Man Without Mercy

La Belle Dame Sans Mercy is relating a story of lost "love" and seemingly warns us of what comes of interactions with femmes fatales. That is, one is left wretched, alone, woebegone even in a time of joy and thanksgiving ("The squirrel's granary is full, And the harvest's done.). In this poem, the blame appears to be placed on the woman for causing such misery, but is it really her fault? In part, yes, for she is a participant in the error in communication and misunderstanding, but the man is equally to blame, whether you think it the lone man at the beginning or, as speculated, the narrator of the poem. I personally think it is the former, as at the end of his story he repeats some of the opening lines, as if in response to the initial question.

Our poor lover never actually receives confirmation from the woman of her constant affection. In the line "She look'd at me as she did love,", "as" is interpreted as "while; as if". These lead to two wildly different readings. If read as while, it could mean simply that she looked at him as they made love, which fits with the next line, "And made sweet moan". If she looked at him as if she did love, though, then it implies a quality of seeming so, but appearances are often misleading. This makes the lady's love much less concrete. It also gives birth to the possibility that the lover willed himself to imagine she loved him, when in truth such feelings may not have existed. It could be a realization on his part in retrospect that all may not have been as it seemed.

One of the most interesting lines to me was "And sure in language strange she said, I love thee true". She did not say "I love you" plainly, in a way impossible to misread, but rather in a "language strange". This serves to further question whether she ever explicitly expressed her love for him. It more and more seems as if the man, in fact, is deluding himself. His whole story has a dreamlike quality to it. The lady is "a fairy's child". Fairies are mystical creatures, not humans, and one questions whether or not they even exist at all. This man is fixated, he set her on his horse and saw nothing else all day long. When we are so obsessed with something, it is easy to interpret things the way we want, even imagine fanciful situations with the object of our fixation.

I'm sorry, my thoughts are not really being expressed clearly here, but what I essentially want to say is that the man seems to have willfully imagined the seriousness of the lady's affections, and in his language has given her a mystical, unattainable quality. Perhaps she did lead him on, but he seems to have led himself on just as much. And so the title of the poem is perhaps slightly inaccurate. Perhaps it is the man who is without mercy (for himself, and for this woman).