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John KeatsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Keats wrote the poem as a ballad, one of the oldest forms of poetry in English literature. A ballad is traditionally a rhyming song of many stanzas and narrates a tale. The balladic stanza is commonly a quatrain or four-line verse, with a rhyming scheme of ABAB or ABCB. Meant to be sung aloud and passed from one generation to another, the ballad is rhythmic and smooth-flowing. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” contains 12 quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme. The meter is largely iambic tetrameter, with the stress falling on four words per line, such as: “O what can ail thee, knight at arms” (Line 1). So far, the poem seems to be following a traditional balladic form. The twist occurs in the fourth line of each stanza, which is abruptly shortened, breaking up the flow of the previous three lines. Pointedly, this last line is only three or four words long and consists of just three stressed syllables. An example is the change in length and meter between Lines 2 and 4, from “Alone and palely loitering?” to “And no birds sing.
By John Keats
Endymion
Endymion: A Poetic Romance
John Keats
Meg Merrilies
Meg Merrilies
John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on a Grecian Urn
John Keats
Ode on Melancholy
Ode on Melancholy
John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
Ode to Psyche
Ode to Psyche
John Keats
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
John Keats
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
John Keats
The Eve of St. Agnes
The Eve of St. Agnes
John Keats
To Autumn
To Autumn
John Keats
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
John Keats
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