The six poems I will compare are: Sonnet 116, My Last Duchess, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Bandit, The Laboratory, and The Ballad of Tam Lin. There is a common theme running through all these poems about relationships and love in them, whether it is the lost love between two lovers as in Laboratory or a fantasy love as in The Ballad of Tam Lin. In La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the author of the poem encounters a knight who is all alone and apparently dying in a field. He proceeds to ask the poor knight about the terrible fate that has befallen him. The knight's response takes up the rest of the poem; he says that one day he met a beautiful fairy in the fields. He spent the entire day with her making flower garlands and letting her ride his horse. She invited him back to her fairy cave where he kissed her sweetly four times and she put him to sleep. She had a horrendous nightmare about all the other knights and kings that the woman had previously seduced and who were now all dead. He wakes up alone and on the hillside. This ballad is divided into 12 quatrains, each with a rhyming structure (ABAC). The rhythm is iambic tetrameter, meaning that each line is made up of four iambs, except in the fourth line of each quatrain where there are only three iambs. The main images of this ballad are placed in stanzas 10 and 11 during the knight's nightmare. He talks about the pale kings and princes he's seen and goes into slightly dark and gory detail "I saw their hungry lips in the dim light" and you really get the feeling you can see them too. Like most ballads, this one is rather like a song and begins quite upbeat as the knight describes the glorious day spent with the young fairy, but takes qu......middle of the paper...imagine this poor man transformed into every kind of beast. The tone of this ballad is quite dark and brooding, which is strange for a ballad as they are normally quite lighthearted, but for this one it needs to be dark so you can feel the turmoil Janet felt when trying to gain her true love Back. It is also full of passion and the love they feel. My favorite poem is The Highwayman because it has an extremely dramatic plot behind it that really draws you in and makes you want to keep reading. It also tells the story of a forbidden love between the bandit and Bess that ultimately ends in their deaths, but the ending conveys the message that not even death could keep them apart in the end, which is a really powerful statement that it's trying to make transmit. . All of these points contribute to why this is my favorite poWorks Citedshmoop poem