Another poem of the same period, romantic in a different sense, is _La Belle Dame sans Merci_. The title is taken from that of a poem by Alain Chartier,--the secretary and court poet of Charles VI. and Charles VII. of France,--of which an English translation used to be attributed to Chaucer, and is included in the early editions of his works. This title had caught Keats's fancy, and in the _Eve of St Agnes_ he makes Lorenzo waken Madeline by playing beside her bed-- "an ancient ditty, long since mute, In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans merci'." The syllables continuing to haunt him, he wrote in the course of the spring or summer (1819) a poem of his own on the theme, which has no more to do with that of Chartier than Chartier has really to do with Provence[57]. Keats's ballad can hardly be said to tell a story; but rather sets before us, with imagery drawn from the mediæval world of enchantment and knight-errantry, a type of the wasting power of love, when either adverse fate or deluded choice makes of love not a blessing but a bane. The plight which the poet thus shadows forth is partly that of his own soul in thraldom. Every reader must feel how truly the imagery expresses the passion: how powerfully, through these fascinating old-world symbols, the universal heart of man is made to speak. To many students (of whom the present writer is one) the union of infinite tenderness with a weird intensity, the conciseness and purity of the poetic form, the wild yet simple magic of the cadences, the perfect 'inevitable' union of sound and sense, make of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ the master-piece, not only among the shorter poems of Keats, but even (if any single master-piece must be chosen) among them all.