Introduction & Romantic Love
The Romantic Poets & Idealised Love
The Romantic period (roughly 1785–1830) transformed how poets wrote about love. Instead of treating love as a rational arrangement, Romantic poets presented it as an overwhelming, often dangerous, emotional force. Three poems in the Relationships collection — Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” and Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43” — each offer a different vision of idealised love, and understanding how they compare is essential for the Part 1 comparison question.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci — John Keats (1819)
Keats (1795–1821) died of tuberculosis at just 25. His short life shaped his preoccupation with beauty, mortality and the pain of desire. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (“The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy”) tells the story of a knight who meets a mysterious, supernatural woman. She enchants him with “wild eyes,” feeds him exotic foods and lulls him to sleep — but he wakes alone on a cold hillside, “palely loitering.”
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” presents love as a beautiful trap. The knight is seduced, enchanted and ultimately destroyed — Keats suggests that the more intensely we pursue beauty and love, the more devastating the loss when they vanish.
Key language: “I met a lady in the meads, / Full beautiful — a faery’s child” — the word “faery’s” immediately marks her as supernatural and otherworldly. She is not a real woman but an idealised fantasy. The ballad form (quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme) gives the poem a folk-tale quality, as if the knight’s suffering is part of an ancient, repeating pattern of men destroyed by desire.
Key structure: The poem uses a cyclical structure — it begins and ends with the knight “alone and palely loitering” where “no birds sing.” This circularity traps the knight in his loss, suggesting he can never escape the memory of the beautiful lady. The barren landscape mirrors his emotional devastation.
In his dream, the knight sees “pale kings and princes too, / Pale warriors, death-pale were they all.” The repetition of “pale” creates a ghostly, death-like image — these are all previous victims of the belle dame. The listing of “kings,” “princes” and “warriors” suggests that no amount of power or status can protect a man from the destructive force of desire. They cry “La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!” — the knight is enslaved, just as they were.
She Walks in Beauty — Lord Byron (1814)
Byron (1788–1824) wrote this poem after seeing his cousin Anne Wilmot at a party, wearing a black mourning dress with spangles. The poem celebrates a woman’s beauty by comparing it to the balance between darkness and light in a starry night sky. Unlike Keats’s dangerous beauty, Byron’s subject is presented as perfectly harmonious.
Key language: “She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies” — the opening simile is unusual because beauty is typically compared to daylight, not darkness. Byron subverts this convention, presenting beauty as something mysterious, soft and restrained rather than dazzling. The alliteration of “cloudless climes” creates a smooth, flowing sound that mirrors the effortless elegance Byron describes.
Key structure: The poem has three regular six-line stanzas with an ABABAB rhyme scheme and iambic tetrameter (four stressed beats per line). This highly regular rhythm reflects the “perfect” balance Byron sees in the woman — nothing is excessive or out of place. The poem moves from external beauty (stanza 1) to inner goodness (stanza 3: “A mind at peace with all below, / A heart whose love is innocent”), suggesting that true beauty is both physical and moral.
Byron’s poem celebrates beauty without ever mentioning love, desire or possession. The speaker admires from a distance, never claiming the woman for himself. This restraint contrasts sharply with the consuming desire in Keats and the passionate devotion in Barrett Browning.
Sonnet 43: “How Do I Love Thee?” — Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)
Barrett Browning (1806–1861) wrote this as part of Sonnets from the Portuguese, a sequence of love poems to her husband Robert Browning. Their relationship was remarkable: Elizabeth was an invalid, six years older, and her controlling father forbade all his children from marrying. The couple eloped to Italy in 1846, and Elizabeth never saw her father again. The intensity of these poems reflects the depth of feeling in a relationship that was hard-won.
Key language: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” — the opening is a rhetorical question followed by a determined attempt to quantify something unquantifiable. The metaphor of “counting” love like a measurable quantity creates tension — Barrett Browning tries to express infinite feeling within the finite structure of a sonnet. The repetition of “I love thee” (eight times) builds like a chant or prayer, intensifying with each line.
Barrett Browning uses the Petrarchan sonnet form — 14 lines divided into an octave and sestet, with an ABBA ABBA CDC DCD rhyme scheme. This is the oldest and most traditional form for love poetry, stretching back to 14th-century Italy. By choosing this form, Barrett Browning places herself in a centuries-long tradition of poets trying to capture love in verse. But she transforms it: historically, Petrarchan sonnets were written by men about distant, unattainable women. Barrett Browning writes as a woman expressing her own desire — she is both the poet and the lover, which was radical for 1850.
Key structure: The poem builds from the everyday (“to the level of every day’s / Most quiet need”) to the transcendent (“I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death”). This escalation mirrors the overwhelming nature of love — it starts simply but ultimately surpasses even death. The final reference to loving “after death” gives the poem a spiritual, almost religious quality.
Comparing the Three Poems
Idealised love — three versions: Keats presents love as dangerous and destructive (the knight is left “alone and palely loitering”). Byron presents beauty as something to be admired from a distance, perfectly balanced but untouched. Barrett Browning presents love as a total, overwhelming commitment that transcends even death. All three idealise their subject, but the consequences are very different: destruction (Keats), reverence (Byron), and devotion (Barrett Browning).
Context links: All three poets write during or in the tradition of Romanticism, which valued intense personal emotion over rational restraint. However, Barrett Browning’s position as a female poet reshaping a male-dominated form (the sonnet) adds a layer of gender politics absent from Keats and Byron.