A Comparison of Love in Annabel Lee and La Belle Dame sans Merci Essay

Love in Poes Annabel Lee and Keatss La Belle maam sans Merci Poes Annabel Lee and Keatss La Belle Dame sans Merci depict the destructive effects that women exercise upon men. In both poems, women, by death and deception, harm their adoring lie withrs. In Annabel Lee, Annabel dies and leaves the speaker in isolation in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the fairy, La Belle Dame, captures the speakers heart, and then deserts him. The common theme of both poems, that love generates harmful effects, is a contemplation of both poets upsetting and harmful childhood experiences. Poetry, Keats purports, comes from the ferment of an unhappy childhood working through a noble imagination (Keats 16). The lesson of Keats boyhood was that the intensity of the beauty, the joy, the pleasure, and the bitterness of their mischief is necessary for a poem (Keats 17). The deaths of Poes parents, foster mother, and wife develop a similar intensity in the form of a lingering pity and herb of grace for the dead (Whitman 61). The implied malevolence in Annabel Lee and La Belle Dame sans Merci echoes these poets pasts the poems speakers are unable to live sanely or comfortably after experiencing and then losing the objects of their exquisite affection. Furthermore, the speakers names are concealed, stressing the importance of the women over the speakers. While both poets believe that love creates destructive situations, they differ about most negatively charged kind of love. Poe believed that an innocent and sexless love hurt the greatest his speaker went insane from love that was more than love, while he and his lover were children. Poes artistic religion was a worship of the beautifulin all noble thoughts, in all ho... ...a Belle Dame sans Merci through their fascination with the doomed nature of love (De Reyes 107). Works Cited Allen, Hervey. Israfel The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe. New York Holt, 1934 De Reyes, Mary. John Keats. Poetry Reviews. 3 vols. 1913 Keats, John. La Belle Dame sans Merci. The Poetical Works of John Keats. London Macmillan, 1884. Moise, Edwin. Keatss La Belle Dame sans Merci. The Explicator. Washington DC Heldref, 1992 Poe, Edgar. Annabel Lee. 15 Aug. 1997. Stefan Gmoser Online. Online. America Online. 12 Jan. 1998 Saintsbury, George. Edgar Allan Poe. Prefaces and Essays. Virginia Macmillan, 1933 Whitman, Sarah. Edgar Poe and His Critics. New York Haskell House, 1972 Wilbur, Richard. Poe and the Art of Suggestion. Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. New York G. K. Hall, 1987