Keats and the Femme Fatale: "La Belle Dame sans Merci"

John Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (1819) is one of the most haunting poems in the English language — a ballad of only twelve stanzas that has generated more critical debate than works many times its length. A knight encounters a beautiful, otherworldly woman; she enchants him; he wakes on a cold hillside, alone and "palely loitering." The poem is simultaneously a love story, a nightmare, a meditation on the dangers of beauty, and a deeply ambiguous exploration of desire, power, and the imagination.

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Context

Keats's Life in 1819

John Keats (1795–1821) wrote "La Belle Dame sans Merci" on 21 April 1819, during the extraordinary burst of creativity known as his annus mirabilis — the year that produced the great odes, "Lamia," and The Fall of Hyperion. Keats was twenty-three years old. He was deeply in love with Fanny Brawne, whom he had met in late 1818, and he was already showing symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him less than two years later.