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The title for this poem, if not the subject, was taken from a medieval poem by Alain Chartier. Though readers are familiar with Charles Brown's transcription of this poem, in its original version, the first line had the first speaker identifying the second speaker as "wretched wight." In the first stanza, the first speaker mentions that "The sedge has wither'd from the lake, / And no birds sing," which the second speaker repeats at the end of the poem. Lured to the "elfin grot" of a "fairy child," the speaker winds up on a bad trip: "I saw pale kings, and princes, too, Pale warriors, death pale were they all," and they all tell him that the title character has him in thrall. For ten points, a knight at arms stays "alone and palely loitering" in this Keats ballad about a pitiless woman.
The title for this poem, if not the subject, was taken from a medieval poem by Alain Chartier.
{La Belle Dame sans Merci}: A Ballad