51ºÚÁÏ

This fully resourced lesson is designed for the Edexcel IGCSE English Literature specification and focuses on John Keats’s haunting ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci. Ideal for first-time study or revision, this lesson builds students’ confidence in analysing poetic form, character, and theme while exploring Romantic conventions and gothic atmosphere.

Lesson Features and Stages:

• Title Exploration Starter: Students consider the French title and its translation, making predictions about tone, character, and genre.
• YouTube video: A few minutes of biographical background on Keats’s life and writing.
• Contextualising information: Some brief background on Keats’s relationship with Fanny Brawne, which sheds light on the poem’s romantic themes.
• Guided Reading: The poem is read and discussed in stages, with questions encouraging close attention to setting, voice, themes and structure.
• Imagery Analysis: Several images are provided on the board. Students identify the quotations which relate to each one and then follow the questions to analyse the key imagery.
• Drawing the central images: Students sketch, find or generate pictures based on given lines from the poem containing imagery. They make analytical notes. This activity could be conducted instead of the previous one, or as homework.
• Form & Structure Analysis: Students explore the ballad form and stanza structure. The key features are provided for them.
• Writing a ballad: Students have a go at continuing a ballad from the first two stanzas, demonstrating an understanding of rhyme and metre.
• Several slides of additional material are provided as alternatives to the above.