" The final line of the ballad, "And no birds sing" reinforces the idea of loneliness and emptiness, and creates an invisible link with the beginning of the poem, more precisely the first stanza which ends with the same line. At a closer reading, one notices that the roles of the knight and the lady change throughout the following stanzas, with each of them being successively dominant over the other. In stanzas IV-VI, the first two lines focus on the knight who is clearly in control -- "I met," "I made," "I set her" -- the use of the first person pronoun is a clear indication as far as the power relations in the poem, whereas lines 3 and 4 refer to the actions of the lady. Moreover, stanza VII is completely devoted to her with verbs such as "she found" and "she said." The following stanza grants the lady the dominant position as far as the narrative level of the ballad: "she took me" and "she wept and sigh'd." This power struggle expressed through pronouns is actually very relevant to the task of understanding how this mysterious woman enters and ultimately changes the knight's life. In the beginning, the audience sees a depressed and lonely knight whose anguish is also expressed through the use of setting imagery: "the sedge has withered from the lake," "the harvest's done" and "fading rose." These images suggest that the knight is feeling sad and lonely after his meeting with the Belle Dame. However, one could argue that the knight was feeling depressed...
In fact, it could have been this depression and inner void that determined the knight to escape to the world of imagination where he is able to create a world according to his needs and desires, a world where his dreams can come true. This is why he imagines an encounter with a beautiful woman who shares his feelings, and gives him the sense of worth and pride that he so desperately lacks in real life. Moreover, in his imagination the "pale" knight feels more powerful and in control of his own life.
John Keats: A lyric Poem compared to a narrative one The poetry of John Keats: Common themes in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Both poems by John Keats "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" have a common theme: the transient nature of human desire. The poems reflect common Romantic preoccupations: exotic settings, art, and mysterious powers that serve to underline the limited
Keats and Hemingway Although the literary texture John Keats' poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and Ernest Hemingway's "A Very Short Story," have profoundly different tones, given that one was written during the Romantic period of the 19th century in England, and the other during the modernist period of 20th century American literature, both works have similar tales and attitudes towards love -- a military man seeks beauty and solace
"The Sleeping Beauty" by Lord Alfred Tennyson uses several narrative techniques. The first of which can be seen in the second line of the first stanza. "She lying on her couch alone" (). The phrase uses incorrect English to change the tone of the poem. Although the poem does not try to establish a rhyming pattern in the BC in the first stanza with "grown" and "form," the two words
Romantic era began in the late eighteenth century as a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment and was a period of great change and emancipation. The movement started as an artistic and intellectual reaction against aristocratic social and political norms of the Enlightenment and against the scientific rationalization of nature. During the Enlightenment literature and art were primarily created for the elite, upper classes and educated, and the language
Fern Hill (Dylan Thomas) The "Poetry Explications" handout from UNC states that a poetry explication is a "relatively short analysis which describes the possible meanings and relationship of the words, images, and other small units that make up a poem." The speaker in "Fern Hill" dramatically embraces memories from his childhood days at his uncle's farm, when the world was innocent; the second part brings out the speaker's loss of innocence and
Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight. (Eliot, XXVIII) However it is worth noting the implicit paradox expressed here in the notion of a married woman's "oppressive liberty." Dorothea Brooke marries sufficiently well
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