The Date of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and ‘Song of Four Fairies’

Abstract

Keats drafted ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ at the end of April in the long journal letter he wrote to George and Georgiana Keats between February and May 1819. Immediately before writing the poem’s title Keats notes the day and time, ‘Wednesday Evening—’. The preceding section of the letter begins, ‘Yesterday’, and in the course of this Keats mentions that he saw ‘a new dull and half damnd opera call’d “the heart of Mid Lothian” . . . on Saturday’. In 1958 Hyder E. Rollins noted that Daniel Terry’s musical version of Scott’s novel had been premiered on Saturday, 17 April, which dated Keats’s reference to ‘Yesterday’ as Wednesday, 21 April. More precisely, it was written that morning because Keats’s next reference is to ‘Wednesday Evening’. Keats therefore drafted ‘La Belle Dame’ on 21 April 1819. This was the accepted dating until 1974 when Jack Stillinger proposed a modification. He argued that the dating of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ ought to be changed to ‘21 or 28 April 1819’ on the grounds that Terry’s ‘The Heart of Midlothian also played on the following Saturday, 24 April . . . when it was still “new,” and Keats’s “Wednesday Evening” just before the poem could as easily refer to 28 April . . . ’. Stillinger’s modified dating is now generally accepted. But what neither Rollins or Stillinger noticed is that in the part of the letter beginning ‘Yesterday’, which contains the reference to Daniel Terry’s opera, Keats also said that on Monday John Hamilton Reynolds had asked him to persuade Hunt to review his new satire, Peter Bell, in the Examiner. Keats did better than that. He went on to draft his review in the letter, and, having done so, tells George and Georgiana, ‘This will do well enough—I have coppied it out and enclosed it to Hunt’. He then continues the letter. Hunt published the review in the Examiner on Sunday, 25 April, adding illustrative quotations from Reynolds’s poem. Keats therefore drafted his review on the morning of Wednesday, 21 April, as Rollins reasoned, and the section containing ‘La Belle Dame’ was written that evening. However, when, in 1978, Stillinger published his edition of the poems, he dated Keats’s ballad 21 or 28 April, but changed his reasons for doing so, and extended his doubts to the whole ten page section of the letter starting with ‘Wednesday Evening’ which Rollins assigns to 21 September: