Theme of Love in La Belle Dame Sans Merci and Sonnet 116 Poems Essay Example

I believe that John Keets’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’ both discuss love through painstaking detail, however they differ on their views on the subject. La Belle Dame Sans Merci describes faster-moving, emphatic love, as described by its many powerful metaphors, this contrasts with Sonnet 116 which presents love as an ethereal power that cannot be controlled. This is shown through the many comparisons of love to time. 

Firstly, in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Keats utilizes the description of the La Belle to prefix the type of love the poem would later go on to describe, in the phrase ‘Her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild.’ Keats utilizes the adverb ‘wild’ to describe her, purposely not providing specific description, Keats permits the reader to interpret his poem to their liking, allowing the reader to visualize the characters at their own free will, not limited by his poem. This therefore forms the poem into an ever-changing text, every line being up to the reader’s imagination to interpret. This is in stark contrast to Sonnet 116 where Shakespeare describes the sheer opposite of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Shakespeare describes classic old love, he does not include characters, therefore greatly reducing the total amount of interpretations that could be formed, choosing to prove his agenda in a straightforward, concise manner. This is best exemplified in the quotation “Love is not love which alters when its alteration finds or bends with remover to remove.” In this phrase Shakespeare addresses love directly, as opposed to Keats’ poem which chose to use love as a poetic device and undertone to add depth to the characters’ bond. Shakespeare chose to do this as he believes in true love that does not need any storytelling, and as such authored a poem that reflected his beliefs and ideologies. 

Both poems use a variety of linguistic devices, however the most prominent are that of juxtaposition alongside extended metaphors. This is done to embody love as much more than just an emotion, as well as comparing love to other emotions and feelings. This achieves the goal of strengthening the poet’s beliefs on love in the reader’s minds. A fantastic portrayal of this is the phrase ‘And there she wept and sighed full sore, and there I shut her eyes with kisses four.’ This phrase juxtaposes La Belle’s mixed emotions together, showing the rapid change from sorrow to a further continuation of love. This expression displays the power of love, and how it overpowers many other emotions. The poet uses the adjective ‘sore’ to portray the sheer melancholy of La Belle’s current emotions, this builds up the image of an immovable sorrow meeting the power of love, which is destined to always come out on top. This portrayal of love is comparable to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, as shown in the quotation ‘Love is not time’s fool, with rosy lips and cheeks’ this quotation shows a similar juxtaposition to the previous one, however it highlights the main differences in these 2 poems’ portrayals and interpretations of love. Shakespeare displays love through no storytelling, simply displaying the emotion without any smoke-and-mirrors, this is shown in this quotation, which metaphorizes love to that of ‘rosy lips and cheeks’ this is opposed to the sickle used to display time in the earlier quotation. This shows that love has no singular meaning or ideal, it is ever-changing and is only up to the interpreter.