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“La Belle Dame sans Merci” 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’s Day poem, is “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which translates to “the beautiful lady without mercy.”

He qualified for the group unwittingly, he recalled, after engaging in a particularly challenging word game: He rewrote Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” 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 “Dylan versus Keats”, as if you had to choose, and as if Dylan’s poetic transformations of folk song are really so different from what John Keats does in his eerie ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci.