(Before proceeding to the analysis below, it might be helpful to read ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and our summary of the poem.) ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is a ballad, a poetic form that was popular – and ‘popular’ in the true sense of the word, being a form […]
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (‘the beautiful lady without mercy’) is one of John Keats’s best-loved and most widely anthologised poems; after his odes, it may well be his most famous. But is this poem with its French title a mere piece of pseudo-medieval escapism, summoning the world of chivalrous […]
Last week, we offered a short summary of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, although given how long the poem is, ‘short’ here wasn’t all that short. Still, now it’s time to offer some words of analysis of this, one of Keats’s most celebrated poems. Keats reportedly took just two or […]