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La Belle Dame sans Merci Study Guide

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by John Keats
About 49 pages (14,804 words)
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad Summary

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Poem Summary

Lines 1-12

The ballad consists of two parts of dialogue, each uninterrupted by the other and each uncouched by the normal story-telling mechanisms for identifying speakers ("I said," "he said," etc.). Because of this, the identity of the first speaker, whose part is completed in the first twelve lines, remains cryptic. Though he (or, it could equally be argued, she) reveals the identity of the other (the "knight-at-arms"), the first speaker says nothing, at least directly, about himself. He does, however, give plenty of information about the situation of the poem. The time is late autumn, the annual grasses having already "wither'd" and the birds having departed on their winter migration. The place, one can infer, is not always as forbidding as it seems to be now—its desolation is simply due to the time of.....

This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 1,250 words. This study guide contains 14,804 words (approx. 49 pages at 300 words per page).

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La Belle Dame sans Merci from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.



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