1  

La belle dame sans merci

John Keats

2  O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?The sedge has wither’d from the lake,And no birds sing.

3  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.

4  I see a lily on thy browWith anguish moist and fever dew,And on thy cheeks a fading roseFast
withereth too.

5  I met a lady in the meads,Full beautiful—a faery’s child,Her hair was long, her foot was
light,And her eyes were wild.

6  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.

7  I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,For sidelong would she bend, and singA faery’s song.

8  She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew,And sure in language strange she said—“I love thee true.”

9  She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,And there I shut her wild wild eyesWith kisses four.

10  And there she lulled me asleep,

And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!The latest dream I ever dream’dOn the cold hill’s side.

11  I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;They cried—“La Belle Dame sans MerciHath thee in
thrall!”

12  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.

13  And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,And no birds sing.

14  ContextThis poem was written towards the end of his life after his brother had died of
tuberculosis, but before he discovered he had it too.How could the death of his brother have
reflected on this poem?What love interest of Keat’s could the Belle Dame perhaps personify?

15  MeaningWhat initial ideas do you have about the meaning?

16  MeaningThe poem is divided between the voice of a knight: ‘O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-
arms’ and who seems to be a passerby. The passerby asks the knights what is wrong, and the
knight describes his troubled encounter with a beautiful lady.
17  The knight says that the woman ‘lulled him to sleep’
The knight says that the woman ‘lulled him to sleep’. What could we interpret from this?

18  I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;They cried—“La Belle Dame sans MerciHath thee in
thrall!”As the Knights sleep he has a terrible dream of kings and princes who visit him as ghosts.
Who could these men be?

“La Belle Dame sans Merci” is a ballad by John Keats, one of the most
studied and highly regarded English Romantic poets. In the poem, a
medieval knight recounts a fanciful romp in the countryside with a fairy
woman—La Belle Dame sans Merci, which means "The Beautiful Lady
Without Mercy" in French—that ends in cold horror. Related to this focus on
death and horror, Keats wrote the poem months after his brother Tom died
of tuberculosis.

 “La Belle Dame sans Merci” Summary

o What’s the matter, knight in shining armor, standing alone, looking

rather ill? The plant life by the lakeside has shriveled up and the sound of
birdsong is absent.

Again, tell me, what’s the matter? You look extremely distressed and sad. The
squirrels have gathered their provisions for winter, and we humans have
harvested our fields.

Your forehead is pale like a lily and moist with the sweat of a painful
fever. The color in your cheeks, once bright and lively as a rose, is fading
extremely quickly.

I, the knight, met a woman in the meadows. She was so enchantingly

beautiful I assumed she was the child of fairy. She had long hair, she moved
so gracefully she seemed to hover over the earth, and she had a mysterious
wildness in her eyes.

From flowers, stems, and leaves I wove a crown for her to wear. I also wove
her bracelets, and a belt strong with the scent of the flowers I used to make
it. Having received my gifts, she looked at me—it was the look of someone
falling in love—and she moaned sweetly.
 I sat her behind me on my trotting horse, yet that whole day I saw nothing but
her—as we trotted along, she would lean forward and around me, singing a
mysterious fairy song.

When we stopped, she dug up sweet, nutritious roots for me. She served me
wild honey, and a substance so heavenly in taste it reminded me of manna,
the food that kept the Israelites alive on their journey out of Egypt. In a
strange language that I nevertheless understood, she said, “I truly love you.”

Next she took me to her enchanted cave, where, overwhelmed with emotion,
she wept and sighed—something pained her. I shut those wild eyes of hers by
kissing her four times in an attempt to soothe her.

Next, she lulled me to sleep, and I fell into a deep dream—it still fills me with
sadness and despair to remember it! That was the last dream I ever had, in
that cave, which was located on a cold hillside.

In it I saw pale kings, princes, and warriors gathered around me. I saw the
color of death in all of their faces. They told me that La Belle Dame sans
Merci—The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy—had taken me as her prisoner.

I saw their love-starved, life-starved lips in the dying light. These lips widened
as they warned me about the trouble I’d gotten myself into. Then I woke up,
and found myself here, on this cold hillside.

So that's the answer to your question—that's why I linger here alone, looking
rather unhealthy, even though, as you say, the plant life by the lakeside has
shriveled up and the sound of birdsong is absent.

 “La Belle Dame sans Merci” Themes

o
 Love, Obsession, and Death

In the poem, a knight tells the story of how he becomes obsessed with, and
then gets abandoned by, a spirit known as La Belle Dame sans Merci, or "The
Beautiful Lady Without Mercy." Though seemingly aware she’s an illusion, the
knight lingers in his memory of the Lady, and it’s implied he will do so until he
dies. In this relationship, the knight’s love turns from enchantment into
obsession.

Through his example, the poem expresses two linked warnings about the
dangers of intense romantic love. First, obsession drains one’s emotional
energy. Second, when the object of obsession disappears, the lover left
behind undergoes a spiritual death, losing the ability to appreciate beauty in
anything but the memory of what is lost. These warnings suggest that love,
though wonderful, can quickly shift into a kind of death if it becomes
obsessive.

The knight first describes falling in love with the Lady as a kind of
enchantment that consumes him completely. The Lady he finds in the
meadow is "Full beautiful—a faery’s child." The Lady’s perfect beauty
captures the knight’s attention. By describing her as the child of a magical
creature, he emphasizes that her ability to charm him is a supernatural force.
Enchanted further by the mysterious wildness in her eyes, the knight begins
serving the Lady and devoting all his emotional energy to her. He weaves the
Lady "bracelets" and "a garland," and in reward receives her "love" and
"sweet moan."

However, the line between enchantment and obsession is dangerously thin.

The Lady soon becomes the knight’s single focus—seemingly his single
source of life. Besides the Lady, the knight sees "nothing else … all day." This
may sound like hyperbole, but the knight means it: the Lady creates a private
world for herself and the knight.
Soon, the knight sees her in everything—he is obsessed. The flowers
transform into suitable material for the Lady to wear. The hillside cave, a
feature of the natural landscape, becomes the Lady’s "Elfin grot." As the
knight’s obsession deepens, he grows to depend on the Lady even for basic
nutrition. The Lady feeds the knight "roots of relish sweet, / And honey wild,
and manna-dew."

The allusion to manna, the supernaturally nutritious substance provided by

God to the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt, implies that the Lady is
literally responsible for the knight’s survival. At this point the Lady says, "I love
thee true." The knight’s response is to give himself over fully to the Lady—he
follows her home, soothes her, and makes himself vulnerable before her,
allowing her to lull him to sleep.

Having devoted so much emotional energy to the Lady and put himself
completely under her control, the knight undergoes a spiritual death when she
disappears. In his dream the knight sees the Lady’s former victims: "pale
kings," "princes," and "warriors"—"death-pale were they all." In their faces he
sees the man he will become: someone deathly, starved, and captivated by
memories of the Lady to the point of enslavement. Like them, he will wake up
"death-pale," or, as the speaker first describes him, "Alone and palely
loitering"—physically alive, yet condemned to replay his memory of an
obsessive love for the rest of his days. The Lady is finally revealed to be La
Belle Dame sans Merci—literally, The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy.

Strangely, the Lady’s merciless behavior actually consists of the love and joy
she provides; her sudden disappearance is what makes the knight’s
experience so painful exactly because she was previously so kind. The shape
of the Lady’s cruelty suggests that anything one falls in love with or obsesses
over can cause such pain, since anything can disappear in an instant. The
poem thus cautions against such intense, obsessive love, arguing that it’s
ultimately not worth the agony it can cause.
o
 Imagination vs. Reality

In "La Belle Dame sans Merci," the speaker asks a medieval knight to explain
why he’s lingering in a clearly inhospitable area, where winter is setting in.
The knight answers by telling a sort of fairy tale that sets up a colorful,
imaginative world in opposition to the barren gray reality. By the end of the
story, however, it is clear that the fairy-tale world is directly responsible for the
knight’s exhausted desperation. The poem suggests that the two worlds are
bound together: the imagination can shape reality so profoundly that the two
become indistinguishable.

The physical descriptions of the setting ground the first stanzas in the real
world. Stanzas 1 and 2 evoke a specific time of year: late autumn. Plants
have "withered," birdsong is absent, and the animals are preparing for winter.
This somewhat harsh imagery will deepen the contrast between reality and
the imagination when the knight begins his fantastic story.

That story, in turn, blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. The Lady the
knight meets is "a faery’s child" who sings a "faery’s song" as she rides with
the knight on his "pacing steed." She feeds him "manna-dew," then brings him
to her "Elfin" cave. The story emphasizes these fanciful aspects of the knight’s
experience, but it is not entirely clear at first whether the knight is using terms
like "faery’s child" and "Elfin grot" literally. At this point in the poem, they could
just as well be the knight’s way of saying that the Lady was extremely,
enchantingly beautiful.

Even the revelation that the Lady is a spirit being doesn’t negate that. The
knight describes what he saw and how it affected him—the result is the same
no matter who the Lady actually is. This is why, at the end of the poem, he
says quite somberly and seriously, "And this"—"this" being his experience
—"is why I sojourn here."
 As he dreams in the hillside cave, the knight learns from "pale kings and
princes" (the Lady’s previous lovers) that he is in the deadly grips of a spirit
known as La Belle Dame sans Merci. The dream is a fantasy within the
knight's story—a kind of double fantasy—but it’s also here that the knight finds
the actual future reflected. That is, at the deepest moment of his imaginative
experience, the knight learns the truth about what has happened to him.

By the end of the poem, the knight’s actual, lived reality becomes a fusion of
the barren lakeside and the memory of his experience. The knight wakes from
his dream "On the cold hill’s side" and surges back into the real world—that is,
the world where the poem started. This moment raises the possibility that the
knight was dreaming all along. However, given how closely bound the real
and imaginative worlds have become for the knight, waking doesn’t imply an
escape from the memory of the Lady.

In the last stanza, the first stanza is repeated—but now the knight is speaking.
The knight acknowledges his place, “Alone and palely loitering” by the lifeless
lakeside, and the poem’s final image is of a desperate man lingering in the
memory of an experience that may not have even happened. Ultimately,
however, it doesn’t matter whether the Lady was ever really there. Unable to
take his mind off this fantastical memory but also unable to return to it, the
knight ends up trapped in the place where his imagination merges with his
reality.

 Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “La Belle

Dame sans Merci”
o Lines 1-4

The poem’s first stanza introduces the poem’s main problem and character,
builds the setting, and establishes the form.

The poem starts on a tone of lament. In isolation, the opening "O" might just
as easily look like the start of a meditation on nature's beauty, or love's glory,
but quickly the word "ail" (i.e. "pains" or "afflicts") intervenes and clarifies one
of the poem's main themes. This is a poem about pain, and the struggle to
understand it. The "O," then, kicks off the inquiry of an empathetic observer.
The archaic "thee" gives the reader an early hint about the time period of the
poem's setting, one confirmed by the addressee's title in the next clause:
"knight-at-arms." Most likely, this poem takes place in the Middle Ages, when
one wouldn't necessarily be surprised by the sudden appearance of a knight.

The precise placement of "knight-at-arms" in the line reflects some of the

poem's main themes. Knight-at-arms is the knight's formal title. It represents
the honorable, chivalrous knight in shining armor. Even the hyphens, which
augment the choppy rigidity of the monosyllabic words, contribute to this
effect. In the sentence, "knight-at-arms" is isolated by a caesura on one side
and an end-stop on the other. Visually and grammatically, the knight is
separated from the rest of the action. This has two effects. One, it highlights
the tension between the expected composure of an ideal knight and the
wallowing of this particular knight, who is a real person with real emotions (the
reader will soon learn that the knight is an emotional wreck). Two, it reflects
the knight's alienation from his context. As the reader will learn, though the
knight loiters by the lakeside, his mind is in a completely different place.

This alienation starts coming through in line 2, in which the knight is described
as "Alone and palely loitering." Already the knight is out of context—he's not
with other knights, or doing knightly things, but rather alone, seeming to do
nothing at all. These words—"alone," "pale," and "loitering"—also hint at some
of the poem's main themes. The knight is alone, but was once with someone
he loved; he is pale, or reminiscent of death; and he loiters, literally incapable
of moving on to the next thing.

The next two lines build on the theme of death, and further establish the
setting. The "sedge," or grassy plant life, "has withered from the lake." By
using the perfect tense in "has withered," the poem suggests that the
 withering, though complete, happened recently. The reader, then, might
assume that the poem is somewhere between fall and winter. Along with the
shriveling plant life, "no birds sing," another sign that winter is setting in.
These tokens of death enhance the knight's deathly aspect, and the
suggestion of seasonal change signals that the poem will deal with the
concept of repeating cycles.

Finally, this jam-packed first stanza establishes the poem's meter. Like other
English ballads, Keats works in quatrains, or four-line stanzas, but he adds
some of his own touches. The first three lines of every stanza are
in iambic tetrameter (each line has eight syllables), and the fourth line of each
stanza has four to five syllables.

Stanza 1 follows the meter faithfully, as will the others. It begins,

O what | can ail | thee, knight |-at-arms?

The uniform beats of the unstressed-stressed iambs are appropriate for a

ballad, a form that was originally accompanied by music and dance. In this
line, the stress falls on the most important words. "What" in some ways
prefigures the rest of the poem, as it forms the question the knight will answer;
"ail" refers to the knight's pain; and "knight" and "arms" introduce the main
character.

The meter in line 4 also serves a special purpose.

And no | birds sing.

This final line kills the rhythm of the three preceding lines. Its first stressed
word is "no," giving defeated emphasis to the poem's description of death. As
in the poem's other stanza-concluding lines, this one both freezes the
preceding imagery with its clipped, terse sound, and, with its monosyllabic
speed, propels the poem into the next stanza.

The Full Text of “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

1O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 
2       Alone and palely loitering? 
3The sedge has withered from the lake, 
4       And no birds sing. 
5O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 
6       So haggard and so woe-begone? 
7The squirrel’s granary is full, 
8       And the harvest’s done. 
9I see a lily on thy brow, 
10       With anguish moist and fever-dew, 
11And on thy cheeks a fading rose 
12       Fast withereth too. 
13I met a lady in the meads, 
14       Full beautiful—a faery’s child, 
15Her hair was long, her foot was light, 
16       And her eyes were wild. 
17I made a garland for her head, 
18       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; 
19She looked at me as she did love, 
20       And made sweet moan. 
21I set her on my pacing steed, 
22       And nothing else saw all day long, 
23For sidelong would she bend, and sing 
24       A faery’s song. 
25She found me roots of relish sweet, 
26       And honey wild, and manna-dew, 
27And sure in language strange she said— 
28       ‘I love thee true’. 
29She took me to her Elfin grot, 
30       And there she wept and sighed full sore, 
31And there I shut her wild wild eyes 
32       With kisses four. 
33And there she lullèd me asleep, 
34       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!— 
35The latest dream I ever dreamt 
36       On the cold hill side. 
37I saw pale kings and princes too, 
38       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; 
39They cried—'La Belle Dame sans Merci 
40       Thee hath in thrall!' 
41I saw their starved lips in the gloam, 
42       With horrid warning gapèd wide, 
43And I awoke and found me here, 
44       On the cold hill’s side. 
45And this is why I sojourn here, 
46       Alone and palely loitering, 
47Though the sedge is withered from the lake, 
48       And no birds sing.

La Belle Dame sans Merci Glossary

La Belle Dame
French for "the beautiful woman"
Ail
to trouble someone
Loitering
Waiting or wandering about vaguely without any definite purpose
Sedge
A kind of grass with triangular stems
Withered
Dried, used-up
Haggard
Exhausted, fatigued
Woe-begone
dejected, miserable, gloomy
Granary
A storehouse for grains
Anguish
torment; severe psychic or physical pain causing misery
Moist
wet, damp
Mead
meadow
Steed
horse
Manna-dew
the celestial food the Israelites were provided with by God, during their wanderings in the
desert
Elfin
elf-like
Grot
a small cave
Lull
to cause to fall asleep
Betide
to happen

La Belle Dame Sans Merci Summary Line by Line

The speaker of the poem comes across a "knight at arms" alone, and apparently dying, in a field
somewhere. He asks him what's going on, and the knight's answer takes up the rest of the poem. The
knight says that he met a beautiful fairy lady in the fields. He started hanging out with her, making
flower garlands for her, letting her ride on his horse, and generally flirting like knights do. Finally, she
invited him back to her fairy cave. Sweet, thought the knight. But after they were through smooching,
she "lulled" him to sleep, and he had a nightmare about all the knights and kings and princes that the
woman had previously seduced – they were all dead. And then he woke up, alone, on the side of a hill
somewhere.

Stanza 1, Lines 1-4

"O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
 The poem opens with a question: an unnamed speaker asks a "knight at arms" what's wrong,
or what's "ail[ing]" him.
 Something is clearly wrong with the knight – he's "loitering" by himself around the edge of a
lake, and he's "pale."
 The speaker says that the "sedge," or marsh plants, have all died out from around the lake,
and "no birds sing." So we're guessing that it's autumn or even early winter since all the birds have
migrated, and the plants have "withered."
 The presence of the "knight at arms" reminds us of medieval fairy tales with knights and
ladies in towers. We think that this is the response Keats intended
Stanza 2, Lines 5-8

"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.
 The first part of the stanza echoes the first line of the poem word-for-word. Apparently the
knight doesn't answer immediately, so the unnamed speaker has to repeat the question.
 This time, we get two more adjectives to describe the knight: he's "haggard," or worn-out and
tired-looking, and "woe-begone." The knight is obviously both sick and depressed.
 The last two lines of the stanza do more to set the scene: the squirrels have finished filling up
their "granary," or storage of food for the winter, and the crops have already been harvested.
 We can now safely assume that it's late autumn.

Stanza 3, Lines 9-12

"I see a lily on thy brow

With anguish moist and fever-dew.
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too."
 The speaker continues to address this sick, depressed "knight at arms." He asks about the
"lily" on the knight's "brow," suggesting that the knight's face is pale like a lily.
 The knight's forehead is sweaty with "anguish" and with "fever," so he's obviously sick.
 The last two lines of the stanza describe how the healthy color is rapidly "fading" from the
knight's cheeks.
Stanza 4, Lines 13-16

"I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful – a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
 This stanza changes point of view.
 All of a sudden, the knight answers the unnamed speaker's questions. So now the "I" is the
knight, rather than the original speaker.
 The knight says that he met a beautiful, fairy-like "lady" in the "meads," or fields.
 She had long hair, was graceful, and had "wild" eyes. (We're not sure what "wild" eyes would
look like, but apparently the knight thought it was attractive.)

Stanza 5, Lines 17-20

"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.
 The knight made a flower wreath, or "garland," for the lady, along with flower "bracelets."
 The "fragrant zone" is a belt made of flowers.
 We get the idea that the knight decks out the maiden with flowers.
 "Fragrant zone" could also be a reference to her lady parts, which would make sense, given
where the next two lines go.
 And where do the next two lines go? Well, the lady is "look[ing]" at the knight while "lov[ing]"
and "moan[ing]," so we think that they two are having sex.
Stanza 6, Lines 21-24

"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.
 The knight puts the lady on his horse (his "pacing steed") to take a ride. Yes, there might be
sexy connotations to this line, too.
 The knight is so absorbed with his erotic encounter with this fairy lady that he doesn't notice
anything else "all day long."
 The lady leans "sidelong," or sideways off of the horse and sings "fairy songs" to the knight.

Stanza 7, Lines 25-28

"She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild and manna-dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
'I love thee true.'
 The knight says that the fairy lady found him tasty roots, honey, and manna to eat ("of relish
sweet").
 "Manna" is the food that the Jewish scriptures say that the Israelites ate when they were
wandering around the desert after Moses freed them from slavery in Egypt. It's supposed to be food
from heaven, so this word makes the fairy lady seem supernatural, if not actually divine.
 Alternatively, the association could be with the slavery from which the Israelites had just been
freed. After all, the knight does become enslaved to the beautiful fairy lady. This allusion becomes
even more potent when it's associated with the "honey wild" that the fairy lady fed the knight. (The
Israelites were trying to find the Promised Land, which would flow with "milk and honey.")
 The fairy lady tells the knight that she loves him, but she says it "in language strange."
 He doesn't say what language it is, or how he's able to understand her. Maybe he's just
hearing what he wants to hear, or maybe her magical influence has enabled him to understand her
"language strange."
Stanza 8, Lines 29-32

"She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she wept and sigh'd full sore;
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.
 The fairy lady takes the knight to her "elfin grot." "Elfin" just means having to do with elves, as
any Tolkien fans probably figured. And a "grot" is a grotto, or cave.
 Once they're back at her fairy cave, she cries and sighs loudly. The knight doesn't say why
she's crying, and we never find out – it's left to our imagination.
 The knight kisses her weepy eyes four times. (Why "four" kisses? Isn't "three" usually the
magic number in fairy tales? )
 Again, her eyes are described as "wild," and this time it's repeated twice.

Stanza 9, Lines 33-36

"And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dream'd – ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill's side.
 The fairy lady "lulls" the knight to sleep like a baby in her cave, and he starts to dream
something.
 He interrupts himself with a dash – in line 34, and exclaims "Ah! woe betide!" because even
the memory of the dream is horrible as he repeats it to the unnamed speaker.
 "Woe betide!" is an archaic exclamation used to express extreme grief or suffering. It was old-
fashioned even when Keats was writing.
 The knight's use of this expression emphasizes the medieval romance setting.
 The knight's dream in the fairy cave is the "latest," or last, dream he'll ever have.
Stanza 10, Lines 37-40

"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!'
 The knight describes the dream he had: he saw "kings," "princes," and "warriors, and they
were all "death pale." In fact, he repeats the word "pale" three times in two lines.
 This procession of "pale" men could be an allusion to the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse
that gets described in the Book of Revelation in the Christian bible. The fourth horseman is Death,
and he rides on a pale horse.
 The pale warriors, princes, and kings all cry out in unison that "La belle dame sans merci" has
the knight "in thrall," or in bondage.
 Line 39 has the title of the poem in it, so it's time to translate it. The title is French and it
translates to "the beautiful woman without mercy."

Stanza 11, Lines 41-44

"I saw their starved lips in the gloam

With horrid warning gapèd wide
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill's side.
 The knight continues to describe the pale warriors from his dream – in the "gloam," or dusk,
all he can make out are their "lips."
 Their mouths are "starv'd" and hungry-looking, and their mouths are all open as they cry out
their warning to the knight.
 The word "gloam" just means dusk or twilight, but it's no accident that Keats uses it – after all,
"gloam" sounds a lot like "gloom."
 The knight wakes up from the dream alone and cold on the side of a hill.
Stanza 12, Lines 45-48

"And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing."
 The knight has finished his story. He tells the original, unnamed speaker, that this is why he's
hanging out ("sojourn[ing]" and "loitering") by himself, even though it's so dismal outside.
 The knight repeats the unnamed speaker's words from the first stanza, so that the poem ends
with almost exactly the same stanza with which it began.
 “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” written in 1819 and published the next year
in a form slightly different from the one here, depicts a knight-at-arms
who has been seduced and abandoned by a capricious fairy. Told in the
form of a dialogue, the poem recounts the experience of loving
dangerously and fully, of remaining loyal to that love despite warnings
to the contrary, and of suffering the living death of one who has
glimpsed immortality," (enotes, 2011). 
  This poem could be interpreted in a myriad of ways. There are some people
who think that the fairy exists only in the imagination and others who believe
her to be equitable to a siren, luring men into become her emotional slaves.
One analysis takes a different route:
 "The references to "faery" and "elfin" suggest enchantment or
imagination. Her "sweet moan" and "song" represent art inspired by
imagination. The lady, symbolizing imagination, takes him to an ideal
world. The knight becomes enraptured by or totally absorbed in the
pleasures of the imagination--the delicious foods, her song, her beauty,
her love or favor ("and nothing else saw all day long"). But the
imagination or visionary experience is fleeting; the human being cannot
live in this realm, a fact which the dreamer chooses to ignore. The
knight's refusal to let go of the joys of the imagination destroys his life
in the real world," (Melani, 2010). 
 In poetry analysis, it may be hard to differ opinion from objective analysis.
While searching articles and websites online, I was struck by how similar they
all sound. After reading a number of them, I was able to tell them apart more
easily. Here is one example of an opinion about Keats' poem:  
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by Arthur Hugues.

 “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is one of Keats’s most beloved poems and
one of the few important works that seems to evade the kind of critical
argumentation invoked by the odes and long poems. Typical of critics’
magnanimity toward the ballad is T. Hall Caine’s 1882 assessment of the
poem as the “loveliest [Keats] gave us.” He writes that the ballad is
“wholly simple and direct, and informed throughout by a reposeful
strength. In all the qualities that rule and shape poetry into unity of form,
this little work strides, perhaps, leagues in advance of
‘Endymion,’”  (enotes, 2011). 

One can tell that it is an opinion because of the use of words like "beloved"
and "important". The author believes the poem to be a beloved and important
work, and that is all based on the author's own opinions. This opinion offers
little in the way of new information or analysis. 

Stanza 1, Lines 1-4

"O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
 The poem opens with a question: an unnamed speaker asks a "knight at
arms" what's wrong, or what's "ail[ing]" him.

 Something is clearly wrong with the knight – he's "loitering" by himself around
the edge of a lake, and he's "pale."
  The speaker says that the "sedge," or marsh plants, have all died out from
around the lake, and "no birds sing." So we're guessing that it's autumn or
even early winter since all the birds have migrated, and the plants have
"withered."

 The presence of the "knight at arms" reminds us of medieval fairy tales with
knights and ladies in towers. We think that this is the response Keats intended

Stanza 2, Lines 5-8

"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.
 The first part of the stanza echoes the first line of the poem word-for-word.
Apparently the knight doesn't answer immediately, so the unnamed speaker
has to repeat the question.

 This time, we get two more adjectives to describe the knight: he's "haggard,"
or worn-out and tired-looking, and "woe-begone." The knight is obviously both
sick and depressed.
 The last two lines of the stanza do more to set the scene: the squirrels have
finished filling up their "granary," or storage of food for the winter, and the
crops have already been harvested.

 We can now safely assume that it's late autumn.

Stanza 3, Lines 9-12

"I see a lily on thy brow

With anguish moist and fever-dew.
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too."
 The speaker continues to address this sick, depressed "knight at arms." He asks about
the "lily" on the knight's "brow," suggesting that the knight's face is pale like a lily.

 The knight's forehead is sweaty with "anguish" and with "fever," so he's obviously
sick.

 The last two lines of the stanza describe how the healthy color is rapidly "fading"
from the knight's cheeks.
Stanza 4, Lines 13-16
"I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful – a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
 This stanza changes point of view.

 All of a sudden, the knight answers the unnamed speaker's questions. So now
the "I" is the knight, rather than the original speaker.

 The knight says that he met a beautiful, fairy-like "lady" in the "meads," or
fields.

 She had long hair, was graceful, and had "wild" eyes. (We're not sure what
"wild" eyes would look like, but apparently the knight thought it was attractive.)
Stanza 5, Lines 17-20

"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.
 The knight made a flower wreath, or "garland," for the lady, along with flower
"bracelets."

 The "fragrant zone" is a belt made of flowers.

 We get the idea that the knight decks out the maiden with flowers.

 "Fragrant zone" could also be a reference to her lady parts, which would
make sense, given where the next two lines go.

 And where do the next two lines go? Well, the lady is "look[ing]" at the knight
while "lov[ing]" and "moan[ing]," so we think that they two are having sex.

Stanza 6, Lines 21-24

"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.
  The knight puts the lady on his horse (his "pacing steed") to take a ride. Yes,
there might be sexy connotations to this line, too.

 The knight is so absorbed with his erotic encounter with this fairy lady that he
doesn't notice anything else "all day long."

 The lady leans "sidelong," or sideways off of the horse and sings "fairy songs"
to the knight.
Stanza 7, Lines 25-28

"She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild and manna-dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
'I love thee true.'
 The knight says that the fairy lady found him tasty roots, honey, and manna to
eat ("of relish sweet").

 "Manna" is the food that the Jewish scriptures say that the Israelites ate when
they were wandering around the desert after Moses freed them from slavery
in Egypt. It's supposed to be food from heaven, so this word makes the fairy
lady seem supernatural, if not actually divine.

 Alternatively, the association could be with the slavery from which the
Israelites had just been freed. After all, the knight does become enslaved to
the beautiful fairy lady. This allusion becomes even more potent when it's
associated with the "honey wild" that the fairy lady fed the knight. (The
Israelites were trying to find the Promised Land, which would flow with "milk
and honey.")

 The fairy lady tells the knight that she loves him, but she says it "in language
strange."

 He doesn't say what language it is, or how he's able to understand her.
Maybe he's just hearing what he wants to hear, or maybe her magical
influence has enabled him to understand her "language strange."

Stanza 8, Lines 29-32

"She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh'd full sore;
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.
 The fairy lady takes the knight to her "elfin grot." "Elfin" just means having to
do with elves, as any Tolkien fans probably figured. And a "grot" is a grotto, or
cave.

 Once they're back at her fairy cave, she cries and sighs loudly. The knight
doesn't say why she's crying, and we never find out – it's left to our
imagination.

 The knight kisses her weepy eyes four times. (Why "four" kisses? Isn't "three"
usually the magic number in fairy tales? )

 Again, her eyes are described as "wild," and this time it's repeated twice.
Stanza 9, Lines 33-36

"And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dream'd – ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill's side.
 The fairy lady "lulls" the knight to sleep like a baby in her cave, and he starts
to dream something.

 He interrupts himself with a dash – in line 34, and exclaims "Ah! woe betide!"
because even the memory of the dream is horrible as he repeats it to the
unnamed speaker.

 "Woe betide!" is an archaic exclamation used to express extreme grief or

suffering. It was old-fashioned even when Keats was writing.

 The knight's use of this expression emphasizes the medieval romance setting.

 The knight's dream in the fairy cave is the "latest," or last, dream he'll ever have.

Stanza 10, Lines 37-40

"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!'
 The knight describes the dream he had: he saw "kings," "princes," and
"warriors, and they were all "death pale." In fact, he repeats the word "pale" three
times in two lines.

 This procession of "pale" men could be an allusion to the fourth horseman of

the Apocalypse that gets described in the Book of Revelation in the Christian bible.
The fourth horseman is Death, and he rides on a pale horse.
 The pale warriors, princes, and kings all cry out in unison that "La belle dame
sans merci" has the knight "in thrall," or in bondage.

 Line 39 has the title of the poem in it, so it's time to translate it. The title is
French and it translates to "the beautiful woman without mercy."

 (If you want to know more about the title, go to the "What's Up With the Title?"
section, and then come back.)
Stanza 11, Lines 41-44

"I saw their starved lips in the gloam

With horrid warning gapèd wide
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill's side.
 The knight continues to describe the pale warriors from his dream – in the
"gloam," or dusk, all he can make out are their "lips."

 Their mouths are "starv'd" and hungry-looking, and their mouths are all open
as they cry out their warning to the knight.

 The word "gloam" just means dusk or twilight, but it's no accident that Keats
uses it – after all, "gloam" sounds a lot like "gloom."

 The knight wakes up from the dream alone and cold on the side of a hill.

Stanza 12, Lines 45-48

"And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing."
 The knight has finished his story. He tells the original, unnamed speaker, that
this is why he's hanging out ("sojourn[ing]" and "loitering") by himself, even
though it's so dismal outside.
 The knight repeats the unnamed speaker's words from the first stanza, so that
the poem ends with almost exactly the same stanza with which it began.