La Belle Dame Sas Merci Analysis

We all poses emotions. Sometimes these emotions are good for us as they enable us to feel, while other times, these emotions hinder our ability to think clearly and rationally. One such emotion that can have such an effect on all humans is love. Love makes us feel special and provides us with a goal that we then strive towards. However, love can also cloud our judgment and not cee the entire truth. The 1819 poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, by the British Romantic Poet John Keats and the 1924 novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates that love is a powerful emotion that blinds us and makes us think of an idealized world. Love infatuates us and makes us do anything and everything for the person we love. This has its merits but sometimes, we do this to a fault. Love …show more content…
Love makes us create our own reality when the one that is true is not to our liking. The knight in La Belle Dame Sans Merci is smitten with the lady of the meadows to the point where all the knight can do is stare at her exquisite beauty: “I set her on my pacing steed, / And nothing else saw all day long” (Keats 21-22). The knight being blinded by love is similar to how most humans deal with love. We become so engrossed in another person that we stop caring for our needs. Our minds are consumed with the thoughts of pleasing the person we love, sometimes to a fault. We become obsessed with this person and look for confirmation from him or her on every action that we take. In love, humans become incapacitated and lose our ability to think for ourselves. The knight love as, however short lived. When things don’t proceed to his liking, he creates an alternate reality for himself where he idealizes his love for the lady: “And sure in language strange she said— / ‘I love thee true’” (Keats 27-28). The knight dreams that the lady