La Belle Dame sans Merci

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

This famous Romantic poem by Coleridge is also written as a ballad, like “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” It too follows a call and response model, where the speaker, a wedding guest, questions an ancient mariner he encounters. The mariner tells the wedding guest his tragic story, which is filled with natural and supernatural elements. One of the biggest similarities between the two ballads is a female figure who personifies death. In “Rime,” she is “The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH […] / Who thicks man’s blood with cold” (Part 3, Stanza 12).

“Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats (1819)

This great ode by Keats, possibly his most famous, was written in the same year as “La Belle.” Though “Ode to a Nightingale” is a lyric poem packed with sensuous descriptions of nature, it shares with “La Belle” the underlying themes of life and mortality and the deceiving nature of the imagination.

“Spellcaster” by Jeannine Hall Gailey (2020)

Written two centuries after “La Belle,” this witty poem by American poet Jeannine Gailey gives a voice to the proverbial spellcasting femme fatale. The persona of the poem’s speaker is a witch-like figure whose purpose is to “liberate” and “decimate” (Lines 11, 12).