All the traditional elements of the medieval ballad are included - the knight at arms, the 'pacing steed', the bewitching lady, kings, princes and warriors. Something goes very wrong in the story, which is not at all a celebratory poem, as the late poet novelist Robert Graves took it to be. Graves was an accomplished reader of poetry, but he read into Keat's ballad his own sublimely destructive relationship to the American poet Laura Riding.
Graves very personal perception of Keats poetry serves to copper-fasten Keats ability to involve his reader, thus enhancing their self knowledge, their relationships and states of mind. Keats once described his works as written "with no agony but that of ignorance, with no thirst of anything but knowledge". Here you get an excellent idea of the doubtful yet calm state of mind some of his poetry was written in. Born in 1795, it wasn't until 1814 that Keats discovered his true calling in life. Sacrificing his medical ambitions and finally succumbing to a literary life. He soon became acquainted with celebrated artists of his time, like Leigh Hunt, Percy B. Shelley and Benjamin Robert Haydon. However after receiving negative feedback, Keats decided to head to the Isle of Wight alone in the spring of 1817. He took care of brother until the first signs of his own fatal disease of his own fatal disease forced him to return home, where his poetry had been harshly criticised in his absence After the death of his brother, he moved to Hampstead Heath, where he met the beautiful Fanny Browne. Absorbed in love and poetry, he exhausted himself mentally, and in the autumn of 1819, he tried to gain some distance from literature.
The last four years of his short existence were to have a life altering effect on his works. Tuberculosis was to be his cause and took hold of him around 1818; a year before he composed the odes, which are considered to this date, his most perfect work.