The poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats contains two speakers. The first speaker starts the poem addressing the second speaker, who is pointed out by the first to be a knight. The first speaker questions the second about what is ailing him, and it is safe to sumise that the "beautiful woman without mercy" from the title is the reason. The transition into the second speaker is not done through typical means such as quotations or parentheses to offset him. The knight goes straight into describing that what ails him was not only a beautiful woman, but a fairy.
Keats sets different tones throughout the poem. The first three stanzas, which are all there is of the first speaker, show concern and curiousity over the knight's predicament. The following four stanzas are the knight explaining all the good things about his fairy love. There is a shift again in the eighth stanza, which focuses on the sadness of the fairy girl, and the knights attempts to comfort her. It seems, however, his attempts fail because the next few stanzas show how he dreams about many other men whom have experienced her love and lost it, and their warnings to him. The final two stanzas are the knight awakening from his dream without her. Keats effectively ends the poem with nearly the exact same stanza he began with, signifying the end of the story to the first speaker.
When reading this poem for the first time, I took the fairy to be somewhat evil or heartless because of the poems title implying that she was without mercy. However, upon rereading a few times, I began to believe the woman was not cruel or evil, but just unable to be take the love she had been given by the knight. The fact that her change in mood occured when she took the knight to her "elfin grot" which I'm assuming is her home, seems to indicate that he didn't quite fit into her world, and therefore she had to let him go when he fell asleep.
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