by Naomi Garton

Created on: May 04, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

John Keat's poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" shares many similarities and differences to John Clare's poem "First Love". Both poems were written in the same time period and both by young men. Both these young men have love of a woman, but the description of the woman, and relationship with her in each poem is very different. Both poems share a feeling of sadness and ultimately disappointment.

There was a brief fashion for all things medieval at the turn of the nineteenth century, and Keats was incredibly impressed by some poetry written by a schoolboy called Chatterton. Chatterton had forged some poems so that people would read them and they did. Yet, inevitably when they found that he wrote them, they stopped reading his poetry. Chatterton heavily influenced Keats, he evocated him, and that is why much of the language used in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" like "O what can ail thee," is typical of the medieval time period, unlike Clare's poem "First Love" where the language used "With love so sudden," would have been modern of the nineteenth century.

Keats was better educated than Clare; he had been to school and read poetry. He uses a wider lexical field than Clare, and the way in which he uses the words is far more sophisticated the use is more deliberate and reminds the reader of Chatterton as it mimics the medieval language he used. Keats is satirizing a literary tradition. He writes in a mock medieval style, yet Clare is not capable of this literary tradition, and he uses more straightforward agricultural vocabulary, "are the flowers the winter's choice?" and word order to meaning. Flowers are particularly important in Clare's poem, as they normally symbolize virginity and sexuality, and Clare's poem "First Love" conveys this sense of innocence with the imagery of flowers in verses one and three, "Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower." We expect that the voice of the poem is John Clare himself; this is what we imagine him to sound like. However it is true too that Keats writes autobiographically in the sense that his poem is a metaphor for his life; Keats appears to be telling a fictional story perhaps in his own mind he is the protagonist the knight. Keats also brings the poem alive for the reader by appealing to our senses by using language like "fragrant zone" and "anguish moist and fever dew". One can feel like one is watching the happenings of this love affair between the two, smell the scents and feel the auras from around them. This is also an effective

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