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La Belle Dame Sans Merci
[ French la bel dam sahn mer-see ]
noun
- a ballad (1819) by Keats.
Example Sentences
鈥淟a Belle Dame sans Merci鈥 blew my mind.
With her tousled hair and forbidding aloofness, May was a figure of bewitchment, la belle dame sans merci of the sardonic comeback.
The most singsong of these masterpieces, and the perfect Valentine鈥檚 Day poem, is 鈥淟a Belle Dame Sans Merci,鈥 which translates to 鈥渢he beautiful lady without mercy.鈥
He qualified for the group unwittingly, he recalled, after engaging in a particularly challenging word game: He rewrote Keats鈥檚 poem 鈥淟a Belle Dame Sans Merci鈥 by using the vocabulary from a Julia Child recipe for a cauliflower dish, and vice versa.
Long before Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize in literature, pundits used to talk about 鈥淒ylan versus Keats鈥, as if you had to choose, and as if Dylan鈥檚 poetic transformations of folk song are really so different from what John Keats does in his eerie ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci.
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