La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) is a ballad by John Keats. A knight, pale and lonely by a lake, tells how he met a fairy woman in the meadows, was enchanted by her and woke alone on a cold hillside, haunted by the pale warriors she had enslaved before him.
The ballad
The poem opens with a speaker questioning the knight, who answers in the rest of the ballad. He describes the lady's wild eyes, the flowers he wove for her and the strange food she found for him.
In her grotto she lulls him to sleep; he dreams of kings and princes who warn him that he too is in her thrall, and wakes on the bleak hillside.
Keats uses the simple four-line stanza of the old ballads, but shortens the last line of each, which gives the poem its haunting, broken rhythm.
The title comes from a medieval French poem by Alain Chartier, which Keats knew through an English translation.
Afterlife
Keats copied the poem in a letter to his brother George in April 1819; a revised version was printed in 1820 in Leigh Hunt's journal The Indicator.
It became a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites: John William Waterhouse, Frank Dicksee and Arthur Hughes all painted the knight and the lady.
Anecdotes
Written in a letter
The first version of the poem survives in a long journal-letter Keats wrote to his brother and sister-in-law in America, between jokes and news.
Two versions
The version printed in 1820 changes the knight into a 'wretched wight'; most anthologies prefer the first version from the letter.
Frequently asked questions
Who wrote La Belle Dame sans Merci?
John Keats, in 1819.
Where does the title come from?
From a fifteenth-century French poem by Alain Chartier.
What happens to the knight?
He is enchanted by a fairy woman and wakes alone and abandoned on a cold hillside.