hyro enter her room and tries to wake her as gently as possible in that she never truly wakes up and remains in a dream like state. He awakes her very softly, “He play’d an ancient ditty, long since mute, /In Provence call’d ‘La belle dame sans mercy.’”(291-292) I find this to be quite odd because this poem is about hoodwinking. Why would he do this to wake her sleeping? If you are hoodwinking someone you are trying to dupe, trick or fool them and the only way that Porphyro can do this is to keep her in a dream like state. This very softly and sweetly awakens her and now “Her eyes were open, but she still beheld, now wide awake, the vision of her sleep”(298-299) This tells me that she is now awake but in her subconscious she is still dreaming. She has no clue as to what she is doing at this point in time. She truly believes that she is still asleep and she is just dreaming. After he has done the deed and she is still sleeping he awakes her and she tries to him about here dream. Upon hearing this Porphyro says, “This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline” (326) in an attempt to wake her up so she know what she is doing. I think that he tries to do this so that he doesn’t look like the bad guy, in that, the only way that he can get a beautiful bride is by hoodwinking her. Upon hearing this Madeline is very distraught by this and she proceeds to say “No Dream, alas! Alas! and woe is mine! / Porphyro will leave me here and fade to pine. ---“(328-329) All this has happened after he has already violated her dreams and has done things that young gentlemen at that time were not supposed to do. As Jack Stillinger said “We must leave or world behind, where stratagems like Porphyro’s are frowned on, sometimes in criminal courts, and enter an world where ‘in sooth such things have been’ (P.75)” All gentlemen were supposed to be hono...
