Moise

            The poem is almost surrealistic, throughout; stanzas four and five are more plausible as a male fantasy than as an account of female behavior. Further on in the poem, it appears that the lady was walking in the mead a day's ride from her "grot." Thus the poem makes dream-sense, but it does not make sense of any other sort. The knight goes to sleep in the lady's grot and wakes on the hill's side. This is not surrealism but magic; the lady is some sort of witch, and her magic begins to work as she has lulled the knight to sleep.
Stanzas four and five might be a purely erotic poem addressed to men, but this impression does not last long. When the lady looks at the knight "as she did love," and "[makes] sweet moan," his response is bizarre: he takes her for a ride on his horse. The ride lasts all day. Among poetic and mythical temptresses, the lady is anomalous in that the temptation that she offers is resistible. Yet perhaps it is the knight who should be regarded as anomalous. If his behavior seems incredible, we should look again at the title of the poem. A poem called "La Belle Dame sans Merci" must be a poem about the fear of women, and it is not unnatural that such a character as the knight occurs in it. Keats was treating an old theme, the fear of women, in a new way, by incorporating it into the portrayal of the knight's character from the beginning, instead of saving it for the end, as a moral implied by what happens to him.
In stanza seven, the lady continues her courtship of the knight. Then in stanza eight,
She took me to her elfin "rot,                  30
And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
     With kisses four.

And there she lulled me to sleep, . . .           31
Two questions arise: First, why does the lady weep, in line 30? Obviously, the sexual demand that she made in the morning (19-20) has gotten her nowhere. Riding, she has sung to the knight. At the end of the ride (and of the day) she has fed him, and declared her love. Then she weeps, and he shuts her eyes with exactly four kisses. The numerical penchant of the old balladists (and perhaps of Keats) may account for the exactitude of the number four, but it does not account for the sexual temperament of the knight.
Question two: does the knight make love to the lady? Possibly; but to consider so, we must read between the lines because the lovemaking must occur after line 32 and before line 33. We would like to consider so, and, ordinarily, it would go without saying. But in light of what we know about the knight, we cannot be sure.
In line 33, the lady seems to treat the knight as a child or baby rather than as a lover. This suggestion is vaguely reinforced by the phrase sfarv'd lips in line 41. The pale warriors are adults, but what they are starved for is milk. The poet really meant lips: starv'd mouths also scans, and mouths would gape wide more plausibly than lips in line 42.
Thus the knight is sexually reluctant at best. We can try to explain this away by observing that in Keats's England, poets were not allowed to speak of sexual desire and actions in straightforward language. Yet the poet portrays the lady's sexuality as frankly eager. ("She look'd at me as she did love, / And made sweet moan.") If the poet may attribute such feelings to a woman, surely he may attribute them to a man. In stanza 36 of "The Eve of St. Agnes," moreover, it is clear that Porphyro makes love to Madeline. Any conceivable doubt is laid to rest in stanza 37. That stanza was published and caused no scandal. The poem was written at about the same time as "La Belle Dame."
Soon after writing "La Belle Dame," Keats revised it (for Leigh Hunt's Indicator) so that the treatment of sex became much less euphemistic. Some of the revisions were stylistic: Mercy for Merci in the title and in line 39; wretched wight for knight at arms in lines 1 and 5; is for as in line 3; cheek for cheeks in line 11; sideways . . . lean for sidelong . . . bend in line 23; hill for hill's in lines 36 and 44; Who for They in line 39; and gloom for gloam in line 41. But some of the revisions are substantive. Stanzas five and six are interchanged, and lines 29-32 become:
She took me to her elfin "rot,
And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,        30
And there I shut her wild sad eyes---
So kiss'd to sleep.

And there we slumbered on the moss, . . .     33
When stanzas five and six are interchanged, the horseback ride precedes the sexual demand, rather than vice-versa. This way, the lady is not insulted or hurt and need not weep in stanza eight. In the new line 32, the knight kisses the lady to sleep. This cannot be meant literally because in the mood that the lady is in, the knight cannot put her to sleep by kissing her. Therefore line 32 means that the knight makes love to the lady. Then, in the new line 33, they slumber as equals.
We do not know what Keats was thinking about when he revised the poem, but we do know what he did: he made the poem less sophisticated and less "abnormal" in a psychological sense. Perhaps this was his main motive. If so, he underestimated the tendency of readers to ignore oddities.
Probably the fear of women is common among men, but "La Belle Dame sans Merci" suggests that Keats had more than his share of it. In writing the poem, he was taking his feelings as he found them, making no attempt to conform to anybody's expectations.
WORK CITED
Keats, John. The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Campbridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1978.
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By EDWIN MOISE, New York City