We're reading a short lyric by Keats today.
His well known ballad, La Belle Dame sans Merci.
It's a short poem.
It's a lyric poem.
It's a particularly kind of lyric which is the ballad.
It is meant to evoke a whole tradition of this kind of ballad.
It's closer to a medieval ballad by Thomas the Rhymer.
It has many of the plot elements of that ballad
by Rhymer though it's not exactly the same but there's a lot of close parallels.
And of course it's image of the woman who beguiles
the hero and delays him on his return home is right out of Homer.
And dozens of other texts, you know,
is this La Belle Dame in this poem a version of Circe,
who you know turned the men into swine.
Or is she a version of Calypso who kept Odysseus there for years in love
with her or even kind of like
the sirens who would this beautiful song would lure the male.
The poem has a funny composition history.
Keats kept a long journal letter when he was away on a tour.
But he would often put pieces of verse in it.
He wrote this poem and put it in this letter.
I'd like to be getting letters from somebody that contained
great masterpieces of original poetry or even I'll take an email of that sort,
you know, I'm not picky in that respect.
Keats revised it for publication in Hunt's magazine.
He actually kind of made it worse.
The consensus of critics and certainly this reader is
that the original version is the one to read.
Perhaps we should just read the poem together.
Dan, would you mind reading the first stanza to us?
"O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing."
Great rhythm there.
Chelsea?
"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."
"I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose Fast withereth too."
Those first three stanzas are a kind of introduction to the poem.
Who's speaking?
Yeah, I -.
No I don't think ever -.
I don't think there's any clue here.
No it seems to be an anonymous speaker.
It's also interesting that you get a switch between the first two stanzas
and the third that we've read where you go from addressing the night to an I message.
Yes. "I see a lily on thy brow with anguish moist and feverish dew."
Well, look at this imagery in these three stanzas.
So haggard and so woebegone.
The squirrel's granary is full and the harvest done.
What's the contrast there?
Well the squirrel has collected all the grain for
the winter so there's a sense of fecundity and
harvest and plenty opposed to the knight who is ailed by something.
He is haggard, he is pale,
seems to be the opposite of that fertility that this world is full of granary.
That's right and his feverish anguish.
And no birds sing.
Yeah. It's also clearly not the beginning of fall. It's the end of fall.
Winter is about to start,
all the birds have gone south,
they're done harvesting and the squirrel is ready.
That's right.
So that setting there is almost a character in the poem.
The setting is a force.
And the flowers are even mapped on to him right?
The lilies on his brow and the roses are on his cheeks.
And as the season changes these things
have withered in his face are faded the color in his face has faded.
That's right. So okay,
Blaine, now is your turn.
Read us the fourth stanza.
"I met a lady in the mead Full beautiful-- a faery's child.
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild."
And her eyes were wild.
It's almost a direct quotation. It's Wordsworth.
Wordsworth's lyrical ballads which contains poetry by both Coleridge and
Wordsworth were a powerful influence on a lot of Keats's writing.
Don, read the next stanza to us.
"I made a garland for head, And bracelets too,
and fragrant zone; She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan."
So fragrant zone.
Zone archaic word for girdle.
Again archaic in Keats's time,
he's using the word intentionally to give you that chivalric language.
Dan?
"I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend and sing A faery's song."
"She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said "I love thee true."
These stanzas immersion the central world.
They really evoke the senses. Chelsea?
I was thinking about Arwen speaking Elvish, there. That's actually what I was thinking.
Really?
Yeah.
Really?
Do you feel the rhythms of this poem all in Arwen's words?
I think there's a lot of resonance.
Yeah.
It's an interesting detail that in the film as opposed to the book Arwen takes Frodo on
her horse to get into Rivendell which is sort of similar to
here except he is setting her on his horse whereas in Tolkien's book it's a different,
you know, he's taken by --.
It's particularly curious since the poem as you say talks about the knight putting her
on the horse and yet he also says or the speaker also says she took me to her.
She like, she took me.
That's right.
Which is inconsistent.
It's real play of passivity in action here.
I know Tolkien was familiar with this point.
Every educated Englishman of his time knew this poem.
I'm not particularly claiming that this poem was a powerful influence on Tolkien.
I want to compare their use of the same kind of materials.
I think there are some passages in the book that seem fairly similar.
Whether he got it from Keats or whether he's just making
parallel use of those same medieval materials or different uses of them.
Something that we want to consider.
Jay ClaytonProfessor
