John Keats – La Belle Dame Sans Merci

La Belle Dame sans Merci, one of John Keats last works, is a ballad which tells the story of a knight who fell in love with a mystical creature, and now suffers the aftermath of a broken heart.
The poem starts with the writer describing a solitary knight who is walking around lonely. So already from the poems start the reader gets sympathy for the knight. In the two first verse, the scene of autumn is described: The grass stopped, no birds sing, squirrels and other animals have hoarded food to sustain them throughout winter, and the harvest is done.
The writer makes the knight look so exhausted and miserable, by saying: So haggard and woebegone. By saying this, it makes the knight seem to be in a terrible condition: “And on the thy cheek a fading rose – the poet is comparing the color on his cheeks with a fast fading rose. The poet also says: I see a lily on thy brow – which means that the knight-at-arms forehead glistens with sweet like a lily (white).
In the fourth stanza the knight starts to tell his tale: He had met a beautiful maiden in the meadows. She was the most beautiful thing he had cast eyes upon, with long flowing hair and wild eyes, which led him to believe that she must be a fairy’s child. Her eyes however had struck him as wild and doleful. He had only eyes for her and did not notice anything else. She was receptive of his attentions and sang to him sweetly. He tried to win her by making garlands and bracelets out of flower and she gazed at him lovingly by giving him delectable things to eat such as sweet roots and wild honey. Although she spoke in a different dialect, he was still that she told the truth when she said that she loved him.
Although she seems like a lovely woman, she is kind of a demon who seduces men with her charm. We can see that when she is taking the knight to her elfin grot – here