[Cover artwork: John William Waterhouse, 1893. A painting depicting one of the scenes described in the poem. The poem was a popular subject for artists; I believe the most well known depiction today is from Frank Bernard Dicksee, 1902. Talk about fanart.]
About the author
John Keats (1795-1821), like his friends Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, was a famous Romantic poet; Romanticism was a literary movement during the early 1800s that focused on emotion, freedom, nature, individuality, and the medieval. Keats died at the age of 25 due to tuberculosis, a fatal disease that was both stigmatized and romanticized during his lifetime. He is probably best remembered for his odes, including “Ode to a Nightingale,” which grapples with depression, and “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” which originated the now-famous saying: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
About the poem
“La Belle Dame sans Merci” is a ballad. The French title translates to “The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy.” Keats completed two versions of this poem. I have used his earlier version, written in 1819, rather than the version he published in 1820; the main difference between the two are a few word changes and a stanza switch.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.
She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.