Psychoanalysis

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Oh 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 lulled 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
Hath thee in thrall!'

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped 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.

The Interpretation of Dreams: The Other Side

The cryptical and esoteric world of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats is not so obscure; moreover, it can lead us to a gratifying description of how human psyche functions. The poem seems to be a dream vision of a knight where his most unaccepted and repressed ideas come to life. The unconscious stores these ideas and then represents the outcome of desires. Not only do the oppressed wishes embed in themselves the unconscious, but they are its cause. The meaning of this poem is the desire for the lady who has no mercy. The knight’s dream or the discourse he produces revolving around the lady is subject to no other reason than to fulfill unconscious desire, more specifically, to exhibit in phantasm the atonement of such crave.

Instead of searching answers where the words of this poem come from, let us first examine why they were chosen among the many. The phrases here are highly improbable, “brief, meager and laconic” (819) as Freud would have put it. There are three striking scenes in this dream-structured poem typifying the memory that is dreamt: the desolate lake where “no birds sing” (Keats line 4), the sweet relationship between the knight and the lady, and again back to the desolate lake with one distinction—visions of “pale kings, and princes too/Pale warrior . . .” (Keats 37-38) are present. Between these three scenes, able to be divided into sub-scenes (or dream inside a dream), what is the relationship? For Freud, these scenes with their relative sub-scenes can represent “foreground and background, digressions and illustrations, conditions, chains of evidence and counter arguments” (821). It can be the undertaking of psychoanalysis to discern what cohesiveness conjoins these seemingly disconnected moments, thus getting closer to an apprehension of the fantasy that is the originator of this dream.

The repetitions of the lines in the opening and ending stanzas “Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,/And no birds sing” (Keats 47-48) and their relationship to a more positive image of “I met a lady in the meads,/Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;” (Keats 13-14) indicate a longing for a caring woman figure (the repressed wish) as opposed to the one with no mercy. In the ninth stanza it becomes apparent that the dreaming night is falling asleep inside a dream. The mood and tone changes here are indisputable. What is left of previous pleasures is now only pale, horrid, and dying, which make the moments portrayed here as less real and “appearances [being] deceitful” (Freud 822). The desolate lake is still here, but only followed by additional elements that bring forward instances from the other dream. The knight that is already in a dream is dreaming inside his dream: “And there I dream’d—” (Keats 34). This moment indicates the knight’s strife to recapture the preceding dream by vaguely realizing that this cannot be achieved. What has changed in this second dream is that it is another representation and this other representation does not demand to be something other than it is.

Could we say that something that was once the knight’s desire is now presented under a rather different lens? From Freudian viewpoint, the daily residues stored in the knight’s mind become to represent his most repressed desires in the form of several dreams. Although, different in content, “the portions of this complicated structure stand . . . in the most manifold logical relations to one another” (Freud 821). Above and beyond, the representations in various scenes of this poem denote in its dramatic configuration present some essences from Freudian psychoanalysis.

Works Cited

Freud. Sigmund. “From The Interpretation of Dreams.” The Norton Anthology of Theory

and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. 2^nd ed. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.:

New York, 2001. 814-824. Print.

Keats, John. “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad. ”The Norton Anthology: English

Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et. al. 8^th ed. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.:

New York, 2006. 899-900. Print.