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1. "Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art"

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Addressed to a star (perhaps Polaris, around which the heavens appear to wheel), the sonnet expresses the poet's wish to be as constant as the star while he presses against his sleeping love. The use of the star imagery is unusual in that Keats dismisses many of its more apparent qualities, focusing on the star's steadfast and passively watchful nature. In the first recorded draft (copied by Charles Brown and dated to early 1819), the poet loves unto death; by the final version, death is an alternative to (ephemeral) love.

The poem is punctuated as a single sentence and uses the rhyme form of the Shakespearean sonnet (ABABCDCDEFEFGG) with the customary volta, or turn in the train of thought, occurring after the octave.

(from Wiki)

2. La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna-dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,

And there she wept and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gapèd wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

“La Belle Dame sans Merci” has been the subject of considerable critical attention. Bate remarks on the wide

range of sources that contributed to the poem, to which may be added the strange folk ballad “Thomas

Rhymer.” The beautiful lady is obviously a femme fatale, an archetypal figure originating in early myth and

continuing to the present in the popular image of the vamp. Bate believes the central influence to be Edmund

Spenser’s Duessa, who in The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) seduces the Red Cross Knight. Other models

readily available to Keats of warriors brought low by the wiles of beautiful women are Samson and Antony.

The identification of a specific femme fatale appears less important, however, than relating the knight’s

experience to the long tradition of a mortal entrammeled by a beautiful female who may possess supernatural

powers. The reader is reminded of the plight of Odysseus’s mariners who are bewitched by Circe in Homer’s

Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.). They temporarily lose their human appearance. Keats’s knight fares much worse. He

may be drained of his blood—he is “death-pale,” as are the kings, princes, and warriors of his dream—in

which case he would be the zombie victim of a vampire. He is definitely drained of his will. The irony of a

knight at arms being reduced to a slave is strong indeed. His “sojourn,” or rule, extends merely to the

circumscribed area of desolation where “no birds sing,” and his activity is reduced from roaming the

countryside seeking wrongs to redress to loitering aimlessly about the lake. He is as enervated and purposeless

as Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s lotus eaters, as out of touch with the world of human concerns as that poet’s

Mariana. The knight has been victimized through no fault of his own and has suffered the irredeemable loss of

his humanness. The pity is that he acquiesces to his fate; he has given up.

(From enote)

All of these events, the disappearing lover and the warning he received about her, could just be in the knight’s

mind. Keats, however, establishes a level of objective reality in the poem by opening it with a second

character who meets the knight in the woods and talks with him. It is the interplay between reality and

fantasy, and the poem’s refusal to clearly define what is and is not real, that makes this one of Keats’s most

compelling works...Romantic poets are famous for describing the world as a subjective experience, one in which the important things happen in the human heart. There is certainly plenty of that in “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” with the

knight-in-arms either creating a fantasy love affair or not, creating his own tuberculosis within his mind, and

then warning himself about the dangers of going beyond his own mind by entering into a relationship with

another person. There is also a strong representation of the objective world, in the unnamed stranger who

encounters the knight in the woods. The poem provides no clear-cut answers about how the world of emotion

affects or is affected by the physical world, but it does raise substantive questions that cannot be easily

ignored.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group,

2003.