‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was originally the name of an anonymous fourteenth-century English poem about a cruel woman, but the title ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is more commonly associated with John Keats’s poem which tells the story of a knight-at-arms who was seduced by a woman who was […]
Tag: John Keats
‘The Eve of St Agnes’: A Poem by John Keats
‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is a narrative poem by John Keats (1795-1821) told using the Spenserian stanza, the nine-line verse form Edmund Spenser developed for his vast sixteenth-century epic, The Faerie Queene. On a cold night in a medieval castle, a young lover breaks into his sweetheart’s chamber, hides […]
‘To Solitude’: A Poem by John Keats
John Keats (1795-1821) begins this early sonnet, written when he was just 19 years old, by talking, almost paradoxically, of dwelling with solitude. Keats says that if he must be alone, he would rather be on his own in pleasant surroundings rather than in a city populated by ‘murky buildings’. […]