The Enigma of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’

Abstract

It is a case of textual transference, if ever there was one. John Keats writes a strange, eerie poem– ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ – about a knight who is enthralled by his Lady. Then the readers who read the poem find themselves enthralled by the poem’s strangeness and eeriness. They find they are unable to tell exactly what happens in the encounter between the knight and the Lady. And so, like the knight on the cold hill side left dreaming again and again the same dream of ‘La belle dame sans merci’, they are left to read and re-read the poem in a state of enthralment to it that seems to have been transferred across from the knight’s bearing towards the Lady (who may or may not be the same person as ‘La belle dame’ in the dream). This, then, is the enigma of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. Firstly, the poem’s meaning appears enigmatic. Then, secondly, this condition, in a way that appears as remarkable as it is real, determines that the problem of meaning in Keats’s poem is enacted by the readers of the poem as well. The whole question of this enigma manifests a clear ideological dimension. For it tends to be the case that Keats’s poem is valorised by virtue of the degree of its enigmatic meaning. It is on this basis, in other words, that the practice of re-reading texts is sustained. But as we shall see, what is often a conservative approach to re-reading texts is something we can break with in regard to ‘La Belle Dame’. The enigma of this ‘unreadable’ poem becomes, through a dialectical twist, the condition of its legibility. In particular, it will be not ‘the mere touch of cold philosophy’ (Lamia) but a version of Keatsian ‘Negative Capability’ (Letters, 21 December 1817) that helps us to intervene in this way. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is indeed ‘that enthralled and enthralling poem’, in Marjorie Levinson’s words, and as such it operates extraordinarily well, as Levinson has shown, as a site where different modes of criticism meet in paradigmatic terms – a ‘life of Allegory’ indeed! Here follow a few examples of critics coming at Keats’s ballad from different directions, yet all asserting the sheer inexplicability of what is related in the ballad itself. In presenting inexplicability as the source of this poem’s continuing fascination, one of Keats’s 1960s biographers, Walter Jackson Bate, has suggested that ‘in this ballad all clues to ready judgment are withheld’. One of Keats’s 1990s biographers, Stephen Coote, draws his discussion of this poem to a close with the comment that ‘In the end, everything we bring to “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” fails fully to account for the subtlety of its exploration of sex and death’. A further variation on this theme is performed by Susan Wolfson who, particularly interested in the language of Keats’s ballad, concludes her reading of