| O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
II.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms! 5
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
III.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew, 10
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
IV.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light, 15
And her eyes were wild.
V.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan. 20
VI.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
VII.
She found me roots of relish sweet, 25
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
“I love thee true.”
VIII.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore, 30
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
IX.
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d 35
On the cold hill’s side.
X.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!” 40
XI.
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
XII.
And this is why I sojourn here, 45
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
It is dialogic also. No moral teaching. There are frequent repetition, refrains, alliterations, archaisms. Fix metric scheme: ABCD. Romantic references: it represents nature(lake, birds, the dark and melancholic atmosphere). There are references to Anglo-Saxons literature: Beowulf and King Arthur. References to Middle Age, such as “knight”, because romantic writers liked Middle Age. LilyPurity, symbol of death. Symbol of love. Life vitality, but here the rose is feeding(?). From the 4th stanza, cavalier begins to speak. In the first 3 stanzas there is the poetic voice. Nature is wild, alive. Climax, isocolos, anaphors, alliterations, polisindeton, parallele structure. She represents maybe inspiring muse, maybe is art, his inspiration. His inspirations is wild, beautiful, attractive, without merci.
Che cosa ti tormenta, armato cavaliere
che indugi solo e pallido?
Di già appassite son le cipree del lago
e non cantan gli uccelli.
Che cosa ti tormenta, armato cavaliere,
cotanto affranto e così desolato,
riempito è già il granaio dello scoiattolo,
pronto è il raccolto.
Vedo sul tuo cimiero un bianco giglio,
umida angoscia, e del pianto la febbre
sulle tue gote, ove il color di rosa è scolorito
troppo rapidamente.
Una signora in quei prati incontrai,
lei, tutta la bellezza di figlia delle fate aveva,
chiome assai lunghe, e leggeri i suoi piedi,
ma selvaggi i suoi occhi.
Io feci una ghirlanda pel suo capo,
e pur bracciali, e odorosa cintura;
lei mi guardò com' avria fatto amore,
dolcemente gemette.
Io mi stetti con lei, sul mio cavallo
al passo, e nessun altro vidi in tutto il giorno;
seduta di traverso modulava
un canto delle fate.
Lei procurò per me grate radici,
vergine miele e rugiadosa manna,
e in linguaggio straniero poi mi disse:
- Io t'amo veramente.
Nella grotta degli elfi mi condusse,
e lì lei pianse, e sospirò in tristezza,
ma i suoi barbari occhi io tenni chiusi,
con quattro baci.
Ivi lei mi cullò, sino a dormire,
e lì sognai: sia maledetto l'ultimo sogno
fantasticato lì sul declivio
del freddo colle.
Vidi principi e re, pallidamente,
scialbi guerrieri smunti, color morte erano tutti
e gridavano a me: - La bella dama che non ha
compassione, t'ha reso schiavo!
Le lor livide labbra scorsi nella penombra,
che m'avvertivano: - L'ampia voragine orrendamente
s'apre! - Allora mi svegliai, e mi scopersi qui,
sopra il declivio del freddo colle.
Questo è accaduto perché qui rimasi
solo, senza uno scopo ad attardarmi,
pur se appassite fosser le cipree
e gli uccelli del lago non cantassero.
La Belle Dame sans Merci (dal francese: "La bella dama senza pietà") è il titolo di una ballata scritta dal poeta inglese John Keats. Esistono due versioni, con poche differenze tra loro. L’originale fu scritta da Keats nel 1819, sebbene il titolo sia quello di un poemetto del XV secolo di Alain Chartier[1].
Narra dell’incontro tra un cavaliere senza nome trovatosi in un paesaggio sterile e desolato, ed una misteriosa donna "dagli occhi selvaggi" che dichiara di essere "figlia di una fata"; la fa salire sul proprio cavallo e lei lo conduce alla "Grotta degli elfi", dove "versa lacrime e sospira di profondo dolore". Addormentatosi, il cavaliere ha la visione di principi e re dalla pelle bianchissima, i quali gli gridano che "La bella dama senza pietà" lo ha assoggettato, rendendolo suo schiavo. Al risveglio, si ritrova sullo stesso, gelido pendio dove continua ad aspettare.
Descrizione figurativa
Benché sia breve (composto solo da 12 strofe ognuna per 4 versi), è pieno di enigmi. Il cavaliere è infatti associato con una lily (simbolo di morte nella cultura Occidentale), pallido e sfuggente, destinato a rimanere sul pendio e ad avvizzire, nondimeno non è chiaro il perché del suo fato sfavorevole. Una lettura diretta suggerisce che sia stato intrappolato dalla Bella Dama, come le linee narrative di Thomas the Rhymer o Tam Lin. Inoltre, poiché i cavalieri sono solitamente costretti al voto di castità, la poesia potrebbe forse implicare che sia compromesso (e stregato) mentre esita e indugia con una creatura eterea. Era un popolare soggetto da realizzare tra i pittori Preraffaeliti.
The Story
The poet meets a knight by a woodland lake in late autumn. The man has been there for a long time, and is evidently dying. The knight says he met a beautiful, wild-looking woman in a meadow. He visited with her, and decked her with flowers. She did not speak, but looked and sighed as if she loved him. He gave her his horse to ride, and he walked beside them. He saw nothing but her, because she leaned over in his face and sang a mysterious song. She spoke a language he could not understand, but he was confident she said she loved him. He kissed her to sleep, and fell asleep himself. He dreamed of a host of kings, princes, and warriors, all pale as death. They shouted a terrible warning -- they were the woman's slaves. And now he was her slave, too. Awakening, the woman was gone, and the knight was left on the cold hillside.
Keats, John - La belle dame sans merci
The poem describes the encounter between an unnamed knight and a mysterious fairy. It opens with a description of the knight in a barren landscape, "haggard" and "woe-begone". He tells the reader how he met a beautiful lady whose "eyes were wild"; he set her on his horse and they went together to her "elfin grot", where they began to make love. Falling asleep, the knight had a vision of "pale kings and princes", who warn him that "La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall!" ( The Lady without pity has you in her charm !). He awoke to find himself on the same "cold hill's side" where he is now "palely loitering". Although La Belle Dame Sans Merci is short (only twelve stanzas of four lines each, with an ABCB rhyme scheme), it is full of enigmas. Because the knight is associated with images of death — a lily (a symbol of death in Western culture), paleness, "fading", "wither[ing]" — he may well be dead himself at the time of the story. He is clearly doomed to remain on the hillside, but the cause of this fate is unknown. A straightforward reading suggests that the Belle Dame entraps him, along the lines of tales like Thomas the Rhymer or Tam Lin. More recent feminist commentators have suggested that the knight in fact raped the Belle Dame, and is being justly punished — this is based on textual hints like "she wept, and sigh'd full sore". Ultimately, the decision comes down to whether Keats wrote the poem as a simple story, or as a story with a moral: given his other work, this may be more an evocation of feeling than an intellectual attempt at moralising.
The Significance of La Belle Dame sans Merci
Whereas the impact of the lady on the knight is clear, her character remains shadowy. Why? You have a number of possibilities to choose among; which one you choose will be determined by how you read the poem.
1. We see the lady only through the knight's eyes, and he didn't know her. As a human being, he cannot fully understand the non- mortal; she is a "faery's child," sings a "faery's song," and takes him to an "elfin grot." She speaks "in language strange" (VII). Whether she speaks a language unknown to the knight or merely had an unfamiliar pronunciation, the phrase suggests a problem in, if not a failure of communication. They are incompatible by nature.
2. The references to "faery" and "elfin" suggest enchantment or imagination. Her "sweet moan" and "song" represent art inspired by imagination. The lady, symbolizing imagination, takes him to an ideal world. The knight becomes enraptured by or totally absorbed in the pleasures of the imagination--the delicious foods, her song, her beauty, her love or favour ("and nothing else saw all day long"). But the imagination or visionary experience is fleeting; the human being cannot live in this realm, a fact which the dreamer chooses to ignore. The knight's refusal to let go of the joys of the imagination destroys his life in the real world. Or is she possibly the cheating or false imagination, not true imagination? Does the food she gives him starve rather than nourish him? The men in his vision have "starved lips." Think of the ending of "Ode to a Nightingale" with its "deceiving imp."
3. This possibility is a variant of choice #2. The lady represents the ideal, and the poem is about the relationship of the real and the ideal. The knight rejects the real world with its real fulfillments for an ideal which cannot exist in the real world. In giving himself entirely to the dream of the ideal, he destroys his life in the real world.
4. The lady is evil and belongs to a tradition of "femmes fatales." She seduces him with her beauty, with her accomplishments, with her avowal of love, and with sensuality ("roots of relish sweet, / And honey wild, and manna dew"). The vision of the pale men suggests she is deliberately destructive. The destructiveness of love is a common theme in the folk ballad.
5. Is the knight self-deluded? Does he enthrall himself by placing her on his horse and making garlands for her? The knight ignores warning signs: she has "wild wild" eyes, she gives him "wild" honey, she avows her love "in language strange," and she "wept and sigh'd full sore" in the elfin grotto. Also he continues to desire her, despite the wasteland he finds himself in and despite the warning of his dream.
ALTRA ANALISI:
La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a ballad, and like others ballads, narrates a story with characters acting in a setting.
The story is introduced in the first lines by the narrator, and then the past events are narrated by the Knight; in the first lines, when the narrator meets the Knight is winter, when the Knight is alone before meeting the Lady is autumn, while when he is with the woman is spring. For the first time, nature acquires the romantic meaning of a mirror of feelings. When the Knight meets the Lady has a shock, an emotion so strong that he forgets everything, just fixed on her, he misunderstands her attitude and thinks that she loves him, but that’s not the reality, when she took him to the grot, – that might be considered the symbol of the maternal womb – she lulled and abandoned him. Keats believed that the joys of sensual love can not last and often lead to destruction and this is the theme of the ode. As a matter of fact, when the Lady leaves the Knight his pain is so strong that he is destroyed inside, but also he is going to die, the destruction comes from his feelings and attacks his body. The poem is also elusive and can be interpreted in different ways, the Lady could be the symbol of sensual love and an anticipation of “femme fatale” that is accused to ruin man, her double image (she is a sort of compromise between the Queen of Faeries and a witch) suggest a double nature: it is both benign and evil. Her transfiguration comes through her absence: it is her absence, the impossibility to find her again that starts Knight’s agony; but also she might symbolise the inspiration that comes unexpected and then abandon the poet who can no longer be a poet without it. Keats’s highest art is expressed in his odes, sonnets and a ballad which, however, can’t be considered in the line of mediaeval tradition, but is rather a literary, more refined and elaborated version of this poetic form. In all his poems, his emotions are expressed through sensuous imagery where all the senses are often at play simultaneously and this gives his poems concentration and richness of expression.
Altra analisi:
The ballad consists of two parts of dialogue, each uninterrupted by the other and each uncouched by the normal story-telling mechanisms for identifying speakers ("I said," "he said," etc.). Because of this, the identity of the first speaker, whose part is completed in the first twelve lines, remains cryptic. Though he (or, it could equally be argued, she) reveals the identity of the other (the "knight-at-arms"), the first speaker says nothing, at least directly, about himself. He does, however, give plenty of information about the situation of the poem. The time is late autumn, the annual grasses having already "wither'd" and the birds having departed on their winter migration. The place, one can infer, is not always as forbidding as it seems to be now — its desolation is simply due to the time of year. There has been a "harvest," but it has ended. There is latent life present around the two characters: "the squirrel's granary is full." Therefore, if the setting symbolizes the knight's emotional desolation, one must understand it as a function of an individualized circumstance: of a very specific but not necessarily permanent condition. Come spring, after all, the cycle of the harvest will begin again. Yet, this seems little consolation to the knight the speaker describes. He is "alone and palely loitering," "so haggard and so woebegone." His pallor is described metaphorically in terms of a "lily" on his brow and a "fading rose" on his cheek. Further, he appears physically ill, "moist" from the "fever" of some "anguish." Though through these observations the speaker has already foreshadowed the reasons for the knight's grim condition, the form's rhetoric demands the question be asked: "O what can ail thee?" A knowledge of chivalric lore should prompt the correct guess. Of a knight's three profound allegiances — to his God, his lord, and his lady — only the last would be described in terms of lily-pallor and a faded rose.
Lines 13 – 24
The story's twist occurs in the first stanza of the knight's speech. Though a "lady" was bound to figure into the poem, that she is a "faery's child" changes the expectations of the tale's outcome and causes readers to reinterpret the nature of the knight's desolation. Literature and myth are filled with examples of humans who fall in love with gods, and with little exception, such relationships bode disastrously for the mortal party. Particularly in that area of mythology dealing with fairies or fairy-like creatures, humans who become enamored of fairies, elves, pixies, and the like generally suffer extreme emotional consequences once their affairs with the capricious beings have ended. Having loved an immortal, these hapless humans discover that mere mortal beauty — which can include not only human lovers but also life itself — will no longer do. Based on these conventions, readers understand immediately that this is the knight's fate, and through his descriptions of his fairy-love's beauty, readers see the caprice that brings on his doom. In keeping with fairies' quick and unpredictable behaviour, "her foot was light." Her long hair suggests the sensual nature of such creatures, who in lore are given to continual pleasures, and "her eyes were wild." The knight confesses he was taken in by his lady's fair.
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