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O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering! But he does not perceive the reasons that led Keats to alter this in the version he published in Leigh Hunt's Indicator to: Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, and so on.
Such, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was Cornelius Agrippa a doctor of divinity and a knight-at-arms; secret-service diplomatist to the Emperor Maximilian in Austria; astrologer, though unwilling, to his daughter Margaret, Regent of the Low Countries; writer on the occult sciences and of the famous "De Vanitate Scientiarum," and what not? who died miserably at the age of forty-nine, accused of magic by the Dominican monks from whom he had rescued a poor girl, who they were torturing on a charge of witchcraft; and by them hunted to death; nor to death only, for they spread the fable such as you may find in Delrio the Jesuit's "Disquisitions on Magic" that his little pet black dog was a familiar spirit, as Butler has it in "Hudibras": Agrippa kept a Stygian pug I' the garb and habit of a dog That was his taste; and the cur Read to th' occult philosopher, And taught him subtly to maintain All other sciences are vain.
'Twas for this I left my goodly castle of Alain and journeyed, a lorn pilgrim, hither to Pentavalon, since when strange stories have I heard that whisper in the air, speeding from lip to lip, of a certain doughty knight-at-arms, valiant beyond thought, that beareth a sword whose mighty sweep none may abide, who, alone and unaided slew an hundred and twenty and four within the greenwood, and thereafter, did, 'neath the walls of Belsaye town burn down Duke Ivo's gibbet, who hath sworn to cut Duke Ivo into gobbets, look you, and feed him to the dogs; which is well, for I love not Duke Ivo.
After repeated failures he received a sounding blow upon the least bony portion of his person: the crowd laughed long and loud, and the pretending "knight-at-arms" retired in confusion. Darkness fell, but no caravan appeared: it had been delayed by a runaway mule, perhaps by the desire to restrain my vagrant propensities, and did not arrive till midnight.
But I went on, "Yes, Madonna, even as I rode up hither, I met a young knight-at-arms who wished you as well as you were fair, and kissed your hands as best he might, considering the distance, before he rode off." Imola blushed, but said nothing. "Who was this youth, sir?" asked Master Peter, in a hurry.
Soft and sweet as she appears, she is La belle Dame sans merci, and her worshipper is as desperately lost as the knight-at-arms of Keats's poem. Solitude and Society The volume which consists of La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic brings the work of this decade to a close.
This does not mean that the "knight-at-arms" version is not also beautiful. But, in spite of this, I trust the Delegates of the Oxford University Press will not listen to Sir Sidney Colvin's appeal to banish the later version from their editions of Keats. Every edition of Keats ought to contain both versions just as it ought to contain both versions of Hyperion.
Surely a much more likely explanation is that Keats, who in this poem wrote his own biography as an unfortunate lover, came in a realistic mood to dislike "knight-at-arms" as a too romantic image of himself. He decided, I conjecture, that "wretched wight" was a description nearer the bitter truth. Hence his emendation. The other alterations also seem to me to belong to Keats rather than to Hunt.
"Did you ever read Keats's Belle Dame sans Merci?" asked Mrs. Tristram. "You remind me of the hero of the ballad: 'Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?" "If I am alone, it is because I have been deprived of your society," said Valentin. "Besides it is good manners for no man except Newman to look happy. This is all to his address.
Sir Sidney thinks that this and other changes, "which are all in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt's suggestion, and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference." To accuse Hunt of wishing to alter "knight-at-arms" to "wretched wight" seems to me unwarrantable guessing.
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