical beauty and sexuality in courtship, is a gateway to subverting and overpowering the lovesick male, making her a superior lord. The Amour Courtois lyric is deemed inconsistent with the representation of woman as an empowered “feudal lord” due to the sheer objectification of femininity and beauty. Poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Dunbar commend a woman’s aesthetic appeal or satirise the lack of it, thus elevating medieval misogynistic expectations of physical beauty as a feminine necessity that objectifies women under the control of man’s advances. Throughout courtly love lyrics female beauty is a purely frivolous and superficial trait lacking predominant depth, to render woman as a “lord” would be poetically conflicting as the only power exemplified by female subjects in courtship is through the idolisation and sexual lust of the male devotee.

Conversely, Keats does not conclude with a positive image of love; the knight’s pain is shown when Keats metaphorically places him ‘on the cold hill’s side’ along with the many other ‘pale kings and princes

His characters showed they had freedom and didn't live in this defined world where they were powerless. His exploration definitely reminds readers of the mastery of men but also how quick that can be taken away when women gain supremacy. The wife begins to tell the story of a knight raping a girl as he “sawgh a maide walking him biforn/ by verray force he rafte hir maidenheed” (lines 892-894, p. 302). This therefore shows the forceful nature of men and the powerlessness of a women. But this idea is quickly transformed when the knight’s life in in the hands of the Queen and must beg mercy of her to spare him.

Keats was a key figure in the Romantic era in the first part of the 17th century which, according to René Wellek 's classic definition, sought to substitute 'imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style. ' Therefore, Keats ' 'Ode to a Nightingale ', written in 1819, has an affiliation with the natural world, through both the metaphors he uses and his meter and rhyme. The fact that the poem is an Ode to a nightingale shows that Keats is addressing the bird in particular and therefore it asserts the link that is found in Romanticism between humans and the natural world. M. H. Abrams states that Keats wrote this poem, whilst reminiscent of a Horation Ode, as what came to be known as a Romantic Meditative Ode which is 'the personal ode of description and passionate meditation '. It is clear here that what Keats is passionate about in this poem is 'the country-green '. Keats coined the term negative capability to describe 'passionate mediation ' in a letter to

The Wife used her body as a bargaining tool, withholding sexual pleasure until her husbands gave her what she demanded; power. She even admitted that she had a healthy sexual appetite and alluded to the fact that she may quench those appetites outside of wedlock. In a way this foreshadowed the old hag who wished to gain higher social class, which would ultimately result in more power. She used her knowledge as a bargaining tool, withholding knowledge until the knight proclaimed to give her what she demanded. Both women have provided themselves with knowledge on how to survive in a world where women had little independence or power.

In the poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats, the poem’s preoccupations and qualities evoke a Romantic sentimental recollection for the past and refer to it several times. Framed through dynamic poetic techniques and powerful visual imagery, Keats conveys universal concerns and values of immortality of art and the mortality of humans through the compilation of the themes of mortality, nature and transience. “Disabled” by the modernist poet, Wilfred Owen projects numerous sensual metaphors to evoke emotional responses of traumatic war experiences. “Disabled” has transcended barriers of time to pursue concerns and values through the compilation of themes and emotions of unseen scars, human mortality, and religion. The preoccupations and

The twenty-four old romantic poet John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written in the spring of 1819 was one of his last of six odes. That he ever wrote for he died of tuberculosis a year later. Although, his time as a poet was short he was an essential part of The Romantic period (1789-1832). His groundbreaking poetry created a paradigm shift in the way poetry was composed and comprehended. Indeed, the Romantic period provided a shift from reason to belief in the senses and intuition. “Keats’s poem is able to address some of the most common assumptions and valorizations in the study of Romantic poetry, such as the opposition between “organic culture” and the alienation of modernity”. (O’Rourke, 53) The irony of Keats’s Urn is he likens

John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is written through the power of eternity, beauty and truth regardless of existence, as Wordsworth showed likewise. Keats illustrated his poem through love in its sublime. For example, in the first stanza he says, “What wild ecstasy?” (Keats 930). If ecstasy is a huge feeling of

Keats, on the other hand, uses the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to express his perspective on art by examining the characters on the urn from either an ideal or realistic perspective. In the beginning, Keats asks questions regarding the “mad pursuit” (9, p.1847) of the people on the Grecian urn. As the Grecian urn exists outside of time, Keats creates a paradox for the human figures on the urn because they do not confront aging but neither experience time; Keats then further discusses the paradox in the preceding stanzas of the poem. In the second and third stanza, Keats examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover “beneath the trees” (15, p.1847) and expresses that their love is “far above” (28, p.1848) all human passion. Even though

Structurally the poem is a ballad written in twelve quatrains. Keats wrote the poem with the intention of it being read as opposed to sung (Cummings). The first three lines of each quatrain are written in iambic tetrameter, while the fourth varies between iambic dimeter and

John Keats was a young poet whose work continues to heavily influence the literary world today. His contributions to the Romantic Period are considered to some to be unmatched by even some of the more experienced poets of the time, including William Blake. Through his use of vivid imagery and magical language, Keats was able to paint beautiful pictures through his poems all while conveying deep philosophical meanings that were prevalent in the writings of the Romantics. What makes John Keats continue to be relevant today is not only the concepts he wrote about, but the manner in which he wrote them. The suffering that he endured from his personal life as well as the extreme empathy he held for humankind shines through his writings and gives his works a very wistful and sad quality that leaves the reader pondering life and all of the beautiful yet mysterious aspects it holds.

The “Ode to a Nightingale” is exemplary in this regard. To follow the bird in its ascent, the speaker in a Dante-like movement descends along an underground path to a garden of “embalmed darkness” (43) – trading bacchic ecstasy for the musk rose’s “dewy wine” (49): a more appropriate substitute of the nectar from “blushful Hippocrene”. Through the appearance of the Rosa Moschata, poetically associated with the wild, but in fact known only through human horticulture, the poem’s circle of origins – from the source of divine inspiration to the “deep-delved earth” of the grape vine – closes in what appears to be the subjugation of nature under aesthetics. One might thus agree with Helen Vendler who stresses that this dwelling of Keats “can represent nature only as it exists in the repository of memory and