La Belle Dame Sans Merci Explanation

`La Belle Dame sans Merci" or "The Beautiful Lady without Pity" is the title of an early fifteenth-century French poem by Alain Chartier which belongs to the tradition of courtly love. Keats appropriates this phrase for a ballad which has been generally read as the story of a seductive and treacherous woman who tempts men away from the real world and then leaves them, their dreams unfulfilled and their lives blighted. For all the beguiling simplicity of the surfaces of this literary ballad, it is one of the most difficult of Keats's poems to explain, and open to many interpretations. It has been alternately suggested, for example, that it is about the wasting power of sexual love and / or the poet's infatuation with his muse. This particular analysis will examine the `La Belle Dame sans Merci' as a poem about a femme fatale and offer a feminist interpretation of the ballad. A femme fatale or fatal woman conventionally tempts man with her beauty and ultimately causes his destruction. There are many such figures in traditional supernatural ballads concerned with a faery's seduction of a human; notable examples include Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer.
That the knight-at-arms in this poem has been enchanted, enthralled, is immediately suggested by his wandering in a desolate wasteland where the plant life has withered and no birds sing. He himself is in a decline; he is pale and the rose in his cheeks, like the sedge, is withering. In trying to explain his state to his questioner, he makes us highly suspicious of the lady whom he encountered. What is there in his description that makes the lady sound dangerous?
To start with, he identifies her as a supernatural being, a `faery's child' with `wild wild eyes' suggestive perhaps of madness. She speaks a strange language, and in her elfin grotto she lulls him to sleep. There may be a suggestion here that she is potentially treacherous since `lull' can denote an attempt to calm someone's fears or suspicions by deception.