"The Still Questionable Knight"

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is a poem written by John Keats about a knight who has an encounter with a beautiful woman and afterward is found by a traveler, wounded and dying. There are many different interpretations of this poem that range from the obvious to the not so obvious. The most common interpretation of the poem is that everything actually happened just as the knight said: he was seduced by a faery, she stole his soul, injured him, and left him to die at the edge a lake. One of the more notable opposing interpretations is presented by a young analytical genius from The Ohio State University named Benjamin K. Shawver. In his paper titled “The Questionable Knight” Shawver lays down an almost impenetrable wall of evidence in opposition to the widely accepted view of the virtuous knight. In his paper he states (among many other equally profound and revealing things), “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 (Shawver 1).” While I have all the respect in the world for the young and formidable Mr. Shawver, the operative phrase in the previous statement is “almost impenetrable”. What is most fascinating about these two points of view is not why they are supportable, but that while they both hold opinions that are more or less diametrically opposed, they are both equally supported by the text. If our job as readers is to find meaning of a text, then where do these two opposing views leave us? In short they leave us with a binary of two obvious and valid points that deconstruct each other by virtue of the fact that they are both valid, making the ultimate interpretation undecidable.

There are many different binary operations that guide this relatively short work of art: the classic good/evil, infatuation/lust, trust/mistrust, in love/betrayal, life/death, and soul/soulless are just a few to mention. If you boil down these oppositions they really break down into three main categories: love/lust, life/death, trust/mistrust, with the third being the most important.

The first of the binaries that I will deal with is love vs. lust, the privileged end of the binary being love. As I briefly stated in the introduction, the classic and most widely accepted view of this poem is not overly difficult to spot. All it requires of us is to simply accept everything the knight says at face value. If we do this it is obvious from the beginning of the work that he is in love with the woman from the start. He describes her as “Full beautiful—a faery’s child”(14), and “[makes] a garland for her head,/ And bracelets too, and fragrant zone(17-18).” He gives up his mount, he stares at her, and listens to her sing all day long! These are not the acts of a lustful man who just wants to have sex;he is genuinely in love this woman. If she is a faery, as the knight suggests, she is in the business of enchanting and seducing men, and this one has it bad.

By no means is this the only way to look at the poem however. If we turn this binary over and allow lust to become the privileged end we get a different story altogether. In Shawver’s paper he takes the same points of interest I just described and uses them in an entirely different manner. He points out that “it is just as possible that the knight is accusing her of being a faery for his own means”(Shawver 4), meaning that he could be using the accusation simply to cover up his improprieties, in essence saying “it was her fault!” He points out that the bracelets could also be handcuffs or wrist bindings, and “fragrant zone” is a belt that attracts attention to the waist(Shawver 3). The list of items that point to a forced sexual encounter is long and plentiful. The fact of the matter is that any number of interpretations are possible for this binary. Since both of these points are equally supportable, and hence any point in between, the only option that we have is to defer the actual meaning to a later time.

The second binary we will look at is the life/death binary. This is not, however, the classic life/death binary that we are so used to dealing with other works of art. The specific item we are dealing with is the soul. Is it better to have loved deeply and lose your soul or to have never loved and retain your soul? It seems in this binary that to retain your soul and never have loved is the preferred end. This is evidenced by most everything in the poem. The knight is visited by dead kings and princes to tell him of his fate, a decidedly unpleasant experience(37-40). He has been wounded and is slowly dieing. Nature itself seems to have abandoned him as evidenced by lines 1 through 4 and 45 through 48.

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).

Everything in the poem seems to be saying that it would have been better for him to have never been taken in by this faery and retain his soul.

There is one critical piece of evidence that has the ability to turn this entire binary on its head. Lines 45 and 46 say, “And this is why I sojourn here,/ Alone and palely loitering”. In other words, because of this experience he loiters where he was left. Something that many people don’t consider is, why was the knight loitering in the first place? Why is he not seeking medical attention? He either knows that it is hopeless (which is also reasonable to think, and supportable) or he feels that he has no further need to go on living if he cannot have that love. If that is the case, why does the knight describe the kings and princes? Why does he not just focus on the positives of the experience? He focuses on those negatives to show that even with the loss of his soul, he considers the experience with the faery and the short lived false love he received, worth it. “[That] is why [he] sojourn[s] here,/ Alone and palely loitering”, because there is nothing left for him in the wolrd to live for. It is possible that the knight himself is weighing this same binary; pointing out the positives (Stanzas 4 through 8) and the negatives (stanzas 9 through 11) and arriving at the conclusion that life with love was worth it.

Another aspect of this binary to consider is its middle ground or supplement. A supplement is the idea that there is a kind of space in between the binaries where an interpretation can land that is not quite one end, but neither is it the other, thus undermining the binary simply by being a third possible meaning. In this poem we see a state between life and death itself. The knight is neither dead nor alive. This poem could also be read in the sense that the knight, though in a pitiable and soulless state, is nonetheless indifferent. He recounts the facts of the story without passion, without anger, as if it has happened to someone else. If this is the correct interpretation then instead we have a supplement, and the entire “binary” (or maybe “trinity” to be more accurate) is undermined and deconstructs.

The third binary is the most important binary. It is trust/mistrust, or more specifically trust the knight/mistrust the knight. The trust end of the binary is favored in the traditional interpretation of this poem. The reason for this is simple, so much so that it is hardly necessary to spell it out, but I will. Trust is the favored end of the binary because an average reader rarely has any reason to doubt the reliability of the narrator. Any apparent inconsistencies in the text can be explained away by an imaginative person. The reason why this is the binary that lies at the base of the entire work is that trust in the knight’s narrative forms a transcendental signified that allows you to understand the rest of the piece. Can you trust the narrator or can’t you? In the traditional reading of the text the reader answers, “yes” without even thinking about it, so engrained is the transcendental signified of truth in our minds. If you answer yes then you have a base on which you can build an interpretation. If you decide that you can trust the narrator explicitly, you end up with one interpretation: the knight is truthful, he got everything right, and the faery stole his soul and left him for dead.

But what about those inconsistencies in the text? In lines 29 and 30 the poem says, “She took me to her elfin grot,/ And there she wept, and sighed full sore(29-30).” That action from the faery woman doesn’t seem consistent with the tone of the rest of the knight’s story. In lines 27 and 28 the knight says, “And sure in language strange she said--/ ‘I love thee true(27-28).’” If it is a strange language, how does he know what she is saying? If nothing else, these inconsistencies force us to accept the fact that, at the very least, some part of the story isn’t right. That makes the knight unreliable as a narrator. Instantly there are many possibilities open for interpretation: The knight’s mental capacity is diminished from blood loss and his memory is faded. This stance is supported by the inconsistency of the remarks, the visions of the dead kings, and the fact that he is loitering near a lake rather than seeking help for his wounds. If we accept that the knight is unreliable we have to accept the fact that he is possibly delirious from blood loss. We have to accept that he is possibly a rapist. Yes, we even have to accept the fact that he is possibly even a dinosaur in human form.

Where does all of this comparison and contrast leave us as seekers of meaning? We can see clearly that the interpretations for the virtuous knight and the villainous knight are both equally supportable. On top of that, we can see that there are many interpretations that fall in between these two extremes, and are also equally supportable by the text: He could simply be delirious from the wound and the story itself could be pure fantasy. The story could be entirely fabricated by the traveler telling it, perhaps he is a traveling bard. The fact is there is evidence for all of it. So were all of this leaves us is nowhere… or everywhere (whichever you prefer). The point is that none of this can ever really be decided; all interpretations are valid, all interpretations can be supported. All interpretations deconstruct the others. In the end the only meaning that can be decided upon without question, is that the meaning is undecideable. The ultimate meaning must necessarily be deferred.

Works Cited

Keats, John. “La Belle Dame sans Merci. A Ballad.” John Keats: Selected Poems. Ed. John Barnard. London: Penguin Group. 2007. 184-185.

Shawver, Benjamin K. “The Questionable Knight” Ohio State U, 2008.