I fell in love with Dicksee’s La Belle Dame sans Merci as a freshman in college.  The painting is inspired by a Keat’s poem of the same name. My love is one of those moments in your life difficult to explain.

            I own a copy that use to hang in my office and now hangs in my den. A print with Dicksee’s version and two other Romantic artist’s versions hangs in my bedroom. A third relief version hangs in the master bathroom.

            My first love of the painting was without knowledge of the title or the poem Keat’s wrote. I fell in love with the idea Dicksee communicated of total surrender, of giving yourself up to Love completely.

            The Knight is a Christ figure, vulnerable to the slightest movement of the beauty above him. And such beauty -- the long red hair, the beauty of her face, the perfect dress setting off the white flesh.

            To me this was Chivalry at it best, in service to Beauty.

            Before the internet, I searched for information about the painting, glimpsed only for a moment at seventeen years of age. Eventually I found information to include the title --

             La Belle Dame sans Merci, or The Beautiful Woman without Mercy and the poem by Keats, the tenth and eleventh stanzas follow:

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!”

I saw their starved lips in the gloam, 

  With horrid warning gaped wide, 

And I awoke and found me here, 

  On the cold hill’s side

It is a poem about a knight killed or trapped by a fairy princess, doomed to eternally be wrapped up in her spell.

And who says God does not have a sense of humor?