“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is a story set to verse based around an injured knight and how he came to be injured and dying. The first time that I was introduced to this poem, it’s traditional reading and also it’s alternative one, was in the class of Dr. Kelly Anspaugh. The most common reading of this poem is that the knight is a victim of an attack by a fairy, who seduces him and steals his soul. This is a good interpretation, but I, along with Dr. Anspaugh, feel that it misses the point. The most interesting and most important aspect of the poem is the undertone that pervades the text. The allusions, ambiguity, and narrative framing all combine to create not an infatuated and innocent knight, but a liar and in all probability a rapist. I believe that this poem is not about the knight’s attraction to a beautiful, but deceptive woman, as it would appear on the surface, but rather about his lust and attempts to hide his actions. This conflict between what the knight says and what actually happened creates the primary tension within the text and needs to be resolved. Dr. Anspaugh planted a seed in my mind that day in early April, but left me wondering, can these subtleties and hints of rape be turned into an air tight argument? I believe that they can. In order to prove that the knight is lying and is indeed guilty of the rape which has been suggested there are a number of aspects of the poem that must be analyzed. Fortunately the poem documents his network of lies. All that remains is for us to dismantle and categorize them.
The first inkling we get that the story might not be entirely true is how the poem is framed. The narrative begins, not with the knight, but with someone else. In most literature the narrator is given the benefit of the doubt. It is assumed that he is telling the truth, or at the very least a relatively unbiased opinion. This position of honor is given to the traveler rather than the knight. The knight, being the second to speak, instantly loses the credibility he would receive simply by being the first to speak. Why is the poem framed in this way? The common response is that it provides a sense of unity to the poem, allowing the reader to listen to the knight’s story along with another person. Once again, I think that this interpretation misses the point. The reason for making the knight the second speaker is specifically to put him into this questionable status of the second speaker. By knowing that the knight is speaking to an actual person (the traveler who starts the poem) you also know that he has an agenda: to convince the traveler of something, presumably his nobility and his innocence. Because of the framing he is no longer a disembodied voice telling us about an occurrence, he becomes a character in a short play, able to forget, embellish, and even lie.
By this point the knight’s story already reeks with uncertainty and his credibility grows thin. It only continues to gain incredibility when you consider the amount of detail the knoght provides of his encounter. He goes instantly to the defense. When asked, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,/ Alone and palely loitering?” (1-2), he does not say, “This woman stabbed me, I think it might be mortal. Help!” as you might expect him to do. Instead he starts into an “It wasn’t my fault.” narration of the encounter with the woman. Sensing his imminent death, he starts describing events from the beginning, trying to cover his bases and make sure that his version of the story is completely and fully understood. Lines twenty seven and twenty eight are particularly interesting when looking at the knight’s defensive pleas: “And sure in language strange she said--/ ‘I love thee true.’”(27-28) This could be interpreted that he had been led to believe that she loved him, but it’s not that simple. By including this part of the story, he is making a defensive assumption on his behalf. If the language was strange, how could he know what she was saying? “And sure in language strange she said” could be interpreted in any number of ways: it could mean, “She had a strange accent and I barely understood her” or it could mean “She was speaking another language, but she must have been saying ‘I love thee true.’”
The evidence so far tells us that we should be looking for something else besides what the knight is telling us. There are more pieces of evidence, and more convincing pieces for that matter, that do point to rape. It is important that the vast majority of the examples that point toward rape are subtle, meaning that the knight is trying to disguise his improprieties as infatuation, or love. Only the second or third meaning of a word, the implication of a gift, or the euphemistic meaning of an image differentiate the apparent meaning of the item: the meaning that the knight would like the traveler to accept, from the sexual meaning that the traveler can infer.
Ambiguity and euphemism play a large role in any piece of art, particularly in poetry. Stanza V on first look is a very sweet, almost touching look at the lovers. The knight takes the time to make things for her and to treat her like royalty. Take a closer look though. In stanza V the knight “[makes] a garland for her head,/ And bracelets too, and fragrant zone”(17-18). There is nothing untoward about the garland, but the bracelets and the fragrant zone are a different story. Without a close examination of the word, bracelets are just bracelets, but it is important to know that a less common, though well known, meaning for bracelets is handcuffs or bindings for the wrist. So it is not unreasonable to think that the bracelets were not necessarily for decoration, but rather to bind her wrists. And what exactly is a “fragrant zone”? A fragrant zone is basically a belt that smells good, made with flowers or some other sweet smelling herb. The purpose of the “fragrant zone” or flowered belt in the knight’s eyes is meant to show how kind he was, which would be the normal argument as well, but to the traveler or the truly critical reader it is an obvious sexual reference to the woman’s body. Coupled together, the bracelets, or handcuffs if you will, and the fragrant zone point towards a sexual encounter that has become a forced and captive situation.
Another aspect of the poem that proves the knight’s story is fabricated is the sexual imagery that is spread throughout the poem. The first image that we get is in line 14 when the knight calls the woman “Full beautiful—a faery’s child”(14). In ancient English tradition a faery, particularly with that older spelling, was a kind of a siren. They were incredibly beautiful and inextricably associated with sex. This can be interpreted one of two ways: first, and most commonly, it is said to mean that the woman is indeed a fairy that seduced the knight and stole his soul. That is a reasonable argument, and not without foundation. However if you consider it from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, it is just as possible that the knight is accusing her of being a fairy for his own means, making her appear to be the aggressor, which I consider to be more likely. In any case the effort of linking the woman to sex is reinforced, once again, at the end of stanza V. “She look’d at me as she did love,/ And made sweet moan”(19-20) are examples of another ambiguous phrase that could have any number of meanings, but as you consider the things that would produce a “sweet moan” the list is very short.
Another sexual image is found in stanza VI. The knight says, “I set her on my pacing steed,/ and nothing else saw all day long”(21-22). It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the sexual connotation in that line. The knight, whether consciously or not, points out the rhythmic, constant, prolonged nature of the encounter. It is possible that the word choice is merely coincidental or that it is meant solely to express the rhythmic and steady pace of the horse, but I find it unlikely. While I’m sure he probably did place her on his horse for transport, I am equally sure that “pacing” was a word chosen specifically to bring out the nature of the encounter as a whole.
There are also a couple of instances of inconsistent testimony that even the most optimistic of critics would be hard pressed to explain in a positive light. “And there she wept, and sigh’d full sore”(30) is an example of that inconsistency. This means that she was not just crying, but implies that she was bawling. Why? Was she so overcome with emotion at finding such a worthy man that she cried? Was she worried that her mother might not approve of the match? If she really was a fairy, would she cry when she had fulfilled her objective of seducing a man? This statement is wholly inconsistent with the tone the knight is trying to set with the rest of his narrative. From the knights point of view, the tears may have been crocodile tears meant to draw him close enough or get his guard down enough for her to stab him, but we must temper even that suggestion with the idea of the unreliable narrator. The only plausible reason that fits is that she was taken against her will and raped. This reason, while it does not fit the knight’s tale of seduction and treachery, it does fit the undertone that I have outlined. The other main inconsistency regarding what this faery told the knight in a strange language is found in lines twenty seven and twenty eight, and has already been discussed.
I know what you are thinking though. There are two things that put a wrinkle in this entire analysis, and to that I say, “Use more starch. There’s no wrinkle here.” The first problem to overcome is the dream that the knight has after falling to sleep. Why would all of these great men visit this good knight and tell him that this woman, this “…Belle Dame Sans Merci/ Hath thee in thrall!”(39-40) This could only be because she has stolen his soul along with theirs, right? Wrong. We must look at this dream with the assumption of an unreliable narrator, just like we do the rest of the poem. There are really two possibilities. The first is the one that the knight would like us to believe, that this one fairy has traveled all over the country seducing knights, kings, and princes and that he is only the latest victim in a long line of noble and virtuous men to have succumbed to her wiles. This interpretation of course looks good for him since it casts him as the victim rather than the aggressor. The second interpretation is at least as believable, and when put in the context of the rest of the poem as being told by an unreliable narrator trying to cover his tracks, it becomes the only interpretation that is acceptable. The second interpretation is that these noble men have all fallen prey to their lust for women and have made the same mistake as he has. They are not in a state of torment because this faery stole their souls; they are in a state of torment because they lost their souls through lust. In shorter terms, this visitation is not to tell the knight that this one woman has stolen all their souls, but to welcome him to a brotherhood of men who have met their own downfall at the hands of their own individual Femme Fatales. The knight hopes that we will interpret the dream the other way, but we all know better by now, don’t we?
I would like to conclude with the second possible wrinkle, and that is the issue of the pathetic fallacy. This is possibly the most important piece of information necessary in finding the true meaning of the text, since it is the only piece of evidence that exists outside of either the traveler’s or the knight’s narrative. It is obvious by the dreary condition described in the four opening and the four closing lines of the poem that nature is trying to make a statement. For brevity’s sake I will only quote lines forty five through forty eight:
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing. 45-48
These lines paint an unmistakably gloomy picture of the area in which the knight is found. Why is the area so gloomy? The normal interpretation of these lines is that the lake, the weather, and even the birds, are lamenting the loss of this brave knight’s soul. This, however, is inconsistent with the undertones of the poem when viewed in light of the evidence that I have put forth. The only way to reconcile the main tension between what the knight says and what actually happened, is to accept that nature is not mourning the loss of the knight, but is so wholly rejecting the knight for his actions that the lake has drawn back from the sedge, “and no birds sing” for his comfort.
In summary, the typical reading of this poem is good, but as illustrated in this paper it entirely misses the point. The simplistic view of the poem that allows a reader to see it just as the tale of a love sick and betrayed knight ignores too many subtleties in language and ambiguity in speech to possibly be the correct interpretation. It is obvious from the narrative framing that we are not supposed to trust the knight. It is obvious from the ambiguity in the knight’s language regarding the woman’s reaction to the encounter that we cannot trust the knight. It is obvious from the fact the Mother Nature herself has rejected him for his actions that the story that the knight wants us to believe cannot be accepted. All of these things combined, along with the other aspects of the poem that I have described above, prove that the knight is not a noble, but betrayed cavalier, but a liar and a rapist.
Works Cited
Anspaugh, Kelly. Lecture on Romantic Poetry. OSU Lima Campus, Lima, OH. 3 April 2008.
Keats, John. “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad.” John Keats: Selected Poems. Ed. John Barnard. London: Penguin. 2007. 184-185.