La Belle Dame sans Merci: John Keats

This 21-slide lesson explores John Keats’ poem, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.

Students begin by exploring popular depictions of Medieval culture, particularly gender dynamics and attitudes towards heroism in storytelling. Stereotypes surrounding knights and damsels are discussed, and we unpick the concept of ‘chivalry’ from both a Medieval and modern context.

We talk about the life of John Keats before reading the poem. The ballad’s language, imagery, rhythm, and structure are discussed. Students are taught ambitious vocabulary to describe each of the characters, and we think about how Keats is subverting stereotypes regarding Medieval attitudes to gender within the poem. The notion of the ‘femme fatale’ is explored, and students are encouraged to conduct close linguistic analysis through a table of key quotations from the poem.

Questions, discussion points, and tasks are included for students throughout. The lesson ends with a creative task (which could be set as homework or covered in a following lesson).

A copy of the poem is included in this resource.

This lesson is ideal for KS3 students, but could easily be used for GCSE students exploring poetry too.

PowerPoint and Word Doc saved as PDFs.