La Belle Dame Sans Meric: A Ballad
The black and white linoleum seemed to Edward Grimes an endless stream of checkered pattern as he stared down the vast corridor before him. The flooring was reminiscent, he thought, of a German expressionist film, something conjured up by Lang or Wiene.
On that note, Edward’s mind could not help but wander to other works of expressionist art he had committed to memory, a task he felt to be his duty given the sheer amount of admiration he had for them. He saw in his mind’s eye Munch’s The Scream standing before him - oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard. Surely Edward could have gone on like this for some time if it were not for the more pressing matter now at hand.
This isn’t necessarily bad. No, definitely not. Maybe she just had a hard time understanding it, but thought it was brilliant. Or maybe she’s going to recommend a few conferences she thinks I should present at.
Edward’s mind was racing as he sat outside Professor Kandinsky’s office, waiting for her to emerge. Her course, Studies in 19th Century Romanticism, had been somewhat of an obsession of his this semester, and as the day’s lecture came to an end he was overcome by a surreal awareness that he would never be attending it again.
The professor merely gave a few words on her appreciation for the work the class had done and wished them well in future endeavors. And, with that, it was all over. Most of his classmates walked out of the lecture hall in small groups, talking cheerfully amongst themselves about summer plans, or their relief at the thought of being done with all the papers and readings and presentations the class had demanded of them. Edward was the last one out and he walked alone.
He felt the whole thing to be a bit of an anticlimax. The course had played such a large role in his life during the last three and a half months, had consumed so much of him, that it seemed wrong for it all to end on such an inglorious note. Edward recalled the multitude of hours he spent in the library, scouring its resources for supplementary materials – scholarly articles, author biographies, any related works – whether it was required of him or not. Some days he would enter the library while the sun was shining brightly and, upon leaving, he would be met only with darkness. It would have unsettled him if he didn’t find his work there to be such a valuable usage of time.
Edward thought too of the sacrifices he had made in his pursuit of literary education. He had transferred to the university at the beginning of the semester, confident that the things he left behind would easily be replaced by the things he would gain. The graduation rate was higher here than at his previous university and the acceptance rate, lower. Academically, it was the right thing to do – surely it was. Or at least that’s what he would tell himself on those occasions when, lying awake in bed or walking to class by himself on a cold Autumn day, he would remember the look on Bill’s face when he overheard Edward talking to his advisor on the phone, asking about how well his credits would transfer. On these occasions, Edward would remind himself that he missed his friend, and that he must start trying to make a better effort to stay in touch, like he promised he would.
Yes, Edward sacrificed very much to be where he was now and, in light of all this, he expected the course’s conclusion to be something more – to make him feel something more. But, for some reason, it didn’t.
But, on this particular occasion, Edward was already in a funny mood, and he figured this was the cause of his disappointment. This was the day Professor Kandinsky returned the final papers to the class, a day that Edward had been eagerly awaiting for some time now. The students were to use one of the texts covered during the semester to propose a larger, researchbased argument in fifteen to twenty pages. As his text, Edward had chosen John Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci, one of his favorite poems. He had always been fascinated the poem’s form and structure, namely the lack of punctuation in the final line; it ended without a period and, to Edward’s scholarly mind, always hungry for analysis, this ignited countless questions whose answers he could not wait to discover. He went to the library the very day the paper was assigned, immediately after class.
Edward read Keats’ entire biography, hoping to get from it a sense of the poet’s background and philosophies. Edward read numerous books on the history of early-19th century England to gain insight into the historical context of the time in which the poem was written. Edward scoured through the many scholarly articles written on Keats’ and his work, taking bits of their arguments to form his own.
After all of this, Edward found his thesis: that Keats refrained from punctuating the final line of his poem to convey a sense of the endless pain and suffering of lost love. In just three weeks, having devoted nearly every night to it, the paper was finished – twenty pages exactly. So proud was Edward of his work, so sure it was to be met with acclaim, that he was dumbstruck – and somewhat horrified – to find the paper returned to him with nothing more than the words see me after class scratched in red ink across the top of the first page.
Edward stared at the linoleum floor, his thoughts jumping from one thing to the next as they often did, preventing him from taking the time to really consider any of them. He didn’t know then that after the meeting he would think differently of the flooring. In just six minutes Edward would leave Professor Kandinsky’s office and the tiles that slid underneath his dragging feet in a repeating chain of white and black would make him think only of the inevitability of things. In six minutes he would think differently too of Keats’ poem. It would no longer seem to him a reflection on lost love. After the meeting, Edward would come to see it as a warning against delusion – or a warning against recognizing delusion. But the poem, and whatever Keats meant by it, wouldn’t matter to him, because in six minutes he would see it only as a collection of ink and paper. He would understand its frailty and his own.
Walking out of the office, a thought would occur to Edward. He would think back to the last time he saw Bill and how Bill had told him that the only reason he was transferring was because he thought everyone here was dumber than him. Bill apologized shortly after. It had never occurred to Edward that he should have apologized to Bill, but in six minutes it would. In just six minutes, a microcosm of the time it took to produce the thing which Professor Kandinsky called him to her office to discuss, Edward Grimes would be told that the final line of his copy of La Belle Dame sans Merci contained a typo