Keats' “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”: The Bad-Breast Mother

The poem I would like to consider in some detail is “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” but it will be necessary to refer to several other poems written in the spring of 1819, as they throw light upon what was going on in Keats' inner world at the time.

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” was written about the middle of April in a spring notable for its earliness and promise. On May 3rd, when Keats finished his long narrative letter 123 to his brother George and his sister-in-law Georgiana, into which he transcribed this poem with many others, he remarked that the violets were not withered before the peeping of the first rose.

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” seems to be a kind of sorceress without gratitude, without goodness, without pity and without remorse. The poem, written in the form of a ballad, is about death in a wintry setting. “The sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing.” Yet it was written in a notably beautiful spring. Keats, still shadowed by mourning for his brother Tom, who died on December 1st, 1818, of pulmonary tuberculosis, must have enshrined the essence of that sad November and December of 1818 within himself, so that it dominated his dream-life and impaired his sleep. His own fatal illness, though not fully established, may well have been brooding in a threatening way, especially at night, with the fever, the night sweats, the fitful, disturbed sleep and unstable mood swings which characterize the early case of phthisis.

Critics and biographers have tended to avoid the analysis of this poem. Various excuses have been given, e. g., Colvin says that to analyse the poem would be to remove half of its subtle magic. Hewlett states that it contains in concentrated form and with human appeal the strong magic, the primal quality brought back into English poetry by Coleridge, coming deviously to us through the German, to be grafted on to such rooted British stock as Binnorie. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,”