Author Question: What details throughout the text tell us that la belle dame is no ordinary woman? What will be an ... (Read 54 times)

acc299 · **on:** Jul 20, 2018

What details throughout the text tell us that la belle dame is no ordinary woman?

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Why do you think the poet chose to imitate the form of the folk ballad inthis poem?

What will be an ideal response?

Jmfn03 · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 20, 2018

Answer to Question 1

In lines 16 and 31 we are told that she has wild eyes. She is a fairys child (line 14), she sings a fairys song (line 24), she speaks a language strange (line 27), and she inhabits an elfin grot (line 29).

Answer to Question 2

Predilections for the ballad form, for medieval settings, and for supernatural themes were all characteristic of one strain of English Romanticism, as exemplified earlier (at about the time of Keatss birth) in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, most notably in Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Robert Southey. All of these qualities can be seen as part of the Romantic Movements revolt against the Neoclassical emphasis of the previous age, with its predilection for heroic couplets, urban and contemporary settings, and rationally oriented, often didactic verse. Notice how many of the attributes of the medieval folk ballad Keats imitates here: lack of rime in the first and third lines of each quatrain; occasional metrical irregularities; pointless specificity (kisses fourcompare Nine bean-rows will I have there in Yeatss The Lake Isle of Innisfree); shifting (and unidentified) speakers; and elliptical narration.