The Hot 100

[Robert Tulip]

La Belle Dame sans Merci is one of my favorites. It reminds me of the Lady of the Lake from the tales of Sir Lancelot, and of the aglæc-wif, Grendel's mother, the nameless fiend who drags Beowulf to the bottom of the lake for the battle of his life. The cold fairy also picks up on the Odyssey story of the sirens sweetly singing, as Eliot put it, each to each. Also, there are echoes of the Germanic Earth Goddess from the Norns and the Valkyries, descended from the Fates and the Furies, and of the barrow wights in Tolkein. The subtext is the treachery of beauty, the idea that an innocent man may be beguiled by charm into captivity. It reflects a fear of commitment, with courtship creating a giddy swirl of romantic love, leading to the danger of captivity in marriage, a fate that the tubercular Keats escaped through early death.

[Saffron]

La Belle Dame sans Merci...The subtext is the treachery of beauty, the idea that an innocent man may be beguiled by charm into captivity. It reflects a fear of commitment, with courtship creating a giddy swirl of romantic love, leading to the danger of captivity in marriage, a fate that the tubercular Keats escaped through early death.

One big yippy for marriage and women from Mr. Keats. If you are correct Robert, it is a rather misogynistic poem. I guess I was hoping for some other way to look at this poem.

Addendum
I could not leave this poem here, misogynistic and misunderstood. I have cheated and looked for interpretation online. I like these two explanations better.
1. .......Line 30 of the poem says, "And there she wept and sighed full sore." The suggestion here is that the lady does care for the knight but realizes she must leave him because she is a fairy and he is a human.

2......In the summer of 1818, Keats began exhibiting symptoms of tuberculosis, a disease that had already infected his younger brother, Tom, who died in December of that year. Exactly when Keats became aware that he was suffering from a killer disease is uncertain. But, as an observer of his brother's symptoms and as a trained apothecary who had worked in hospitals, Keats must have suspected that his own symptoms were an ominous sign. Consequently, when he wrote “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in the spring of 1819, he might have intended the beautiful woman as a symbol for the life, which was slowly slipping away from him. During this time, he must have felt like the knight sitting on the cold hill—pale, feverish, and alone. He lasted less than two more years, dying in February 1821.

[DWill]

Of course if a poem doesn't hit our sweet spot, it's no harm, no foul. Up until just a couple months ago, when Penelope happened to post the poem, I wouldn't have said it's one of my favorites, or even a favorite among Keats' poems. Then too, I'm a bit influenced by the drama of Keats' career, so thinking of him dashing this off in an afternoon, a poem that is a diversion for him but nevertheless a distillation of a popular ballad theme and a piece of masterful technique, raises it in my estimation.

Not that we can't see in the theme something that interested Keats throughout his career--the encounter of the worldly with the other-worldly, though not in any occult sense. I think what makes the poem for me is that it's not just a repeat of the Circe theme, where the women seduces or bewitches the more virtuous man. Here the more likely scenario is that the knight has been captured by his own imagination. It's not clear how much the faery girl really does to the knight and how much is in his mind.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan. 20

"As she did love," or as if she did love.

For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

He doesn't know what the song says.

She found me roots of relish sweet, 25
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
“I love thee true.”

He's "sure" that she tells him she loves him, though the language is strange.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore, 30
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

She's hardly the domineering man-killer.

And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d 35
On the cold hill’s side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”

What are we to make of his dream? Is it to be read psychologically or as a true portent?

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

What are we to make of the whole reported episode?

[DWill]

8. "Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold. Harmon says that this poem, written in the mid-1800s, could be the first modern poem and might even be "modernist, in the way it places an isolated neurotic on the edge of a highly charged symbolic scene. The lines are broken and uneven; some of the transitions are abrupt, almost surrealist."

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

[Robert Tulip]

One big yippy for marriage and women from Mr. Keats. If you are correct Robert, it is a rather misogynistic poem. I guess I was hoping for some other way to look at this poem.

encounter of the worldly with the other-worldly, though not in any occult sense. I think what makes the poem for me is that it's not just a repeat of the Circe theme, where the women seduces or bewitches the more virtuous man. Here the more likely scenario is that the knight has been captured by his own imagination. It's not clear how much the faery girl really does to the knight and how much is in his mind.

...
She's hardly the domineering man-killer.
..
What are we to make of his dream? Is it to be read psychologically or as a true portent?

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

What are we to make of the whole reported episode?

I think it works at several levels. Keats as the courageous lone pale knight, valiantly battling against tuberculosis, is one fairly obvious level.

When we consider messages regarding relations between the sexes, I don't agree that misogynist is quite the right word. It is more that Keats is warning about commitment, and suggesting to continue the bachelor life. That is not a hatred or belittling of women, just a suggestion, like Paul, that it is better not to marry because family responsibilities detract from a higher calling.

The theme of the relation to imagination is interesting. Dreams of mythological creatures and magical deeds have an allure, and it is like Keats is providing a modernist caution that drifting to far into the land of the fey can lead to a loss of one's mental faculties, that hearing the sirens moan can snap the brain into a supernatural mindset from which it is impossible to recover.

Another set of creatures that this reminds me of is the Nixies.

[Saffron]

That is not a hatred or belittling of women, just a suggestion, like Paul, that it is better not to marry because family responsibilities detract from a higher calling.

Women are not a trap, never a trap, family is not a trap. We are built for romantic/sexual relationships, romantic/sexual attraction lead us to people that we can attach to and create a home base (=family). Attachement to a loved person or persons does not detract from any higher calling. We all need to belong to someone/some group. I would not say that family or love of partner is a lower calling than to ones god, art, or anything else. I believe that it is often in loving another that we are able to reach a higher level. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that rejecting sexual love/attachment is to diminish ones humanness and that there is something sacred about sex.

[Robert Tulip]

I would not want to endorse the idea that avoiding commitment is a good thing, but that still seems a reasonable reading of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The poem has beautiful images and rhythm, and evokes hidden worlds.

You can't generalise one way or the other if having family or not is better, considering that there are many creative people who have not had children, and whose creative efforts have been enabled by the time they would have otherwise devoted to family. Family sometimes is a trap, as in shotgun weddings.

Keats is continuing a long tradition of wariness of feminine wiles, including, as DWill mentioned, from the old story of Circe the enchantress in the Odyssey. There is also the line in the Bible and Buddhism that to reject the attachments of material comfort can help to find a calling.

I don't think you can jump directly from this wariness to a general comment about the virtues of attachment.

[Saffron]

I would not want to endorse the idea that avoiding commitment is a good thing, but that still seems a reasonable reading of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The poem has beautiful images and rhythm, and evokes hidden worlds.

You can't generalise one way or the other if having family or not is better, considering that there are many creative people who have not had children, and whose creative efforts have been enabled by the time they would have otherwise devoted to family. Family sometimes is a trap, as in shotgun weddings.

Keats is continuing a long tradition of wariness of feminine wiles, including, as DWill mentioned, from the old story of Circe the enchantress in the Odyssey. There is also the line in the Bible and Buddhism that to reject the attachments of material comfort can help to find a calling.

I don't think you can jump directly from this wariness to a general comment about the virtues of attachment.

I never mentioned children; family is more than children. First, there is a subtle difference between the Buddhist concept of attachment and the way in which it is generally used in referring to relationships between people. I believe that intimate relationships/emotional attachment is a basic human need and has nothing to do with virtue.

We are off track and off topic. At this point, I feel fairly sure that Keats was speaking of impossible or unrequited loved or of the confussion that sometimes happens when love is onesided. Sorry everyone for getting us lost.

[DWill]

Wow, if this is off-topic, what do we call what happens in our other threads?

[Robert Tulip]

I never mentioned children; family is more than children. First, there is a subtle difference between the Buddhist concept of attachment and the way in which it is generally used in referring to relationships between people. I believe that intimate relationships/emotional attachment is a basic human need and has nothing to do with virtue.

We are off track and off topic. At this point, I feel fairly sure that Keats was speaking of impossible or unrequited loved or of the confusion that sometimes happens when love is onesided. Sorry everyone for getting us lost.

Why is it off-topic? Keats' poem is fairly straightforward in telling the story of how a man is entrapped by a woman. Children are often the factor that imprisons people in relationships that they regret. There is no 'unrequited love' in this poem, it is about how the 'sweet moan' of the fairy led the man into a subterranean prison.