La Belle Dame sans Merci

Keats uses popular figures and ideas from faery tales and medieval folklore in “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” The poem is constructed as a ballad, which is an old, traditional form of narrative folk poetry. The poet presents the narrative in a story-within-a-story structure or the frame tale, common in medieval literature. For example, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval classic Canterbury Tales (1400), the stories of the various characters of the narrative are told through the speaker. Other elements from medieval romance seen in “La Belle Dame sans Merci” are the questing knight, his transformative journey, and the faery queen. The faery queen is a staple of the folklore and ballads of the British Isles. An enchanting figure, the queen of fairies can be both benevolent and destructive, depending on the context. Queen of the Faeries was a popular figure in orally narrated British and Irish folk stories and songs. Edmund Spencer used the queen-of-faeries figure as an allegory for Queen Elizabeth I in his famous poem The Faerie Queen (1590). Traditional ballads like Tam Lin too feature a faery queen who wants to trap a mortal man in her company.