Gov’t Mule
John Keats
John Keats , the English Romantic poet wrote the ballad “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy) in 1819. Its subject matter is an ailing knight who meets a poet in the scarcity of late Autumn. The poet is curious what is wrong with the knight, ” O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing.” The knight explains that he met a beautiful woman, a faery’s child, a temptress with wild eyes. They immediately fall deeply in love and when he falls asleep with her at his side he has a prophetic dream in which kings, princes and warriors warn him that he has fallen in love with a woman who has cast him in a spell “I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gapèd wide.” He awakens and she is gone. He is doomed to walk the earth in eternal Autumn ruing his broken heart.
The concept of the mysteriously, spell binding woman without mercy , the heartbreaker , is chosen by Warren Haynes for his wistful ballad “Beautifully Broken” from the 2001 album The Deep End, Vol.1. The song carries a beautiful melody highlighted by Hayne’s soulful voice. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the poem written almost 200 years earlier, “I see the way she cast her spell. It’s like drowning in moonlight. Discards them she’s done.They’re lost in her twilight. I watch her move from star to star and I wonder why, why it feels so right.” Even though he recognizes her as threatening and knows that a spell of heartbreak will be placed on him, he is resigned, “She’s so beautifully broken-shaped by the wind. Dangerously twisted-Here I go again,”
“I see the way she casts her spell-it’s like drowning in moonlight
Discards them when she’s done-they’re lost in her twilight
I watch her move from star to star and I wonder why, why it feels so right.”
U of Music 