When people hear the word “romanticism” they associate words like love, dreams, and emotions with it. Romanticism first occurred in the early nineteenth century right after the enlightenment. The Romantic literary period presented the ideas that people should separate themselves from logic and allow themselves to resort their own intuition, imagination and emotions for a better life. John Keats, author of “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, demonstrated the ideals of romanticism throughout his work by including many key aspects of the literary period. In his poem, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, he introduces his audience to a knight who takes them through an interaction with a beautiful woman in a wintering meadow. Keats personifies death as the beautiful woman in the meadow, and he writes about this knight to express how in the end everything reaches death. The “Beautiful Lady Without Pity” is the perfect example of this time period, and Keats makes sure that his audience understands what happens when people base their actions and interactions around their own instincts and emotions.
During the period of romanticism people were heavily in touch with their human emotions and wanted to completely reject the ideas of the enlightenment that were centered around intellect and logic. Keats demonstrates this in “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by the character of the knight. This character does not act on logic at all, and instead utilizes his imagination, emotion and intuition. When he first notices the naked woman in the meadow, he automatically sees that she has this dream like glow to her. Keats shows his readers that the knight falls into the trap of imagination when the knight says “She looked at me as she did love and made sweet moan” (Keats 408). Based on his imagination, the woman lures him in by playing with his emotions. This is demonstrated when he decides to “set her on [his] pacing steed and nothing else saw all day long” (Keats 408). He makes a rash decision to follow the woman’s temptations where he would be taken into a cottage, and it leads him to his untimely death.
The Romantic Revolution was a period in time where everyone believed that there would always be a better tomorrow. Not only was this period a historical follower of the French Revolution, but it became a historical leader as well. This movement was responsible for moments in history many years later such as, the “Hippy Movement” and the “New Age Movement”. This poem highlights the historical beliefs that “a new day will dawn” because the knight trusts his intuition and goes with the lady into her cottage where he believes life has something so good to offer him. In the end he is just met with death, so he was not so lucky. Keats plays on the ultimate romantic death in the ending scene of the poem where the knight tells the audience “And there she lulled me asleep, and there I dreamed ah woe betide! The latest dream I ever dreamt on the cold hill’s side” (Keats 409).
The romantics believed that they had their own rights to discover their own truths, which made them make some rebellious and spontaneous choices, like we see the knight do in “La Belle Dame sans Merci”. People were also deeply connected to nature in this time period believing that the woods were a form of spiritual bliss because it brought you closer to earth’s “roots”. In Keats poem, the readers learn through the knight’s dream that the woman (aka death) lures men into her bondage. Even though she comes off so beautiful and appealing while she is surrounded by the wintering meadow, in the end she leads the knight to his death. Because the knight wanted to discover his own truths, he trapped himself into a situation that he would never be able to escape: “And this is why I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering; though the sledge withered from the lake and no birds sing” (Keats 409). His own selected truths ended up killing him.
Keats leaves his readers with the idea that the romantic period is a very dark place in time. It leads people closer to death when people decide to base all of their decisions on emotions and “what could be”. Romanticism completely abandoned the process of rational thinking because of the belief in this dream like world. Keats demonstrates that whole idea of the time period quite well through “La Belle Dame sans Merci” where considering all consequences was avoided.