Like nature's patient, sleepless eremite,2
5 The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution3 round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No?yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
10 Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
8. The prayers beginning Ave Maria ('Hail Mary'). Keats had said that the austere scenes 'refine one's 1. In the letter to his brother and sister-in-law, sensual vision into a sort of north star which can George and Georgiana Keats, into which he copied never cease to be open lidded, and steadfast over this sonnet, March 19, 1819, Keats wrote: the wonders of the great Power.' The thought 'Though the first steps to it were through my developed into this sonnet, which Keats drafted human passions, they went away, and I wrote with in 1819, then copied into his volume of Shake- my Mind?and perhaps I must confess a little bit speare's poems at the end of September or the of my heart. .. . I went to bed, and enjoyed an beginning of October 1820, while on his way to uninterrupted sleep. Sane I went to bed and sane Italy, where he died. I arose.' 2. Hermit, religious solitary. 1. While on a tour of the Lake District in 1818, 3. Washing, as part of a religious rite.
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L A BELL E DAM E SAN S MERCI : A BALLA D / 89 9 Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever?or else swoon to death.4 1819 1838
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad1
i
0 what can ail thee, knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge0 has wither'd from the lake, rushes
And no birds sing.
2
5 O what can ail thee, knight at arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done. 3
1 see a lily on thy brow
io With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too. 4
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy's child;
is Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild. 5
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;2
She look'd at me as she did love,
20 And made sweet moan.
6
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A fairy's song. 7
25 She found me roots of relish0 sweet, flavor And honey wild, and manna dew,
4. In the earlier version: 'Half passionless, and so Keats's earlier version of the poem, as transcribed swoon on to death.' by Charles Brown. The version published in 1820 1. The title, though not the subject, was taken begins, 'Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight.' from a medieval poem by Alain Chartierand means Keats imitates a frequent procedure of folk bal' The Lovely Lady without Pity.' The story of a lads by casting the poem into the dialogue form. mortal destroyed by his love for a supernatural The first three stanzas are addressed to the knight, femme fatale has been told repeatedly in myth, and the rest of the poem is his replv. fairy tale, and ballad. The text printed here is 2. Belt (of flowers).
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