In Coleridge’s Christabel Geraldine
embodies a supernatural temptress whose mission seems to be to enthrall
Christabel, stripping her of her innocence and leading her into a path of sin.
Nevertheless, despite Geraldine’s apparent evil nature, she possesses a level
of empathy and decides to have some mercy on Christabel stating in page 88: “All
they who live in the upper sky,/Do love you, holy Christabel!/And you love
them, and for their sake/And for the good which me befel/ Even I in my degree
will try/ Fair maiden to requite you well.” In Keats’ ballad La Belle Dame
sans Merci a female supernatural figure also appears, this time not masked
as a human, but openly declared a “faery” by the knight. The title itself,
however, seems to acknowledge the fact that this supernatural creature is merciless.
Yet,
despite the fact that Keats introduces this as an irrefutable truth by placing
it in the title, it still seems as if the ‘Belle Dame’ isn’t void of emotions. Some
may argue that her actions with the knight are all simply an act, a form of
getting her way and deceiving him, and although this very well may have been
Keats’ goal, I view it otherwise. In stanza’s V and VI one can see that the
knight is already fully entranced by this “faery’s child” for he saw nothing
else all day. Why then did she have to cry if the spell was already in effect?
Rather than believing that she is lying when she says “I love thee true” to the
knight, I believe that the Belle Dame means what she says. Stanza VII,
therefore, shows a change in this creature for, “She took me to her elfin grot/
And there she wept and sigh’d full sore.” She, for once, seems to realize the
magnitude of what she is about to do and can’t help but break down. In a way
she seems to want to escape from what she is forced to do to the knight,
letting him comfort her. In the stanza before this one it’s also mentioned that
she feeds him manna dew, which has biblical allusions, for it saved the
Israelites, and in a way may suggest her desire to save him.
It’s
not until the end of the poem, however, that we discover how the first speaker
came across the knight. He had just awoken and found himself in the middle of
what seemed to be fall or winter, meaning he had been left by the Belle Dame
for months there, since they had met in the spring or summer. The first speaker
describes him in the first and second stanza as pale and in a sickly state,
however, before reaching the conclusion that the Belle Dame in fact had no
mercy and left him to die it’s important to analyze the dream that the knight
has. In stanzas X and XI he describes the dream, telling the first speaker how
he saw pale kings, princes, and warriors too. They were all “death-pale” which
leads the reader to infer that these were all past victims of this creature,
yet they warn him “La Belle Dame sans Merci /Hath thee in thrall!” And from
this dream he awakens to find the first speaker. Therefore, it seems as if the
dream triumphed to warn him, for he awakens from this deadly sleep. Whether the
Belle Dame knows or allows this break from the trance is difficult to say, but
he awakens nonetheless, seeming to escape death narrowly.
No comments:
Post a Comment