left: earth's first modest swan
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad by John Keats : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.
Every November, two lines from Keats find their way into my consciousness: “The sedge has withered from the lake/And no birds sing.”
Like “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (“The Beautiful Lady without Pity”) is probably easy to mock in our time. On one level, it’s surely a silly soap opera that leans on overly familiar medieval tropes and plot, and some of the variations in meter sound simply awkward.
However, I give Keats credit for replacing the vision of the lady with images of pale warriors; I find genuine mystery there, mostly concerning the blurred boundary between the sleeping or visionary world and the waking one. I hear a larger question: “Where am I, and how did I get here? How many of my choices had anything to do with rational, conscious decision-making?”
As for music or meter, I hope someone else hears and loves as I do the shift from traditional ballad meter (alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines, plus a rhyme scheme of abxb). Most of Keats' stanzas here have final lines with two stresses rather than the traditional three. And when we do get three, they arrive as a trio of beats on a bass drum—consecutive hard stresses in “cold hill’s side” and even more so in “no birds sing.”
I’m tempted to say the whole poem is embodied in those final three words and the stresses upon them. Wherever he is, and we are, it’s hard, it’s cold, it’s bare. So is November; so are some—or many—of the loveliest humans. And so is the visionary world when it vanishes and returns to cold consciousness, awake and rational, but dazed, chilled, and alone.
Now hie thee thither into yon pearly weekend, and may'st thou never again feel mid-November in thy bones without hearing, "The sedge has withered from the lake/And no birds sing."
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