To begin with – a riddle: “The beautiful lady” has a spooky foot. What’s more, two of her feet are chopped off. What’s happened?
The answer lies in the opening verse of his classic poem, La Belle Dame sans Merci – “the beautiful lady without mercy”. In this poem, Keats presents his narrator stumbling across a knight in the middle of nowhere. The knight seems out of place and out of sorts.
“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
Alone and palely loitering?”
Keats uses the opening to create mystery and raises lots of questions in his reader’s mind: Who is this knight? Why is he hanging around in this place all by himself? Why does he look as if he’s seen a ghost?
Keats also uses the opening to create an unsettling atmosphere. He doesn’t just use description to do this. He also draws upon the rhythmic properties of poetry to create this effect.
This is where the feet come in.
If you have some technical knowledge of poetry, you will have been able to make a start on working out the meaning of the riddle at the start. For you will have been alert to the fact that “a foot” is not just something on the end of a leg, but a way of dividing up a line of poetry.
To understand this, let’s look more closely at the opening two lines. We will find out about their feet. This will help us work out the rhythm – or metre – of the lines and so understand its effect.
This whole process is called scanning (or scansion) and involves three steps:
- Count the number of syllables in each line.
- Find out which syllables have a strong stress and which syllables have a weak stress.
- Divide the line into segments, based on the number of syllables and the patterning of the stress.
Let’s apply this to the first two lines:
O what / can ail /thee, knight /–at arms
Alone / and pale / ly loit / ering?
What do we find? Firstly, each line has eight syllables. Secondly, there is an alternating “weak-strong” pattern of stress throughout. Finally, we can divide the line into four sections, each of which has a “weak-strong” pattern of stress.
A particular segment with a particular pattern of stress in a line of poetry is called a foot. A foot with this particular pattern of stress – “weak-strong” – is called an iamb or iambic.
Therefore, in the first line we have four iambic feet and in the second line two. A line with four feet is called a tetrameter (from the Greek for “four”). A line with four iambic feet is called an iambic tetrameter.
We can say then that the opening of La Belle Dame sans Merci starts with two lines of iambic tetrameter. This is its rhythm or metre. This is also the classic metre of the ballad genre of poetry.
Now a rhythm sets up a pattern. A pattern sets up an expectation. An expectation sets up a desire for fulfilment. Having established this ballad metre in the first two lines, what kind of metre does Keats use in the third line? Does he continue with the iambic tetrameter?
O what / can ail /thee, knight /–at arms
Alone / and pale / ly loit / ering?
The sedge / has with / ered from / the lake,
Indeed he has! We have, once again, a clear iambic tetrameter. How about the final line of this verse?
O what / can ail /thee, knight /–at arms
Alone / and pale / ly loit / ering?
The sedge / has with / ered from / the lake,
And no/ birds sing.
The first point is that it is missing the final four syllables or, to put it another way, its final two feet. That solves the second part of the riddle at the start: two of the feet have been cut off. But what about the “spooky foot”?
Scanning the final line, we can see that we’ve got the following pattern: “weak-strong” followed by “strong–strong”. Then silence.
When you have a two stressed syllables jammed together to make a single foot, you have something called a spondee.
There are a number of methods that go into creating the unsettling effect at the end of this verse.
There is the choice of words: the fact that “no birds sing” already creates a spooky atmosphere. The fact that the line is suddenly cut short makes us feel uneasy.
Earlier in the verse, Keats had set up an expectation about how the lines would go. The sudden cutting short of the line means that our desire for fulfilment has been denied. It’s as if he has strangled the line. The sudden silence mimics the silence of the birds.
Finally, the use of the spondee at the end dramatically intensifies the unsettling atmosphere of the opening. That’s why I said “the beautiful lady” also has a spooky foot- a spooky spondee to be precise.
Out of all the methods that Keats uses, I would argue that its his use of this spondee that plays the biggest role in heightening the sense of unease in the opening. This is evident if you compare two different ways of ending.
Keats could have ended the line with a continuation of the iambic tetrameter rhythm as in:
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered on the lake,
The birds don’t sing.
However, he chose to go with a spondee at the end:
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered on the lake,
And no birds sing.
The use of the spondee at the end gives an emphatic finality to the line which then intensifies the silence that follows. It’s a subtle shift in the pattern of stress, but powerfully unsettling.
Write a little bit like Keats
Can you create a similar atmosphere of unease, using a similar method to Keats?
Think of a theme.
Write some lines in iambic tetrameter. Then cut the last line short, and make it end in a spooky spondee to intensify the uneasy atmosphere.
It’s not quite the same as Keats’, but that doesn’t matter: I still think the removal of the feet in the last line and ending with a spooky spondee have a similar effect.
A ship is moored just off the shore.
Its lights come on as daylight fades.
But no one boards.
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