Y12: Lockdown Lit 2021 (Week 1)

Hello Y12, 

(Year 13, if you're reading this, you're on the wrong post!)

 

Welcome to Lockdown Literature on my A Level Blog! I’ll be using this space to post resources as it gives me a bit more flexibility than Google Classroom. Or perhaps I’ll just post stuff there instead. I don’t know yet. I’m also toying with the idea of trying some live lessons and recorded lessons. What do you think? You can tell me on this brief questionnaire.

 

We’re going to start this year by revisiting the work we started on Keats just before Christmas, then we’ll get back to Othello in a week or so.

This week, I’m going to give you a load of reading and a big old list of tasks to complete and later in the week I’m planning to send you a video to help you annotate the poem.

 

Here’s your first set of tasks for this week:

 

1) Make sure you’ve read and annotated the material I gave you about Keats before Christmas.

There’s a short bio here and a more detailed one here.

 

2) Re-read La Belle Dame Sans Merci:

 

I.

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,   

  Alone and palely loitering?         

The sedge has wither’d from the lake,    

  And no birds sing.

 

II.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!               5

  So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,        

  And the harvest’s done.   

 

III.

I see a lily on thy brow       

  With anguish moist and fever dew,               10

And on thy cheeks a fading rose  

  Fast withereth too.           

 

IV.

I met a lady in the meads, 

  Full beautiful—a faery’s child,   

Her hair was long, her foot was light,              15

  And her eyes were wild.  

 

V.

I made a garland for her head,     

  And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;   

She look’d at me as she did love, 

  And made sweet moan.            20

 

VI.

I set her on my pacing steed,        

  And nothing else saw all day long,        

For sidelong would she bend, and sing  

  A faery’s song.       

 

VII.

She found me roots of relish sweet,                 25

  And honey wild, and manna dew,         

And sure in language strange she said—

  “I love thee true.”  

 

VIII.

She took me to her elfin grot,       

  And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,                   30

And there I shut her wild wild eyes        

  With kisses four.   

 

IX.

And there she lulled me asleep,   

  And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide! 

The latest dream I ever dream’d           35

  On the cold hill’s side.     

 

X.

I saw pale kings and princes too, 

  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;           

They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci 

  Hath thee in thrall!”                  40

 

XI.

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,      

  With horrid warning gaped wide,          

And I awoke and found me here,

  On the cold hill’s side.     

 

XII.

And this is why I sojourn here,             45

  Alone and palely loitering,          

Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,     

  And no birds sing.

 

Read it as a comic strip here!

 

3) Answer these questions on the poem. You can share your doc with me when you’ve finished. You can download the doc here: WORD | GOOGLE DOC | PDF

 

4) Remind yourself of these interpretations of the poem:

 

5) Read this information about the ballad form and answer the question at the end in an email.

 

This poem is in the form of a ballad. Look at the four examples of ballad stanzas below to figure out how a ballad works:

 

Let me tell you a little story

About Miss Edith Gee;

She lived in Clevedon Terrace

At number 83.

 

 

He did not wear his scarlet coat,

For blood and wine are red,

And blood and wine were on his hands

When they found him with the dead,

The poor dead woman whom he loved,

And murdered in her bed.

 

 

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!

 

This is the tale that was told to me by the man with the crystal eye,

As I smoked my pipe in the camp-fire light, and the Glories swept the sky;

As the Northlights gleamed and curved and streamed, and the bottle of "hooch" was dry.

 

Read up on the ballad form here and here and here.

 

You’ll notice that La Belle Dame Sans Merci is made up of quatrains which rhyme abcb.

 

Take a look at the pattern of stressed syllables in the first stanza:

 

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,   (4 stresses)

       Alone and palely loitering?     3

The sedge has withered from the lake,      4

       And no birds sing.     2

 

The final line in each stanza is either an abrupt, two-stress line (which makes the poem seem to be characterised with a sense of awkward abruptness) ­– or it contains three stresses and sounds a bit more naturally ballad-like.

 

What is the impact of Keats’s use of the ballad form in this poem? How does it contribute to the poem as tragedy? Send me your answers in an email.

 

 

Finally, I’m going to share an important resource with you: the Critical Anthology.

You’ll get a paper copy of this when you’re back in school. It contains introductions to six important areas of literary criticism:

 

• Narrative theory
• Feminist theory
• Marxist theory
• Post-colonial theory
• Ecocritical theory
• Literary value and the canon

 

To put it another way, these are different critical lenses through which you can read a text. You'll need to use two sections of this anthology as part of your coursework next year.

 

6) Here’s what I’d like you to do as a starting point:

 

a) Choose one of the following critical lenses: Feminist, Marxist or Ecocriticism

 

b) Read the section of the anthology which you have chosen.

 

c) Come up with a list of 5 things a reader might find interesting about La Belle Dame Sans Merci when reading from your chosen critical perspective. Alternatively, you could write a paragraph.

 

Worked example:

 

I’m going to consider the poem from the point of view of narrative theory.

 

Narrative theory (or narratology) concerns ideas about how texts are contructed.

 

Here are my observations on La Belle Dame Sans Merci from the point of view of narrative theory:

 

• There is a circular structure to the poem which has the following effects: a) it creates a sense of stasis and hopelessness, b) it foreshadows the tragic trajectory of the poem and creates a sense of inevitability
• There are three separate voices in the poem: an unidentified narrator who encounters the knight and introduces the poem, the knight himself, and the voices of the pale kings and princes.
• The poem can be seen as a type of tragedy in that the sense of extreme joy and fulfilment of the initial encounter turns to imagery of hopelessness and death, but there is no clear resolution as the knight is still alive at the end.
• The story is full of narrative gaps: who is the initial narrator? What does ail the knight? Who is the lady? Why does she weep? What does she represent? In what sense does she ‘lull’ him to sleep? How long has the knight been ‘palely loitering’. This leaves the poem open to a multitude of interpretations.
• There is a narrative frame, provided by the unidentified narrator; this distances us from the story.
• There is plenty of repetition – as you’d expect from a ballad.
• How reliable is the narrator’s story? Was the knight really ever in control? Does he misinterpret her? And who labels her ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’? Why does this label seem to clash with the way the knight presents her?
• The poem, like many of Keats’s poems (and Othello) has two worlds or two contrasting settings: the wintery stasis of the cold hillside and the rich, warm, sensuous world of the meads.
• In terms of characterisation, the characters are flat and seem to fulfil stereotypes. The knight comes from the same world of power as the pale kings and princes. The lady is the ‘other’. None of the characters is developed. They seem to work as symbols.

 

Now it’s your turn. So:

 

• Pick your ‘critical lens’
• Read the relevant section of the anthology
• Email me your bullet point list of observations from that critical perspective.

 

You can include your comment about the effect of the ballad form in the same email. Don’t forget about the questions on the poem too.

 

I look forward to seeing what you come up with. We’ll share your ideas next time.

 

That’s it for now. I reckon there’s a good 1.5-2 hours of work there. Later in the week, I’m hoping to share a video to help you make final annotations to the poem. I'm also going to challenge you to learn the poem by heart!

 

Let me know if you need anything.

 

Mr M

 

P.S. Don't forget to fill in the questionnaire, if you haven't already.