preview

Summary Of La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Decent Essays

Deceived

In John Keats “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” the speaker express his love for this fairy woman where he explains, “I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful—a faery’s child,” (13,14). But he was “Lured” (33), to sleep with the woman who he thought once loved him and as she said, “I love the true” (28). Why then if she “love thee” does he feel the darkness of “horrid warning gapèd”? Was it all just a dream? Or reality?
Firstly, the speaker as I assume is a man because he is talking about a lady he met which he called her a“faery’s child,” (14). As he said in the poem he was, “ Alone and palely loitering” (Keats, 2), That certain stanza made me pictured a man alone with no sense of direction no sense of love. Lonesome. But they never went into much detail on what he was doing or where he came from. Moving on, just from a few lines into the poem the speaker’s tone was coming off as melancholy. I got the melancholy tone because the speaker seemed very sad and gloomy with phrases as, “O what can ail thee” (1) almost sound like a cry for help or just a cry out of last hope. He then goes on to say “I met a lady in the meads,” ( 13 ), as stated previously but, this is when the poem turns from melancholy and alone to happy and almost hopeful.

Continuing on, in this poem the speaker became infatuated with this lady. As he said, “ I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;” (17,18 ) he begins to fall for her and starts to be very taken with her

Get Access