La Belle Dame sans Merci PDF

Preview

Summary

analisi sonetto la belle dams sans merci. letteratura inglese 1....

Description

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad By John Keats 1. 2. 3. 4.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing.

5. 6. 7. 8.

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.

9. I see a lily on thy brow, 10. With anguish moist and fever-dew, 11. And on thy cheeks a fading rose 12. Fast withereth too. 13. I met a lady in the meads, 14. Full beautiful—a faery’s child, 15. Her hair was long, her foot was light, 16. And her eyes were wild. 17. I made a garland for her head, 18. And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; 19. She looked at me as she did love, 20. And made sweet moan 21. I set her on my pacing steed, 22. And nothing else saw all day long, 23. For sidelong would she bend, and sing 24. A faery’s song.

Juxtaposition

Repetition of the S sound and alliteration accentuate how close to death the knight looks

Mythological reference to magic and spells

Alarm bell: she never said she loved him, she just looked ‘as she did’. Passion hinted. It’s a sexual climax Mythological reference. The singing echoes the view of the intoxicated knight with his fascination of this woman

25. She found me roots of relish sweet, 26. And honey wild, and manna-dew, 27. And sure in language strange she said— Seems negative 28. ‘I love thee true’. Reader’s questioning to what extent is the Knight wishful thinking. Paranoid recounts 29. She took me to her Elfin grot, 30. And there she wept and sighed full sore, She’s enchanting with the repetition and the assonance 31. And there I shut her wild wild eyes Knight supports her with kisses. 32. With kisses four. Repetition of dreaming’s semantic field adds 33. And there she lullèd me asleep, to the readers’ interest – was this all an 34. And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!— 35. The latest dream I ever dreamt illusion? 36. On the cold hill side. Element of reality

37. I saw pale kings and princes too, 38. Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; 39. They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci 40. Thee hath in thrall!’

Dream like sequence; the apparitions tell him that he’s not the first to be caught in ‘thrall’ by the lover Further proof she’s a dangerous woman: the The use of ‘I’ is much knight is powerless like the more dynamic and evocative

41. I saw their starved lips in the gloam, 42. With horrid warning gapèd wide, 43. And I awoke and found me here, 44. On the cold hill’s side. Repetition of ‘cold hill side’ makes reality more painful 45. And this is why I sojourn here, A 46. Alone and palely loitering, B 47. Though the sedge is withered from the lake, C 48. And no birds sing. B Regarding Keats’s life: References to 1st Romanticism: Wordsworth and Coleridge’s lyrical ballads even because he sought to revive the medieval genre also by writing this ballad. Keats lost his parents and his brother young to tuberculosis and qualified for medical school in London. He will also die of tuberculosis at 25. Poem’s settings: The narrator is an anonymous questioner talking to the knight who’s dying in front of him due to the dangerous power of a mesmerizing woman. The title itself it’s a clue into what this woman is all about: a femme fatale (woman without pity). The poem has 12 stanzas (ABCB) in tetrameters with eight syllables per line (line 4 stresses lines 1 and 3 of each stanza, and 3 stresses on lines 2 and 4, which adds its abrupt ending). 1st stanza lines 1-4: the speaker instantly poses the question (what’s wrong?) pointing out his symptoms and sufferings: he’s alone, pale and not moving. The landscape is also dying (§ withered), the death of the knight is described as a bleak wintry location that neither the nature is making a sound (§ line 4). 2nd stanza lines 5-8: line 5 is a repetition of line 1 and reflects the speaker’s curiosity to know what happened. The terse language in line 6 (§ haggard and woe-begone) is so abrupt and sparse that adds to the pain of the Knight at arms. Line 7-8 are a juxtaposition of the squirrel and the harvest, having all it needs, vs the Knight suffering. 3rd stanza lines 9-12: the speaker is more worried about the symptoms of the illness that the knight has. The knight is dying and looks like he’s fading. The negative images used here by the speaker are in contrast with the following stanza. 4th stanza lines 13-16: enchanting (because due diligence and intensity, this woman ticks all the boxes) imagery. The woman is described as beautiful, erotically attractive, fascinating and deadly (§ wild eyes). It juxtaposes the former stanza with an image of life over death.

5th stanza lines 17-20: the knight is describing what he gifted her with but the reader’s not able to tell if he was enchanted or if he did it just to impress her on his own choice. 6th stanza lines 21-24: the intensity of his affection is heightened as if he’s blinded by love. The whole stanza reflects both an intense and dangerous feel. 7th stanza lines 25-28: the knight recalls what the woman gave him (those delights are even mentioned in the Bible, Old Testament). 8th stanza lines 29-32: emotional and sensual engagement. The woman is engaged with her senses (§ lines 30). 9th stanza lines 33-36: there are the emotional recollections of the knight. The exclamation mark across the stanza signal how passionately the reader can recount what happened. 10th stanza lines 37-40: the repetition of pale serves two purposes: 1. The accent of colour; 2. Ghost-like. Colour is absent across the whole stanza. 11th stanza lines 41-44: quite grotesque imagery; the infatuation is now pain. 12th stanza lines 45-48: spoken so rhyme was a way to keep the meaning clearly remembered (typical element of oral stories). There’s a near repetition of the 1st stanza, leading the cycle of the ballad to an end, adding how unfortunate the knight’s faith is. In the end, the speaker is melancholic, heightening the eerie tone. Keats used the ballad form for two reasons: 1. Ballads often had a 6-quarters element, which in this case accentuated how sorry the readers feel for the knight. 2. To illustrate the truth of love....