La Belle Dame Sans Merci: A Poem by John Keats

A poem born from Keats’s sexual insecurity

John Keats (1795–1821) wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci on 21st April 1819, which was three months after he wrote The Eve of St Agnes. Although the two poems are very different — in length, setting and style if nothing else — there is an intriguing connection between the two. This is that the title of the later poem is mentioned in the former, due to the fact that one of the characters in The Eve of St Agnes plays, on his lute, “an ancient ditty, long since mute” with that title. This was a 15th century French ballad written by Alain Chartier in which a suitor is rebuffed by a haughty lady.

Keats’s poem is his own version of the legend expounded by Chartier, set in the same environment of the “courtly love” tradition in which mediaeval knights were expected to admire beautiful women from afar with little hope of having their affections returned.

When John Keats wrote his poem, he feared that his life was unlikely to last much longer — he was experiencing symptoms of the tuberculosis from which he would succumb less than two years later, and which had already killed his younger brother Tom.

Also significant is the fact that he was involved in a relationship with Fanny Brawne, who had recently moved, with her widowed…