Which Romantic poet wrote 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'?

John Keats wrote the Romantic ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” The poem was composed in 1819 and tells of a knight who encounters a mysterious fairy woman, falls under her spell, and awakens abandoned on a cold hillside.

Its title means “The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy” and echoes a fifteenth-century poem by the French writer Alain Chartier. Keats’s version is arranged in twelve four-line stanzas, using an ABCB rhyme scheme and deliberately simple, songlike language.

The poem’s haunting mixture of beauty, seduction, illness and death reflects themes common in Keats’s poetry. Readers sometimes confuse it with medieval folklore or assume the lady is a clearly identified mythological figure; Keats leaves her nature and the knight’s fate deliberately mysterious. The poem became especially influential among Pre-Raphaelite artists and later inspired music, fiction and film.