Premium Content A Critical Appreciation of "La Belle Dame sans Merci"
By Eleanor Bance - January 22, 2003
The cursory reading of this poem is that it is merely a story of a knight bewitched by beauty, who becomes abject slave to a fairy woman, and who falls asleep, waking up alone and dying on a hillside in the meadow. However it could be perceived as a Romantic vision pertaining to the importance of youth, beauty and emotion, and to the transience of…
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