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Essay / La Belle Dame Sans Merci, waking up alone and dying on a hillside in the meadow. However, this could be seen as a romantic view relating to the importance of youth, beauty and emotion, and the transience of these factors. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The poem is written primarily in the poetic form of a ballad, the subject is the common tale of unrequited love and a supernatural event, themes common to the ballad; the stanzas are four lines long with an ABCB rhyme pattern and memorable iambic tetrameter. However, certain deviations lead the reader to realize that this is perhaps not as ancient a poem as the traditional form and archaic wording seem to suggest. This is most clearly evident in the last line of each stanza where the iambic tetrameter is broken and there is instead a monosyllabic trimeter. This confuses the lyrical rhythm of the poem, giving it a slightly disjointed tone. The abrupt end of the lineage also seems to echo the knight's sudden awakening to solitude and alerts the reader to the fact that the end of his life is near. In a traditional ballad, one would expect a continuous meter or trimeter to appear on the second and fourth lines rather than just the fourth. The traditional melancholic tone of the poem is further evoked through the use of repetition that occurs throughout the poem. , for example the word pale, which is repeated five times. This pallor seems to denote the fate of those "under the influence" of "the beautiful lady", their slavery caused their deterioration, it is not a slavery of the body but of the heart and the mind. One of the underlying themes of this poem seems to be the feeling that the loss of such an exquisite emotion as love is fatal, but that love, by its nature, is fleeting and, therefore, to truly experience it, one must surrender to it entirely. It is not clear whether the lady herself is real or imaginary, but this does not hinder the feeling of intensity of emotion. In fact, it may be this idea of the intangibility of emotion that makes it so irresistible. Perhaps also why the cruel face of love is personified in a "fairy child", because fairies are mythical beings, intangible creatures, of iridescent beauty who can quickly disappear like a thought and are often described as mischievous, even malicious beings. The female character is the predator, taking sadistic pleasure in the pain of men, one could say this is a very subversive view of women. This malevolent quality seems to manifest itself in the fact that the lady has no mercy, she has enslaved many men without remorse, but we can see that the poet is simply using the tale to illustrate men's vulnerability to beauty, is -perhaps it embodying a personal experience of powerlessness, of feeling tied to a woman? Could it even, in broader terms, represent the bonds of marriage? This could be possible if the garlands that the knight gives to the lady are symbolic, they could be representative of chains or oaths that bind. The fact that they are made of flowers shows that beauty and nature can be deceptively powerful and dangerous. Nature in this case seems to mimic the disintegration of the knight's health through the progression of the seasons, which indicate the brevity of life and emotions. The change of season is represented in the lines "The squirrels' granary is full / And the harvest is over." and also in the absence of birdsong, which reflects the absence of love, when "no birds sing", thatbecomes winter in the soul. The migration of birds also seems mimetic of the lady's passage to the next man, of her abandonment of the knight. The “sedge” is described as “withered” from the lake, as if it were growing old, backing away from the lake as if afraid. Even if he is withered, he is not yet dead, like the knight who “strolls pale”, he is on the verge of death. This inevitability is underlined especially in the third stanza where the paleness of death is described. The “lily” has connotations of funeral flowers and the “withered rose” is surely dying love, as roses are a traditional image of love. They describe the knight's loss of cheek color and deathly pale complexion while explaining it. "Dew fever" is the sweating caused by illness, it adds to the flower metaphor with the word "dew" which also seems to represent the coldness of the morning, which is appropriate since the knight has just woken up from the heat. from love to the coldness of reality and also because it makes the reader imagine cold sweats, like those of a fever. It's also interesting because love has often been described as an illness, people are said to be "love-sick", and the sweat is perhaps reminiscent of the nervous sweating that often occurs when meeting people. a new lover. This demonstrates an intensity of feeling, whether physical or emotional. The idea of pain seems to be implicit with that of love, even the depiction of the woman's love as a "sweet moan", a moan being usually linked to pain. She is also described as crying "deeply", this creates an image of her eyes, red and swollen with tears, but it is unclear why she is crying, and there also appears to be a sexual connotation that is linked to the idea of pain and pleasure being linked, she is a seductress and a temptress. The poem's depiction of love and women is distinctly pagan, in contrast to Christian ideals of a chaste woman, unattainable before marriage and then subject to the will of the man. This woman accepts the kisses and sleeps next to the knight, "putting him to sleep". She has "wild, wild eyes" and it seems that the idea of her as wild, messy and free is more appealing than that of a traditional woman. The poem seems to use pagan images such as those of nature and fairies in opposition to the courtly love of the king and the knights who turn out to be "pale warriors" in love. The knight appears to have been enchanted, common images of enchantment are used, such as singing, eating roots and a "foreign tongue". The rhythmic and lyrical pattern of the poem is itself hypnotic and seems to echo the "rhythm steed" and the "song of Faery". The title of the poem being in French also seems to echo the strangeness of the lady compared to what we know, and to show that she speaks another, gentler language. It is as if the knight has been hypnotized, he imagines that she loves him, even though he cannot understand her actual words and he describes seeing "nothing else all day" as if he was totally fascinated by his image and that the outside world had passed. by without notice. The kings and princes in her dream have "hungry lips", which adds to the feeling of time passing quickly around them, they are starving in the emptiness of the lady's presence. It is clear that a lot of time has passed because the knight makes garlands of flowers for the lady, but it is autumn or winter that the poet finds him again. We know he is going to die because it is his "last dream", this means that it is his last dream, it is ambiguous as to whether the knight decided to die or whether he was so exhausted by the experience that he no longer has a choice. We also do not know what are the)
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