Explore the nature of tragedy in Keats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'

(Extracts from a longer answer)The tragedy in ‘La Belle Dame’ could be argued to be the knight’s sitting on a ‘cold hill side’ waiting for his love. At a deeper level the tragedy in ‘La Belle Dame’ emerges as one of consciousness, as explored by Camus in his essay on ‘Sisyphus’. Camus argues that consciousness of the tragic position one is in is what makes the situation tragic. The knight in Keats’ poem has experienced quintessential love and is therefore conscious of its existence and now unable to live without it. This consciousness is the cause of his tragedy and as his control over his experience appears limited, he is therefore not the cause of tragedy in the poem. The true cause is the underlying transient nature of happiness and contentment in love.It is possible to argue that the tragedy of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is one of the failure of the imagination to sustain the ideal. The story in the poem begins in stanza four as the knight says ‘I met a Lady in the meads…a faery’s child’. The language here is that of storytelling and suggests fantasy especially as he calls her a ‘faery child’ implying she is a magical creature. The title of the poem also outlines it as ‘a ballad’. Traditional ballads have unknown authorship and usually pass a story on orally from one generation to another. This suggests that the story told in the poem is one the speaker heard long ago and he now yearns for the experiences of the knight in the poem. The speaker creates the ideal in the character of the Lady and after his imaginative experience, feels he cannot live without her – he cannot bear the return to reality. Like Camus’ Sisyphus, it is the consciousness of what he is missing that makes the knight’s situation intolerable. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the two settings enforces the contrast and mutual exclusion of the ideal and the reality. The ‘elfin grot’ represents a utopia the speaker has imagined to remove himself from the ‘cold hill side’ which is the reality of the world he lives in. Once his mind has experienced the idyllic utopia of the ‘elfin grot’ it cannot return to the ‘cold hillside’ without ensuing tragedy. Keats suggests that the imagination of the speaker is the cause of this tragedy as the experience it brings his allows him a glimpse of the ideal before he plummets back to the reality of life on earth. Ultimately, as a Romantic poet, Keats was fascinated by nature’s beauty and believed ideal beauty to exist on earth. In ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ Keats shows that, inevitably, beauty is transient when viewed by a mortal being as the mortal will eventually part with the earth’s beauty. However, it could be argued that the true nature of tragedy in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ can only be seen clearly by removing the male gaze to reveal society’s role in Keats’ tragic poem. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ illustrates the tragic way in which women are represented in literature. Women, since the Greek beginnings of tragedy, have fallen into one of two roles: the innocent, pure, angelic beauty of the narrative; or one who evokes the lust of men and seduces her male counterparts to cause their harm and downfall. Any power given to women in literature is usurped from its rightful male holder and leads to destruction and fragmentation. From Clytemnestra and Medea, to La Belle Dame and Lamia, the representation of women in literature is negative and warped. The nature of tragedy in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ is therefore complex, as the obvious victim – the knight: left ‘alone and palely loitering’ – is perhaps not the greatest sufferer in this poem. The nature of tragedy in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ reaches far beyond the characters in the poem to a wider tragedy concerning gender and representation in literature which has such power to shape the views and actions of individuals, and of society as a whole.