La Belle Dame sans Merci

The lady, whom the knight encounters in “the meads” (Line 13) or the meadows, is described through a caesura (a deliberate pause in the middle of a sentence): “Full beautiful—a faery’s child” (Line 14). From the onset, she is associated with the otherworldly and the supernatural. Even her description as a faery is indirect; she is called “faery’s child” (Line 14), instead of a faery. This adds another layer of mystery to the lady. It is suggested she is half a faery, but then, what is the other half? Why is she described in this peculiar manner? The descriptor “Full beautiful” (Line 14) is odd as well, as if the word full has to be repeated to capture her essence. The knight’s inability to adequately describe the lady symbolizes his awe and wonder at seeing her. The lady herself symbolizes not just the supernatural, but also the imagination. Because the imagination is so vast and superlative, it cannot be described in human terms. It should also be noted that the poem’s symbolism reflects its Romantic context. In the Romantic tradition, the imagination, the supernatural, and nature overlap, representing a journey into the wild and the pure.

In her positive aspect, the lady represents the wildness, nurture, and beauty of nature and the imagination or the fancy. She nurtures the creative soul, feeding it wild honey and manna dew, she sings to it, and lulls it, almost like a maternal figure. The knight-at-arms is happy till he can control the lady or the imagination, till he can garland her and make love to her and place her on his steed. However, as the knight delves deeper into the imagination, the imaginary world begins to grow stronger. This is evident with the lady’s growing dominance. It is she who feeds him and takes him to her elfin grot. The knight/poet begins to let imagination control him, rather than the other way around. The lady’s offer of fruit takes on a sinister aspect, because in faerie lore, mortals are not supposed to eat faerie fruit at all. Eating faerie fruit disorients the mind. This elaborate symbolism represents the poet’s anxiety about delving too long in the world of fancy (a recurrent motif in Keats’s poetry). The knight lives in that world so long and deep, he loses reality and is now stuck in a limbo.

Alternatively, the lady symbolizes fate and death. All her victims are pale, the hallmark of those suffering from consumption. She is cruel because she offers humans the brief gift of life and possibility (the knight’s time in the mead and woods), only to snatch it all away. In this reading, the lady represents the poet’s fear of his impeding illness. Keats had already lost his mother and brother to tuberculosis and witnessed up close the ravages of the disease. Through the allegory of the poem, he was expressing the very real fear that his own life, his poetic career, and his romance with Fanny Brawne would be cruelly cut short by death.