Keats, John - La Belle Dame Sans Merci (2)

- Simple language;

- Musical effects (assonances, consonaces, repetitions, allitterations);

- Divided into quatrains;

- Tragic contempt;

- Presence of supernatural;

- Beginning in medias res.

The fatal woman is a beautiful lady without pity: she hasn’t got compassion. Usually the woman is idealized or submitted, the fatal woman is the feminine version of the romantic- dark hero: this woman is cruel. In the Ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ the woman is the foreigner of the aesthetic woman of the Pre-Raphaelite artists.

- A knight (romantic figure described by natural elements) with his armor, pale and wondering, read to go to war.

- A beautiful, young woman. She deceives him making him believe she would love him forever, but then she lefts him. This woman is a vampire, her kiss is perdition.

This ballad can be divided into three parts:

1) The speaker talks: a knight is wandering, he’s not an heroic character: he’s pale, quite sick, also nature is dried, is autumn, birds not sing. The unknown speaker seems to be deeply concerned for the knight and inquires after the cause of his troubles.

2) The knight tells what is happened to him: he has met a beautiful woman ( beautiful like a fair but with an unconventional characteristic: she has wild eyes ). He falls in love with the girls and they go to the Elfin grot.

3) Turning point: the knight is lulled into a sleep and he has a dream: all the knights the lady had seduced were dead. He wakes up alone, the lady has gone away. She is suffered and she stars to wander in order to find her.