Exercise in Lockdown

There could be a lot of things that Keats is talking about here–love, desire, imagination. I feel though, that Keats is making a statement about the tension between imagination and reality, even about his own poetry.

The “Knight-at-arms” here could be an auxiliary for Keats, showing how his intense imagination and detachment from reality has left him desolate, “haggard”. For Keats, poetry is a glimpse into an extraordinary and sublime world–one that he sees in the faery girl. It enthrals him to the point he becomes a slave to it, and the “pale kings and princes” could be references to past poets who met similarly tragic fates as Keats did, warning him against this path. Yet he still chooses to immerse himself in this world, and chooses to be ruthlessly spit out onto the “side of the hill”–which represents reality in this case. The Knight’s journey is symbolic of Keats’s struggle to reconcile imagination with reality, leaving him broken by the end.

The path that he takes is also reflected in the structure of the poem. The poem is a ballad, a type of song used to tell stories. The regular rhyming scheme and the short lines at the end of each stanza, “On the cold hill’s side” and “And her eyes were wild” act as transitions to the next part of the story. Keats uses these last lines in a very clever fashion–one that caught my attention was the repetition of the phrase “On the cold hill’s side”. The first time it appears, it is given as a cool, soothing place of rest where we can indulge himself in his imagination. Yet on its second appearance, it’s presented as a place of desolation and death, with withered plants and an absence of life. He uses this constancy to show the duality of his perception–that his imagination is simultaneously beautiful and draining.