La Belle Dame sans Merci Summary & Study Guide

This Study Guide consists of approximately 43 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of La Belle Dame sans Merci.

La Belle Dame sans Merci Summary & Study Guide

This Study Guide consists of approximately 43 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of La Belle Dame sans Merci.
This section contains 1,262 words
(approx. 4 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the La Belle Dame sans Merci Study Guide

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 year. There has been a "harvest," but it has ended. There is...

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This section contains 1,262 words
(approx. 4 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the La Belle Dame sans Merci Study Guide
Copyrights
Gale
La Belle Dame sans Merci from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.