La Belle Dame sans Merci

La Belle Dame sans Merci is John Keats’s ballad about a knight left desolate after an encounter with a mysterious woman. His account moves from apparent intimacy into a troubling dream and a return to the bare landscape where he is found. The spare ballad form leaves motives and explanations uncertain. Repeated images of fading life and the silent natural world give the poem its atmosphere, while the framed narration preserves the distance between an experience and the story told about it.