¶ … Keats and Hemingway

Although the literary texture John Keats' poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and Ernest Hemingway's "A Very Short Story," have profoundly different tones, given that one was written during the Romantic period of the 19th century in England, and the other during the modernist period of 20th century American literature, both works have similar tales and attitudes towards love -- a military man seeks beauty and solace in the arms of a woman. Yet the man's love comes to naught because of a woman's faithlessness.

The Keats has a distinctly 'unreal' or crafted poetic tone, in contrast to the Hemingway attempt to have the quality of ordinary speech and life. Keats' poem is a ballad in the modern style. Hemingway's reads almost like a newspaper story in its quiet, factual description of its characters. Keats' poem is about a fairy queen, rather than an attempt at capturing reality, while the Luz of "A Very Short Story" is always recognizably human. But both show that romantic love is a false ideal, because it only exists in the knight or soldier's mind -- the men do not see their women for what the women really are like, they only see dreams.

The knight of the Keats poem falls in love with the queen of the title. She carries him away to a fantasyland. But then, after the experience of being in love with the fairy queen and reaping her treasures and rewards for a night, the man is cast off and nothing seems as wonderful as it did in the past, before he knew the ecstasy of a woman's love. Thus, although love may seem sublime when one is in love, when one is out of love, the poet suggests, the nature of love renders this casting-off almost too harsh to bear -- it drives the knight to despair and makes the Hemingway protagonist ill. Both thus, tales begin with beauty, and comforting a man of the world with feminine tenderness, and end with even more despair than when they began.