Blog 10: Keats

In today’s blog, the focus will be the next of our A Level texts: the poetry of John Keats.

With all of these blog posts, I’ll be highlighting three important things to consider to elevate your exam responses.

Key Character

‘La Belle Dame’. It is important to know — and this will flesh out your use of historical context, essential at A Level — that ‘La Belle Dame Sans Mercy’ was written the year after Keats had (unsuccessfully) nursed his dying brother through a disease (TB) that was thought at the time to be linked to sexual depravity: ‘La Belle Dame’ leads the knight-at-arms astray just as society would have thought Keats’s brother had been; the poem is both a love-letter to his brother and a cry of anguish about what had happened.

Key Theme

Illness. Following on from the character link, there is lots of illness in Keats: characters are described as ‘pale’, ‘wan’, and ‘meagre’. This makes sense, given our knowledge of his life: as well as his brother, he lost his mother to TB when he was 16, and his father died in a riding accident when Keats was a child; his was a short life punctuated by loss. Even in poems celebrating love, this loss is often close to the surface (see Isabella and Lorenzo in ’The Pot of Basil’, for example).

Key Quotation

‘No dream, alas! Alas! And woe is mine!’ In ’The Eve of St. Agnes’, Madeline wakes from her slumber to the realisation that not only has Porphyro been in her bedroom in the flesh — not just in her dream — but that he has performed an act on her, ‘a deceivèd thing’, which means that she feels she has no choice but to elope with him: a sad normalisation of sexual behaviour which Keats recognises, but with which he does not agree. ‘Love’ and loss combine, again.

📌 If you want more of this focus on character, theme, language, and context to prepare you for your exams, get in touch.