La Belle Dame sans Merci

The sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing. On a cold hillside after the harvest is in, a stranger finds a knight-at-arms loitering alone, a lily on his brow, and asks what ails him; the rest of the poem is his answer. He met a lady in the meads, a faery's child with long hair and wild eyes. He set her on his horse, she fed him roots of relish sweet and honey wild, and in a language strange she told him that she loved him true. Keats copied it into a letter to his brother in the spring of his great odes, and it has the eerie plainness of an old ballad, each stanza closing on a clipped short line that stops like a caught breath. What it knows is how enchantment feels from inside: total, sweet, and already draining the colour from everything else. Twelve small stanzas, and by the last of them the reader understands why no birds sing on that hill, and why he cannot bring himself to leave it.