Archetypes in John Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci A Ballad

Archetypes in John Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci: A Ballad During the Romantic Movement in literature, numerous writers fed off one another’s ideas; thus, creating various patterns which reoccur throughout literary works. According to â€Å"The Literature Network,† John Keats is â€Å"usually regarded as the archetype of the Romantic writer.† Therefore, Keats himself is thought to be the original model for the writer during the Romantic Era. In his poem, â€Å"La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad,† Keats uses various archetypes which provide added meaning and depth to this work of literature. The archetype may be defined as â€Å"the original model from which something is developed or made; in literary criticism, those images, figures,†¦show more content†¦Therefore, archetypal criticism attempts to pinpoint various archetypes in literary works in order for human’s to catalog the archetypes with its significance in humanity’s collective unconscious; thus, drawing on the concept or idea for later reference. Keats’ â€Å"La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad† features various archetypes. Frye proposed the existence of four types of plots, or â€Å"mythoi,† which make the four major genres. Each is associated with one of the four seasons: spring conveys comedy, summer is romance, fall shows tragedy, and winter yields satire (Murfin and Ray 28). â€Å"La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad† is about a knight who meets an untimely demise due to his affiliation with a supernatural woman. The outlook of this poem is bleak because the knight perishes; therefore, this poem is a tragedy. Lines 3-4 show the reader that the season in which the incident occurs is fall: â€Å"The sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing† (Keats 845). Keats further engrains the season of fall in the reader’s mind in lines 7-8: â€Å"The squirrel’s granary is full, / And the harvest’s done† (845). Therefore, Keats portrays the se ason as being fall within the first two stanzas, which, according to Frye’s ideas about the four basic types of plot, signifies the poem as being a tragedy. â€Å"La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad† is indeed a tragedy because the knight, in the end, loses hisShow MoreRelatedClassic Medieval Romanticism in La Belle Dame sans Merci Essay examples1497 Words   |  6 Pagesecstasy and felt that the vegetable universe is really a shadow of that real world which is the Imagination. John Keats once wrote that a poet could be certain of nothing except truth and beauty. He wrote, With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration or rather obliterates all considerations. A case in point being his famous poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci which was written in April 1819. He took the title of the poem from `an early fifteenth century French poem by