The White Goddess (96 page)

The context of the poem is discussed at length in Sir Sidney Colvin’s
Life
of
Keats.
Keats had been reading a translation, then ascribed to Chaucer, of Alain Chartier’s
La
Belle
Dame
sans
Mercy
,
in which a ‘gentleman finding no mercy at the hand of a gentlewoman dyeth for sorrow’. In the translation these lines occur:

Other literary sources of the ballad have been found. In Spenser’s
Faerie
Queene
(
II, 6
), the enchantress Phaedria is seen in a rowing-boat by the Knight Cymochiles as he wanders on the river-bank. He accepts her invitation to embark with her, and they have a pleasant time together. She sings, jests, decks her head with garlands, and puts fresh flowers about her neck, to the knight’s wondrous great content. They land on an island in the ‘Idle Lake’, where she takes the ‘wretched thrall’ to a shady dale, lulls
him fast asleep with his head on her lap, and there maroons him. Similarly in Malory’s
Morte
D’Arthur
, (
IV,
1
)
the prophetic poet Merlin ‘was assotted and doated upon’ Nimue, the enchantress. She decoyed him into a grotto and there left him immured.

Amy Lowell has traced another source of the poem in the romance
Palmyrin
of
England
which Keats is known to have read with avidity. Palmyrin is madly in love with one Polinarda whom he fears he has offended, and ponders his grief under trees by the water-side….‘And the passion therefore became so strong upon him that his strong heart failed, and such was the power of these fantastic thoughts over him that with the semblance of one dead he lay at the foot of the willow trees.’ In another episode Palmyrin ‘espied a damsel on a white palfrey come riding toward him, her hair spread over her shoulders and her garments seeming to be greatly misused; all the way as she rode she used many shrieks and grievous lamentations, filling the air with her cries.’ She was an emissary of the sorceress Eutropa, sent to decoy him. And towards the close of the romance occurs a description of kings and princes embalmed in a mortuary temple on Perilous Isle, which seems to account for the ‘pale Kings and Princes too’.

There are also reminiscences in the
Belle
Dame
Sans
Merci
of Coleridge’s
Kubla
Khan
with its singing maiden and poetic honey-dew (‘honey wild and manna dew’ is Keats’ version), of a line by Wordsworth, ‘Her eyes are wild’, and of another in William Browne’s
Pastorals
‘Let no bird sing…’; but the most important source of all is the
Ballad
of
Thomas
the
Rhymer
,
one version of which had recently been published by Sir Walter Scott in his
Border
Minstrelsy
and another by Robert Jamieson in his
Popular
Ballads.
Thomas of Erceldoune was taken up by the Queen of Elfland on her milk-white steed and carried to a garden where she fed him on bread and wine, lulled him to sleep in her lap, and gave him the gift of poetic insight; but warned him that he might be destined as a Sabbatical sacrifice to hell, going by the road that ‘lies out owr yon frosty fell’ (or ‘cold hillside’).

Keats was now twenty-four years old and at a crisis of his affairs. He had abandoned medicine for literature but was growing doubtful whether he could support himself by it; lately a ‘loitering indolence’ had overtaken his work. He had conceived a jealously possessive passion for the ‘beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange…MINX’ Fanny Brawne. She was evidently flattered by his addresses and willing to let him be her beau, but her frivolous ways caused him increasing pain; the more so, because he was not in any position to offer her marriage or insist on her remaining faithful to him. The ‘kisses four’ in the poem are likely to be autobiographical, rather than a modification, to suit the rhyme, of the ballad convention ‘kisses three’. But often Fanny seems to have treated him mercilessly in resentment of his masterful ways and even, as he
complains in a letter, to have made his ‘heart a football by flirting with Brown’, his friend. Thus the Belle Dame was, in one aspect, the elfish Fanny Brawne, whom he figuratively placed before him on the saddle of his Pegasus; and it is true that she admired his poems sufficiently to copy one or two of them out in a manuscript book of her own.

Keats, writing to his brother George who was in low water and far from home, took pains to conceal both the strength of his passion for Fanny and the serious condition of his health which complicated his other distresses. He was now in the early stages of a consumption induced, six months previously, by an exhausting walking tour in Scotland from which he had returned to find his elder brother Tom dying of the same disease. As an ex-medical student he knew that no cure had yet been found for it. He had seen the lily on Tom’s brow, the hectic rose on his cheek, his starved lips a-gape in horrid warning, and had closed his wild wild eyes with coins, not kisses.

In the letter which contains the
Belle
Dame
Sans
Merci
Keats mentions having just met Coleridge walking by Highgate Ponds with Green, a former medical instructor of his own. Coleridge’s account of the meeting has been preserved. Keats asked leave to press his hand, wishing to carry away the memory of meeting him, and when he had gone Coleridge told Green: ‘There is death in that hand.’ He characterized it as ‘a heat and a dampness’, but ‘fever dew’ is Keats’ own description. Thus the Belle Dame Sans Merci was, in another aspect, Consumption: whose victims warned him that he was now of their number. Although it was not for nearly another year that he received his ‘death-warrant’ in the form of violent arterial bleeding in the lungs, Keats must have already realized that even if it were financially possible to support Fanny he could not now honourably ask her to marry him; especially since the consumption was aggravated by venereal disease which he had caught two years before this at Oxford while visiting his friend Bailey the Divinity student. Thus the features of the Belle Dame were beautiful in a strange pale, thin way as Fanny’s were, but sinister and mocking: they represented both the life he loved – in his letters to Fanny he identified her with both Life and Love – and the death he feared.

There is a third constituent of this nightmare figure: the spirit of Poetry. Keats’ chief comfort in his troubles, his ruling passion, and the main weapon with which he hoped to clear his way to Fanny’s love was poetic ambition. Now Poetry was proving an unkind mistress. In the disturbed state of his heart and mind he could not settle down to writing the romantic epics on which, in emulation of Milton, he hoped to build his fame. Recently he had stopped work on
Hyperion
after writing two and a half books, and confided to his friend Woodhouse that he was so greatly dissatisfied with it that he could not continue.

That the Belle Dame represented Love, Death by Consumption (the
modem leprosy) and Poetry all at once can be confirmed by a study of the romances from which Keats developed the poem. He seems to have felt intuitively, rather than known historically, that they were all based on the same antique myth. The Queen of Elfland in
Thomas
the
Rhymer
was the mediaeval successor of the pre-Celtic White Goddess who carried off the sacred King at the end of his seven years’ reign to her island Elysium, where he became an oracular hero. The story of the prophet Merlin and the enchantress Nimue has the same origin; so has that of Palmyrin and the enchantress on the white horse; and that of Cymochiles and the enchantress Phaedria. She was Death, but she granted poetic immortality to the victims whom she had seduced by her love-charms.

The case of Thomas the Rhymer,
alias
Thomas of Erceldoune, is a remarkable one. He was an early thirteenth-century poet who claimed to have been given poetic insight by the Queen of Elfland, or Elphame, who appeared suddenly to him as he lay on Huntlie Bank and chose him as her lover; and it was for this reason that his vaticinations were so highly prized by the Scots. (They were said by Thomas Chambers, in 1870, to be ‘still widely current among the peasantry’.) Although it looks at first sight as though Thomas had merely borrowed the Gaelic myth of Oisin and Niamh of the Golden Hair, of which the Arthurian variant is the romance of Ogier the Dane
1
and Morgan le Faye, and applied it fancifully to himself, this is unlikely to be the case. What seems to have happened is that he was accosted on Huntlie Bank not by a phantom but by a living woman, the titular ‘Queen of Elphame’, the contemporary incarnation of Hecate, goddess of witches. She made him renounce Christianity and initiated him into the witch cult under the new baptismal name of ‘True Thomas’.

As we know from the Scottish witch trials, the same adventure happened to other likely young Scotsmen, three or four centuries later. At Aberdeen in 1597, for instance, Andro Man confessed to carnal dealings with the then Queen of Elphame, who had ‘a grip of all the craft’ and who had attended that year’s Harvest meeting at the Binhill and Binlocht riding on a white hackney. ‘She is very pleasant and will be old and young when she pleases. She makes any King whom she pleases and lies with any
she pleases.’ (Old and young, naturally, because she represented the Moon-Goddess in her successive phases.) William Barton of Kirkliston similarly became the beloved of a later Queen, as he confessed at his trial in 1655, renounced Christianity, was renamed John Baptist and received the Devil’s mark. But already by the thirteenth century the sacrifice of the king in the seventh, or Sabbatical, year seems to have been no longer insisted on, or only symbolically performed: for in the garden to which the Queen took Thomas of Erceldoune he was warned on pain of death not to pluck the apples growing there, the traditional food of the oracular dead. If Thomas had eaten them he would not have lived to tell his tale and keep his ‘green velvet shoes and coat of even cloth’ that had been his livery as the Queen’s gudeman. The account of his mystical experiences corresponds with what is known of the initiation ceremonies of the witch cult. Like Ogier the Dane, he had first mistaken her for the Virgin, a pardonable mistake since (according to the confession of the witch Marion Grant of Aberdeen, an associate of Andro Man) she was addressed as ‘Our Lady’ by the witches and appeared like a fine lady clad in a ‘white walicot’.

Keats in his letters to Fanny makes it clear that to become her lover in as complete a sense as Thomas of Erceldoune became the Queen of Elphame’s, he would gladly have received the Mark and signed the blood compact which thereafter delivered his soul to hell. He was not a Christian. ‘My religion is Love and you are its only tenet,’ he wrote to her. But Fanny was not well cast for the part he forced upon her. Though at first, like the Queen whom William Barton met on the way to the Queen’s Ferry, she pretended to be ‘angry and very nyce’ when he offered her gallantries, and later took pity on his distresses and humoured him to some degree, it is clear that she never ‘suffered him to do that which Christian ears ought not to hear of’.

Coleridge, at his best, had a stricter poetic conscience than Keats. Though the second part of
Christabel
belies the moon-magic of the first, his description in the
Ancient
Mariner
of the woman dicing with Death in the phantom ship is as faithful a record of the White Goddess as exists: