Descending into Despair with “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

In his poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” John Keats has emphasized the literary elements of structure, speaker, and imagery to create a story reminiscent of courtly love from the medieval era where the knight errant suffers for the love of the beautiful, mysterious and unattainable mistress. In the early nineteenth century, an interest in the ballad of earlier centuries was sparked by the romantic poets of the time, of which John Keats was one, and his poem, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” became a true example of what became known as a literary ballad. Similar to the popular folk ballad that was sung, a literary ballad sticks to the basics of repeated lines and stanzas “in a refrain, swift action with occasional surprise endings, extraordinary events evoked in direct, simple language, and scant characterization.” (pg. 508) Literary ballads also tend to be more polished in regards to their style and their use of poetic techniques. In addition, they will exhibit a set rhyme scheme and a simple structure of stanzas that allows the poem to flow as if it were that song of years past. Keats’s poem consists of twelve stanzas of four lines, known as quatrains, each with a rhyme scheme of abcb. The poet has also taken care to write each line to a specific length. The first three lines of each stanza consist of eight syllables each, but the final line of the stanza is either four or five syllables long. Since a literary ballad’s structure is meant to mimic that of a folk ballad, it is clear that Keats has paid close attention to meter to contribute to fluidity. He has used iambic tetrameter, where an iambic line is composed of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. A tetrameter refers to four feet, or two syllables per feet. Looking at the beginning of the poem, one sees how this comes to use. “O