John KEATS and La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Keats is “the most honest, the least self-deceiving ． ． ．of the Romantics,” says Mr. S. Spender, “the one in whom the Romantic aim of creating an interior world of poetry was most clearly expressed.” If no artist could find any possibility of living by transforming the environment into his own world, as the critic has pointed out, he would find himself imprisoned in a simply individual solitude as “lost in a sort of Purgatory blind.” Keats was fortunate enough to be able to conceive “Beauty” as his shaping spirit at the centre of his interior world after the lonely struggles, as is the case with other Romantics, against the severest sense of realities. “Beauty” is a positive imagination and in the poet's own words “the love of good and ill,” thorough which every reality, foul or reality, foul or fair, of the world is accepted as necessary ; there at the moment the poet himself becomes God. “Beauty” is the embodiment of the serene acceptance of one's fate, the powerful act of self-detachment ; the negative view of life is nothing but a strategic device for recovering a belief in the positive conception of life. It seems to the present writer, however, that the poetic vision of “Beauty” in all things was in Keats more or less a momentary one, as is probably understood in comparison for exmaple with the quality of Wordsworth's vision. Since only such a moment as mentioned above could not be a poet's whole life, the momentary experience, though artistic, had to be accumulated and organized into the long duration of his whole life. Though so organized a life did he long for, his realities were so uncompromising that the poet seems to have been unable to remain long at such a moment. Ths poet's career is, the writer believes, to be explained not in one static point of “Beauty”, but in a life-long pursuit of the realization of the object, presenting itself in an ever fluctuating circle from visionary moment to fretfulness and vice versa. We should be able to realize the fact in the chronological arrangement of the poems, Hyperion-La Belle Dame Sans Merci-The Fall of Hyperion-To Autumn. Be that as it may, in the spring of 1819 the poet could stand at the supreme height of his agonized contemplation of life as a reward for his long embittered pangs ; he was paid for them in the eternal harmory of “Beauty” embodied in Mnemosyne in Hyperion. Almost at the same time La Belle Dame Sans Merci was found copied in his letter. The ballad, so simply related, but so profoundly felt, sinks and spreads in the reader's mind ever widening rings of association and emotion, like a stone thrown into a pond. Suoerficially simple as the balled may seem, emotionally it is not simple at all as L.. Hearn suggests. At a more abstract level, however, there can be found some symbolical meaning underlying its dramatic, though intensely lyrical, and purely objective serenity with which the Knight a symbol of the poet himseld is in deep and calｍ acceptance of his fate after the mingled experience of light and dark. The parallel to the fact might be sought in the mental trial of Apollo in the epic. Sitting and moaning upon the grass and “Feeling curs'd and thwarted,” Apollo is unaware of the reason “why thus I rave, about these groves! ” whom a guardian Goddes addreses, inquiring “Is't not strangeThat thou shouldst weep, so gifted? ” The lines remind us at once of those of the second stanza of the ballad. Though the process of Apollo in conquering his interior world through the agonized taking-part in the harmony of good and ill embodied in the Goddess is direct and personal, harsh and grating, passionate and raving, that of the Knight in his similar situation and in his contemplation may be taken to have “not the least suspicion of raving.” In the light of the internal evidence, the probabilities are heavy that the ballad belongs to the few days after the third book of the epic was finished