Theme of Love

This paper presents a comparison of the theme of love in two of the most widely recognized poems called: “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, writtten by John Keats and Robert Browning's My Last Duchess.

La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats

Beginning with stanza 4 and continuing to the end, the knight tells his strange story, one unlike any other in English poetry. In the flowering fields he met a young woman of supernal beauty, “a fairy's child” who in reality is a femme fatale. The knight came immediately under her spell, perhaps hypnotized by her powerful eyes, losing awareness of all but her (Keats, 14). Although he could not understand her strange tongue, the two communicated in other ways. Reminiscent of Christopher Marlowe's passionate shepherd, he made her a garland of flowers, a bracelet, and a belt and set her on his warhorse. She in turn found strange foods for him—sweet roots, wild honey, “manna dew”—and cast a spell upon him which he mistook for words of love: “sure in language strange she said—/I love thee true.” She took him to her underground grotto, where, weeping and sighing, she allowed him to comfort her even as she lulled him to sleep (Keats, 15).

“La Belle Dame sans Merci” has been the subject of considerable critical attention. Bate remarks on the wide range of sources that contributed to the poem, to which may be added the strange folk ballad “Thomas Rhymer.” The beautiful lady is obviously a femme fatale, an archetypal figure originating in early myth and continuing to the present in the popular image of the vamp. Bate believes the central influence to be Edmund Spenser's Duessa, who in The Faerie Queene (1590,1596) seduces the Red Cross Knight. Other models readily available to Keats of warriors brought low by the wiles of beautiful women are Samson and Antony (Keats, 16).

The identification of a specific femme fatale appears less important, however, than relating the knight's experience to the long tradition of a mortal entrammeled by a beautiful female who may possess supernatural powers. The reader is reminded of the plight of Odysseus's mariners who are bewitched by Circe in Homer's Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.). They temporarily lose their human appearance. Keats's knight fares much worse. He may be drained of his blood—he is “death-pale,” as are the kings, princes, and warriors of his dream—in which case he would be ...