John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci

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La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Brief Legacy of Love and Strife “Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water”, etched upon the stone of John Keats’ grave, at his diction, summarized a theme and disdain for his own existence. Keats lived a life that was fleeting in success, love and mortality, as if played upon water. Sadly, his early efforts in poetry were panned and his genius for writing was not realized by the public until after his demise. By examining his work, “La Belle Dame San Merci”, one will discern the symmetry to Keats’ own short life. John Keats was born near London in 1795 and orphaned by the age of 14; his father died as the result of an accident and his mother died of tuberculosis (Bush). Although he had four siblings, all but his sister died before him and as a result of the ‘family illness’, consumption (Bush). While he struggled through finance issues his whole life, he never knew that he had funds left to him and his siblings that could have eased most of struggles in life. Despite the hardships, he went to school and earned his license to practice medicine, although he abandoned the field to devote himself to literature by 1814 (Reisman). What success Keat’s enjoyed was limited and one could say his ‘productive’ years came between the years 1817-1821 (Keats.com). It was during this time, 1820, that his poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, was first published. In translation the title is “The Beautiful Lady without Mercy” and is commonly known in that form, though it was altered slightly from its first version written in 1819 (Reisman). ‘La Belle’ for short, is a poem in ballad form, with only 12 quatrains total in the ABCB rhyme scheme. The ABCB pattern simply means that the ending of the 2nd line rhymes with the ending of the 4th line, such as loitering and sing, found in the first stanza. Further, the poem is written largely in ‘iambic

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