La Belle Dame sans Merci, written by the famous romantic poet John Keats in 1819, has been declared one of Keats's greatest works due to the ambiguous boundaries that it establishes between imagination and reality [Kelly]. Throughout the poem, the reader always questions the "reality" presented by the poem, creating many facets that readers have discussed for years and still have not established a definitive answer as to their true meaning. La Belle Dame sans Merci perfectly embodies Keats’s “negative capacity”. Keats believed that people with great intellectual prowess must retain the ability to accept that not everything necessarily has a precise value and that there is not always one true answer. This is the essence of negative capability, and the poem asks readers to use this mindset in order to eventually understand the mysticism that the poem creates through the tale of the knight-at-arms. La Belle Dame sans Merci consists of twelve quatrains, eight of which concern the knight's depiction of his fleeting love with a "fairy child". The first three stanzas belong to an unknown speaker addressing the knight. The first two stanzas are almost the same, with their first line questioning the knight's condition, their second line illustrating the knight's condition, and their last two lines containing images depicting a winter scene. The third stanza depicts the knight in more detail, showing his waning vitality with "[his] cheeks are a faded rose / fading quickly too." The fact that there was a 'rosy' quality to his cheeks, but now the parallels are fading to him leaving a warm house (the mead) and entering the cold of winter (the hill). This correlates with a final part of the poem when the knight pretends that he has fallen asleep... middle of paper ...... Belle Dame sans Merci apart from the rest of Keats's work is not its theme, but its endless ambiguity. No matter how many times it is read or analyzed, the reader is never absolutely sure what happened to the knight [Hirst]. This feature is the key element that truly makes the poem one of Keat's greatest works. p. 92-118. Reprinted in Poetry for Students, Vol. 17. Literary Resource Center. Gale Group Databases. David Kelly, Critical Essay on “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” in Poetry for Students, Vol. 17, Gale, 2003. Documentary Resource Center. Gale Group Databases. Lilia Melani. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Brooklyn College. from 03/26/08 to 3/29/08.