[I]f a literary work arrives to our view as a unique order of unique appearances, then a grid of the poem's social and historical filiations, both intra- and extra-textual, should help to elucidate the poem's orders of uniqueness. The poem, whether viewed as an experience or as an event, is a nexus of various concrete social determinations, and these can be critically specified as an aesthetic order. (5)

At the heart of this argument is the recurring dilemma of assuming any reading stance: That is, in developing a particular critical perspective, once we have appropriated the vocabulary and the strategies, how can we be sure we are remaining faithful to the text or merely to the theoretical orientation? And yet, how are we to begin anything like a competent reading of a text if we are not first versed in one strategy or another? This is a dilemma that is perhaps more crucial for the lecturer than the scholar, but if we keep in mind the relationship between the two--that we begin as students, absorbing the reading strategies of our mentors, and as we develop our own critical ideologies the teaching and research necessarily inform one another--it is not a dilemma easily dismissed by either. McGann, too, addresses

the pedagogical problem of how to integrate an historical method with the task of teaching specific poems and literary works. Whatever shortcomings beset a concept of the literary work as autonomous verbal object, this idea generated a powerful set of pedagogical techniques. (4)

A reading of La Belle Dame which considers the historical, contextual, and intertextual conditions of both versions together can test McGann's historical method without abandoning the pedagogical strengths of modern criticism. That is, we can both teach a text and read a poem, measuring up to McGann's imperative: "the need to reintegrate the entire range of socio-historical and philological methods with an aesthetic and ideological criticism of individual works" (3). As an instance, the alteration of the very first line, from "O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms," to "Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight," shifts the entire socio-historical condition of the poem. And within the poem it alters the relative positions of both the questioner and the questioned, seemingly negating Wolfson's claim, and requiring us to examine the process of Keats's poetics before we focus on either of the products.

But first, by way of deriving what correspondences between the two texts will allow us to study La Belle Dame in this manner, we might ask where we find the knight/wight addressed in the poem: "alone and palely loitering." Whatever else Keats's revisions change about the poem and within the poem, the knight/wight is "found"--by himself and/or by an other--"on the cold hill side," alone and palely loitering. Given this common ground between the texts, and the fact that the phrase is what brackets the ballad--constituting part of its conventional form--it seems a reasonable place to begin. An examination of this phrase can lead to further questions of both philological and socio-historical import. That the knight/wight is alone is the whole subject of the poem, of course, alone and loitering. To loiter can only be suggestively traced to either the Middle Dutch loteren , to shake or totter, or the Old English lution , to lurk. We can see between the two, at least, a shifting of control, perhaps of power. This continuum, between the teetering knight/wight and the lurking one, is symptomatic of a matrix Keats has created with La Belle Dame : Consider again, "alone." We can easily envision the knight/wight solitarily lurking, but can we as easily accept the synonymous lonely and lurking? Lonely and teetering, certainly, but "alone" and teetering proves more difficult. A continuum is not exactly what we are seeking at this point, though. We are seeking a point of fixity, at least momentary, from which we can perhaps apprehend, perhaps appreciate La Belle Dame , in its variant forms. The further descriptive of our alone and loitering knight/wight, "palely," has been a point which many commentators have focused on. Joseph T. Swann sees in the word, and its repetition both in the knight/wight's dream and again at the end of the poem, a "movement from one apparition of pallor to another," that is, "from questioner to knight to lady to kings and princes," or, "from one level of dramatized experience to a further one enshrined within it." And then, for the purposes of his argument, to illustrate "the difference between a deconstructionist and a reconstructionist reading," he deduces a fifth movement: "The knight returns to a world where nature and imagination join in an order very different from that of his initial questioner, and the various stages in the poem are moments in a single process, the growth to consummation of that union." And he concludes this particular point by suggesting, "The reason why the knight sojourns at the lake is his story, but the lake in its wintry silence is the final point of reference of that story."[4] We might ask at this point,what happens to Swann's schema with the Indicator text? For one, depending upon which meaning of wight we choose, it can be proposed that there is no question as to why a wight would be sojourning by the lake. But more important than that, if we insert the wight into Swann's "movement from one apparition of pallor to another," it would seem that the "various stages" are no longer "moments in a single process." The wight does not fit in that progression, at least not with the "faultless logic" with which Swann wishes to characterize it. We could then simply say that this is a bad reading, having exposed its fault. But that is not the point. The point is that Swann's was a prefigured reading, a "reconstructionist" reading--and, presumably, it is a good reconstructionist reading--with his attendant inquiries focused more on the field of his theoretical tradition than on the poem itself--rendering it, for our purposes, not so good. We might return to the poem, at this point, and ask if there are any apparitions of pallor at all; is that the only meaning we can take for "palely" or even "pale"?

Bennett mentions the word too, citing it as "a slightly awkward adverbial formation (an awkwardness reflected in the word itself which, alternately, is spelled 'paley') [which] foregrounds the texture of the word or emphasizes Jakobson's 'poetic function,' so that the triple repetition of 'pale' in stanza 10 echoes this initial reference." But Bennett, too, is building a structural argument, upon the narrative and lexical concepts of "rarefaction" and "impaction," which shows not only the knight, but the reader enthralled by La Belle Dame as well. At a most crucial point of this argument, though, Bennett reads

the symbolic effect of the garland bracelet and fragrant zone, all of which not only dress and decorate the Belle Dame, but also surround, enclose, or protect her; the Belle Dame, by contrast, is passive. The narrative threads, the hints which we have discerned behind the teasingly simple, pellucid narrative texture of the poem, now seem to be more consciously organizing themselves by means of contrast, of binary opposition into something comprehensible, something graspable not only as plot . . . but as an organizing, controlled discourse through which to read the underlying story events; without such direction, the rarefied atmosphere of the minimal plot will continue to disturb.

He goes on, then, to say, "In stanza 6 [I set her on my pacing steed. . .] we begin to believe that we are really getting somewhere." We do not, of course. The narrative is again interrupted by more "ritual giving," though in a different tone, according to Bennett. Again, the point is, the Indicator text, where these two stanzas are reversed, would seem to have pretty serious repercussions for Bennett's reading.[5]

Most interesting, for the moment, is Bennett's characterization of "palely," as "a slightly awkward adverbial formation." Adverb to what, we might ask, and how? How would one loiter palely? It is not impossible, of course, but at least some of what Bennett considers the phrase's awkwardness has to reside in this difficulty to realize the image. It may just be a case of Keats's stylistics, what David Perkins has suggested as "characteristic of Keats," his "substantiation of one sense by another in order to give . . . additional dimension and depth."[6] This does not offer us a great deal of assistance, though, especially if we are reading "palely" as diminished in color or intensity only. If we apply direct philological attention to the term, though, we can, at the same time, reveal another possibility for how we might read it, which would also disclose a philological aspect of the poem itself. When we look at the root of the word we find two interesting things. First, in the case of the former sense, the Indo-European root is also the root for fallow, as in an untilled, dormant field. The field where our knight/wight is found and finds himself is decidedly not a fallow one. It has just been harvested. Secondly, pale-, used as a prefix denotes a subject or field of study of something remote in space or time, or ancient, as in paleography. Can we conceive of someone studying ancient discourses, for instance, as "palely loitering"?[7] If we can,where would that land us, or the knight/wight, or Keats? It would seem to deliver us over to intertextual considerations, a move, moreover, we are already invited to make by the very title of Keats's poem, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci /Mercy."

Theresa Kelley has suggested that Keats "probably took little more than his title from Chartier's poem,"[8]agreeing with Robert Graves that the earlier Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer is a more significant source for Keats's textual indebtedness.[9] This emphasis on the latter text is because of the Rhymer's encounter with a faery woman, "the Queen of Elfland,"who gives "him the gift of poetic insight."[10] Graves presents a Keats who was haunted by death, distraught by Fanny's refusal of love, and at odds with his "chief comfort in his troubles, his ruling passion, and the main weapon with which he hoped to clear his way to Fanny's love . . . poetic ambition." Though, "Now Poetry was proving an unkind mistress."

In the disturbed state of his heart and mind he could not settle down to writing the romantic epics on which, in emulation of Milton, he hoped to build his fame. Recently he had stopped work on Hyperion after writing two and a half books, and confided to his friend Woodhouse that he was so greatly dissatisfied with it that he could not continue.[11]

All of this is offered as proof that Keats's poem ought to be included under the heading of this chapter in The White Goddess , " The Single Poetic Theme," which also claims that Rhymer's queen of Elfland " was the medieval successor of the pre-Celtic White Goddess." The problem is, as even Graves admits, that Keats "seems to have felt intuitively, rather than historically, that they were all based on the same antique myth." [12] Without contending that particular point, it is worth considering a couple of others: Part of Keats's dissatisfaction with Hyperion was his dislike of its Miltonic inversions--he "felt Milton's influence to be creatively suffocating." [13] We might question, given this possibility, whether Keats would so willingly yield to so strict an influence as a "Single Poetic Theme," intuitively known or not.[14] And as for his suffering at the hands of Poetry during the writing ofLa Belle Dame , we might ask when has so much of so representative work ever been produced by any other " major" poet as in the 6 or 4 or even 3 month period surrounding this poem? If we consider that Keats was not necessarily lacking of poetic insight at this time, as much as vocational acceptance, we would have to ask again just how much Chartier's version illuminates Keats's--either text. Marjorie Levinson reminds us:

We must remember that we are not talking about a middle-class poet but about a young man who aspired to the condition of the legitimate middle class, and to the profession of poetry.[15]

The controversy surrounding Chartier's Belle Dame (1424) which "was still alive in the sixteenth century" Richard Firth Green tells us[16] caused a "literary sensation in France" which the world had rarely seen, according to Melissa L. Brown.[17]Brown goes on to say that

Whatever the historical truth about the controversy, the disagreements of critics over the Lady's character seem still to be focused on the issue of her emotional and sexual "coldness," and on the question of whether or not he reasoning is meant to be taken seriously. (120)

However else we might untangle the controversy, at the heart of it, Chartier's heresy, was his giving the Lady a voice, her own, outspoken, determining voice. Whether the condemnation of La Belle Dame was a hoax or not, the proposed censorship was upon the Lady, not Chartier: he, in fact, was commanded to "answer the charges against him."[18] But, Green says, "it is little wonder that Chartier in his Excusacion is unrepentant."[19] Green's examination of the affair is to show that "the cour amoureuse " of Charles VI was "not only an elaborate fiction, but also the embodiment of male hypocrisy."[20] As opposed to the courts of twelfth-century Champagne which

were based on the concept of a court of law, a curia, . . . Charles VI's cour amoureuse was primarily a court in the domestic sense, a familia, again, the courts of Champagne sat in judgment on the finer points of amatory etiquette, the actual behaviour of lovers, that of Paris, on the other hand, discussed love poetry and the niceties of literary decorum; finally, the earlier courts were presided over by women, whereas the later one was nominally founded by a king and was administered by a `prince' of love. (90)

The main business of Charles VI's court was "to sponsor a literary competition between [its] ministers" --various "experts . . . of the art of rhetoric, [and] acknowledged poets," Green tells us (93). Chartier was censored for his poetic behavior, not his courtly decorum. It is the figure of the Lady which rival poets objected to. We might wonder, then, how much of this "hypocrisy," which Green surmises and the Lady of Chartier's poem exposes, resides in the fact, as Elizabeth Jones says, in that day:

the suburbs were urban dumping-grounds; they were the locations for leper hospitals, noxious trades like butchering, tanning and dyeing, and for the activities of an active criminal underworld which included, most lucratively, prostitution.[21]

That is, more than a little actual "courtship" at the time was being conducted outside the city's walls. Within this scenario, a Belle Dame who mercilessly defies a lover's entreaties, in a "poem which defends the right of women to reject unwelcome suitors," [22] would certainly pose enough of a threat to the established order to warrant an attempt at censorship and revision.

It is from these same suburbs that Keats emerged, which, according to Jones, "never lost their culturally marginal association, even after the massive move out of the City centre around 1750" (14). And it is within this biographical circumstance where Keats's early critics based their attacks. The labeling of Keats and Hunt as Cockney poets, as constituting the Suburban school, the attacks, of Byron and Lockhart, "are consistent with the prejudices of English conservative society, which equated living in the suburbs with class pretension."[23] Keats's response to thecriticism, of course, was every bit as unrepentant as Chartier's:

I have written independently without Judgment --I may write independently & with judgment hereafter.--The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law & precept, but by sensation & watchfulness in itself--That which is creative must create itself--In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.[24]

And leap headlong into the sea again is precisely what Keats did the following spring of 1819.

"La Belle dame sans Merci can thus be read as an epitome of Keats's relations with women and words. . . . it is as much about poetry as it is about love," Ronald Tetreault tells us, where, as in other Keats texts, "women and words are constantly jeopardized."[25] His reading of LaBelle Dame operates from the following thesis:

Whether Keats's poetry is brought into focus more clearly by the supposition of his moral idealism or by the force of his sexual desire defines the terms of a dispute that is not easy to settle. At first sight these two views seem poles apart; reconcile them how we will, whether through a progression from sensation to thought or through a marriage of coexisting principles, the tension between them remains. Perhaps the difficulty arises from the attempt to locate a centre to Keats's poetry at all, for once we do we seem compelled to determine which of the two is primary and to privilege one over the other. In the process, the play between them is too easily lost. On second look, we may be able to see that neither moral idealism nor sexual fantasy is the real problem, but rather the medium in which they are expressed. Keats is after all a poet, and one who furthermore is dying: language and time are his limiting factors. Putting into words the fleeting moment inevitably creates distortions and disjunctions, so that it may be well to read the text of Keats neither as coming from an origin like "the body" nor working toward the end of "a transcendent realm of the spirit." (59)

It is a thesis and a project that first seems exceedingly provocative in its own right, and indeed proves to be, except he goes on to eliminate part of the play he had so decidedly rescued by saying, "I accept the opinion of virtually all the commentators that the first version [the letter text of La Belle Dame ] is superior; the changes introduced would not affect my analysis in any case."[26] In point of fact, there are at least two changes which would seem to have direct bearing on Tetreault's analysis. He uses what he calls "the onset of their love-making," the lines,

	And there I shut her wild wild eyes
	With kisses four

to further assert "The manner of somehow cancelling the expression in the eyes of the beloved suggests an urge to deny female subjectivity, or perhaps to encompass and assimilate its power. What occurs in La Belle Dame sans Merci is certainly not a rape, but even so hints at the way an act of love, like an act of reading or writing, is always caught up in the complexities of desire and power" (71). And he confirms this by beginning the next paragraph, "By his status as warrior, Keats's `knight-at-arms' is a man of power." Both parts of this particular argument would have to be reworked with the Indicator text. Had Tetreault not discounted this text, he might have seen that his dialectic of women and words was dispersed between the two versions, not occupying an irreconcilable position of tension within either text.

If we take to heart what many have identified as Keats's "fundamental literariness,"[27] and we consider that perhaps La Belle Dame is fundamentally about literary concerns, for Chartier, and Keats, and us, we don't have to discard either of the versions in order to present a competent reading. In fact, the best reading would seem to be the one that brings to light those threads of meaning as we move between the poems, from "La Belle Dame sans Merci ," to "La Belle Dame sans Mercy." Between Keats's revisions of the poem, we are freed of many of the uncertainties which plague modern reading. We have both the play of language and the commentary on the socio-historical conditions to satisfy McGann's directive. The competing elements which would normally constitute tension, and suppression, and loss, are exposed, and in that sense, disarmed of their problematic features. They are not the same poems, so they can not be judged by any single theoretical criterion which would necessarily have to choose one or the other. They must be encountered not as a literary artifact but as a poetic process. We can legitimately ask How did this poetic expression come together as we have it?

What happens, we then ask, as we move from the lonely teetering knight-at-arms to the solitarily lurking wight? The justification for these characterizations is the first part of our answer. The first word of the Brown/1848 text we have to take as signifying a direct address, a questioner addressing the knight-at-arms. And this questioner is at some pains to explain the knight-at-arms' presence; that is, the questioner is familiar enough with the normal occurrences of the lake-side to first notice the unusual presence and cognizant eno ugh to realize that if the knight is both alone and loitering, it must signify some type of ailment. Of the Indicator text, "Ah," we can not be so sure. The expletive "Ah" carries any number of different emotional shadings which can be addressed to an other, or to oneself. If we allow for any significance in the signature of the Indicator text, "Caviar," it might lend a reasonable credence to the idea that the "wretched wight" is addressing himself. We might even characterize this as Levinson has other Keats poems, as "something very like a narcissistic lament" (233). If we allow that, then we do not necessarily have to settle on either "foul" or "outcast" for wretched, nor do we have to make any attempt to reconcile the range of possibilities for "wight": he can be both "creature" and "warrior." This possibility allows for a different kind of relationship between the two texts other than merely one being a revision of the other. First, take the questioner's comments in the first version as a certain kind of impertinence. This is conceivable, given the knight's refusal to answer directly, first by relating a story which does not exactly speak of any ailment, then by the remonstration of rephrasing the question as the only answer he'll stoop to give. Then their business is unfinished.[28] Smarting from this rejection, the wight takes up his own question again, and addresses it to himself. How, though, in this scheme, could both of their stories be the same, if the wight of the second version is the questioner in the first? They are not the same stories, but perhaps they are about the same topic.

The knight answers "I met a lady in the meads," as does the wight. Variously, the lady has been seen as a figure for immortality, the daemonic, poetic insight, or love. Given the knight's unusual presence, which prompted the questioning in the first place, we can surmise that this is probably recent past action, and we can ask, What was he looking for in the first place? Generally, we find what we're looking for. The social conditions of the time of the tradition Keats's poem is operating in suggest that if a knight is solitarily venturing out from the walled city--that is, not on a quest--he was seeking some kind of illicit activity, "most lucratively," Jones told us, prostitution.[29]The knight bestows favors of garlands and bracelets upon her, sets her on his "pacing steed," they eat, retire to her "elfin grot" where they have some kind of romantic encounter, he falls asleep, and dreams.[30] That is the narrative sketch of the poem, which is not much, as most commentators have pointed out, which has perhaps allowed for the multiplicity of readings that have been brought to the poem. If that narrative is expanded across the space bracketed by the differing versions of the poem, though, we have something more to work with.

The wight would at first seem to have a similar kind of experience, except that because of his social position, there is no immediate cause for questioning his presence--either by an interlocutor, or himself--so the motivation for his tale lies elsewhere. Because we can not, then, presume the same kind of immediacy, we can not tell if the events are recently past or perpetually haunting. If we consider the wight as the knight's questioner, then we have some motivational force for his tale, and we have a greater import in the tale. The wight, initially, is responding to his encounter with the knight, not the lady. The lady is not what ails him, but the rebuff from the knight, explaining some of the nonsense of his talking to himself as a sarcastic recreation of the scene with the knight:

	Ah, what can ail thee , wretched wight,
	. . .
	I see a lily on thy brow,

	I met a Lady in the meads

Such a rebuff, and the reaction to it, are the tensions inherent within the class stratifications once strictly adhered to. At about the time of Chartier's poem, and his Lady, the authority for such rigid distinctions was beginning to wither. One symptom (or cause?) of this was elucidated by Kristeva:

The second half of the Middle Ages (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) was a period of transition for European culture: thought based on the sign replaced that based on the symbol.

The model of the symbol characterized European society until around the thirteenth century.[31]

We can see this at work in Chartier's La Belle Dame: The lover appeals to the lady along the symbolic lines of traditional courtly virtues, honesty, faithfulness, service, and honor. Her responses in their dialogue, while presented in a cold, rational manner--which many readers object to--serve to invert, expose, and finally subvert the deceit of courtly intentions, the emptiness of the lover's symbols. "From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century," Kristeva says, "the symbol was challenged and weakened. This did not make it altogether disappear but it did assure its passage (assimilation) into the sign. The transcendental unity supporting the symbol--its other-worldly wrapping, its transmitting focus--was called into question" (65). She goes on to characterize the sign by saying:

It does not refer to a single unique reality, but evokes a collection of associated images and ideas. While remaining expressive, it none the less tends to distance itself from its supporting transcendental basis (it may be called `arbitrary'). (72)

This change brings with it not only the challenges to traditional, symbolic authority--the questioning of a knight by a wight, for instance--but also the potential, at least, of social mobility once almost totally determined by birth. By Keats's time, absolute authority--of the church, of the monarchy--is constantly challenged and only clung to by heralders of the old-guard, who fear, consequent to a loss of acknowledged authority, a loss of power. We can see this in the particular case of Keats where the damning reviews of his early poetry were first dressed in terms that attacked his social status--purely an accident of birth, what used to be the most important determining factor in class distinctions. But Keats knew better. "The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law & precept, but by sensation & watchfulness in itself--That which is creative must create itself," which is what happens in La Belle Dame . That the knight can not experience what he encounters with "sensation & watchfulness" is his ailment. The wight, encountering the same "lady," has an entirely different experience.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci then is not about the Belle Dame at all, but about the differing responses to her or whatever she signifies for Keats (and we can possibly determine what that is only by examining the spectrum of responses between the texts). Whether La Belle Dame is the figure of women or poetry (and here it would do well to remember that faery can conjure up anything from suprahuman to fate), then, the Knight, deliberately looking for what he wants to find, bestows his gifts, takes what he wants, and is enthralled, subjugated, by a woman/fate who will not thank him for his attention. The wight does not initiate the gift giving and receiving until after he has heard the "fairy's song."[32] His enthrallment is of a different order altogether. He is unmercifully haunted by the call of that fairy's song, by poetry.