DramaticFlowers
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is so full of flowers, it could practically open its own sidewalk kiosk. Most of the flower imagery in the poem has some kind of symbolic weight to it. We usually associa...
Seasons and Cycles
The beginning and end of the poem seem to take place during autumn or even early winter, but the sequence with the fairy lady seems to be during spring or summer. Does the fairy lady control the se...
Paleness
Considering that the poem opens with descriptions of autumn and the "wither[ing]" plants around the lake, it's not surprising that the landscape and the people in it are colorless. But it is surpri...
Dreams and Sleep
The entire poem could sound like a dream sequence or a fantasy, with all the fairy ladies and "elfin grots." But there's an explicit dream sequence described by the knight at the close of the poem,...
Dew and Water
Medieval romances often associate women with water, so it's no surprise that Keats borrows from that tradition in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." The problem with women and water, though, is that men w...