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John KeatsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Like many of Keats’s later poems, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” can be considered a meditation on mortality and death. The external landscape of the poem—the lake, the dried grass, the meads, the elfin grot—enacts the poet’s deepest fears about illness and end. The fundamental and unanswerable question with which the poem wrests is how to live when death is near and a given. From his very introduction, the knight is presented as pale and rudderless, almost paralyzed by what contemporary readers may recognize as panic and anxiety. The reader recognizes the knight is in crisis. To know the exact nature of this crisis, the knight takes the reader on a journey through his storytelling. The knight paints a vivid picture for the poem’s anonymous speaker—the stand-in for the reader—and thus acts as a creative force. In this state, the knight is in his full glory, identified with vitality and spring. The landscape at the start of the knight’s journey is radically different from its current state. It is a landscape of meads, garlands, “honey wild and manna-dew” (Line 26), all symbols of spring, summer, and bounty. The knight is in the prime of his youth. As his journey advances, the knight is led by the lady into the elfin grot, a faery cave.
By John Keats
Endymion
Endymion: A Poetic Romance
John Keats
Meg Merrilies
Meg Merrilies
John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on a Grecian Urn
John Keats
Ode on Melancholy
Ode on Melancholy
John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
Ode to Psyche
Ode to Psyche
John Keats
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
John Keats
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
John Keats
The Eve of St. Agnes
The Eve of St. Agnes
John Keats
To Autumn
To Autumn
John Keats
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
John Keats
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