“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” seems very enigmatic at first. The more one dwells on it, the more it seems suffused with tragedy. The vision of the death-pale kings, princes and warriors is haunting to the imagination. The cry, “La belle dame sans merci hath thee in thrall,” coming from their starv’d lips in the gloom, is a horrific cry of belated warning from the world of the dead victims. It is likewise haunting to the imagination. The more I read and re-read the poem, the more I got a sense that it had a very personal meaning for Keats, but a specific meaning still eluded me until I began reading his letters to Fanny Brawne. Then the whole, profoundly sad story became clear.

The first clue I got was from the letter to her dated July 8, 1819. “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death,” he wrote. “O that I could have possession of them both in the same moment. I hate the world: it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it.” At the moment he wrote this letter, he seemed to be under the influence of a seductive mood of romantic melancholy which fused death with sex. He was not fighting the feeling; quite the opposite – he was luxuriating in it. In a letter that came after a year had passed, however, he was obviously fighting it.

In August 17, 1819, he wrote a very cold, flinty letter to Fanny pretending to be over her, to be too busy with important work to feel any emotion for her – until the end of the letter, when he suddenly seems to realize that he has been kidding himself and admits: “Even as I leave off it seems to me that a few more moments’ thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me. I must not give way to it – but turn to my writing again – if I fail I shall die hard. O my love, your lips are growing sweet again to my fancy, – I must forget them.”

Could it be that he had realized that he would never write his greatest poetry unless he resisted the powerfully seductive force which seemed to hold him in thrall intermittently? It is very easy to imagine him identifying that force in his imagination with the image of the femme fatale in Judeo-Christian tradition – the evil, seductive woman who comes into the life of young men to lure them away from the paths of good and destroy them. Although Keats does not seem to be either conventionally religious or prudish, he may have been influenced by that cultural image.

A letter he wrote to her in February of 1820 repeated that theme. “My sweet creature when I look back upon the pains and torments I have suffered for you to go to the Isle of Wight; the extasies in which I have passed some days and the miseries in their turn. I wonder the more at the Beauty which has kept up the spell so fervently.”

Here I will point out that although he believes that he is under a spell caused by Fanny, he doesn’t blame her but instead seems to blame a force he calls Beauty. Fanny was a femme fatale to him in a way, but only because he imagined that a “Great Femme Fatale Spirit”, i.e., Beauty, was working through Fanny. That’s why he makes his faery’s child sad. He knew she did not want to hurt him (or want him to die of tuberculosis).

He goes on to write, “Now I have had opportunities of passing night anxious and awake I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. ‘If I should die,’ said I to myself, ‘I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.’ Thoughts like these came very feebly whilst I was in health and every pulse beat for you – now you divide me with this (may I say it?) ‘last infirmity of noble minds’ all my reflection.” He seems to be telling her that he would like to create an immortal work before he dies, but she divides all his reflections with the infirmity which love creates.

Apparently, he was under the impression that he had lost the battle to write immortal poetry. (Maybe that’s why he changed “knight” to “wight”. Another reason he used the word “wight” could be because he was staying at the Isle of Wight.) His illness, too, divided his reflections. There seems to be a very fuzzy line between love and illness in Keats’ mind at this point. That is understandable when somebody is simultaneously dying from a fatal illness and languishing in disappointment from unrequited love.

I can only conjecture the extent to which Fanny returned Keats’ love, but there seems to be evidence in his later letters to her that she was moved by pity to honor his requests from the sick-bed, although she somewhat resented being manipulated. From Keats’ pleas and carryings on, one gets the impression that her feelings for him were not as intense as his feelings for her, and that he knew it very well. That must have made him feel that his love was unrequited to a degree.

To sum it up, then, I believe that Keats’ revisions are due to the fact that he believed he had lost the battle to write immortal poetry. He had probably been feeling stronger and more optimistic when he wrote the original version. As his illness weakened him physically and mentally while he was at the Isle of Wight, he probably became more and more enthralled by the mood of romantic melancholy. That’s why he changed “knight at arms” to “wretched wight”. He had come to consider himself a wretched wight.

I believe that the original version is better, because it was written in a stronger and more hopeful spirit, which can change the meaning of the first and last stanzas dramatically. In the original version, one can make a case that the solitude implied in the first and last stanzas is actually positive – perhaps a return to the ascendancy of powers of poetic creativity. Consider a passage about solitude in a letter that Keats wrote to George and Georgiana on October 25, 1818.

“Notwithstanding your Happiness and your recommendation, I hope I shall never marry. Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk; though the Carpet were of Silk, the curtains of the morning Clouds, the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet’s down; the food Manna, the Wine beyond Claret, the Window opening on Winander mere, I should not feel – or rather, my Happiness would not be so fine, as my Solitude is sublime….The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my Children….I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds….I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone.” Perhaps at the time he wrote the original version, he believed that he would get over his obsession with Fanny and be content with creative solitude once more, producing the immortal works he still believed he had yet to write.

On the other hand, when the character changes to a “wretched wight”, it becomes hard to imagine such a triumphant kind of solitude. Instead, it seems like a solitude which was not chosen but was the unwelcome result of abandonment. (Did he feel abandoned by Fanny at that point? Or did he feel abandoned by the promise of life? Maybe Fanny and the promise of life were not sharply separated in his mind. After all, if he had been able to recover from his tuberculosis, Fanny would probably have been attainable.)

The poem does not seem typically Keatsian in either version, because it has an almost skeletal quality. His other poems are much fleshier. In addition, it seems to be more personal than most of his other poems. Most of his other poems were about things more external to himself which he identified with sometimes but did not live the way he lived “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. He is the character in the poem, not just a poet writing about a character which he can identify with in some ways. In other words, I think that “La Belle Dame” is more autobiographical than most of his other poems. For that reason, I think it is the saddest of all his poems.