"La Belle Dame sans Merci" Traditional Reading

The Beautiful Woman without Mercy is a ballad--a short narrative poem. Some read it as a Medieval love story in which La Belle is dominant and demonic in the tradition of Morgan le Fay (Morgana the Magician).  Some readers think that the first three stanzas are spoken by another character--the questioner--who comes upon the knight in the wilderness. The remaining stanzas in that reading are the knight's answer.

It is important to note that the season in the first three stanzas is autumn or winter: the sedge has withered, no birds sing, the squirrel has food stored and the harvest is in.  The knight is obviously ill: he's pale--there is a lilly on his brow--and feverish; he's withering as is the color on his cheeks; he's haggard and sad. He's also alone and interestingly he's "loitering." (I'll get back to that word in the non-traditional analysis of the poem.)

In the fourth stanza the knight is speaking in first person and answering the question posed: "What can ail thee?" He describes La Belle as a sylph, a beautiful young woman who is free and mysterious--perhaps the personification of young love. It is spring time and he gives her gifts of flowered "jewelry." She seems to be in love with him. He takes her up onto his horse and she is singing and filled with happiness. She feeds him and tells him that she loves him--in language strange since she seems other-worldly. La Belle is now the temptress. She takes him to her home--her "elfin grot"--and he kisses away her tears without questioning their cause. She lulls him to sleep and he dreams.

Stanzas ten and eleven describe his dream about previous victims who warn him that he is "in thrall" to La Belle. In other words, her spell has worked and he is enslaved and helpless. The dream seems to turn into a nightmare. These death-pale kings, princes and warriors caution him that La Belle is, in fact, a femme fatale. She deliberately leads men to their own destruction. Are they the ghosts of men who also found her irresistible? Is the same thing going to happen to this knight? When he awakens he is in a type of wasteland alone. Has this knight's quest failed through no fault of his own? Is the poem his warning to other potential targets of La Belle? Or was he searching for something unattainable?


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173740