And therefore, it is true to say that "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is a natural example of a poem that has been based around a spiritual correspondence between man and nature. Also, the fantasy style poem brings about a strong contrast with the style used in the more recent poems of Hughes and Heaney, who have chosen to use more realistic representations in their poems with the boy and the man, and the rat and the deer, and therefore demonstrates how these poems might have been based upon real-life events.
The faery in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is illustrated in romantic notion as being a thing of natural beauty otherwise, as it would have to be for this poem to work, as the knight would never have fallen in love. Therefore, it again shows the typical style of writing in that day and age as everything is portrayed as being beautiful and natural, and as knights in shining armour- a romantic notion. In this poem, nature is dominant and therefore powerful, as everything in the poem can be related back to nature as "the sedge has wither"d from the lake- and even the imagery used has a strong link with nature, "she found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew-. This imagery actually shows a romantic side to nature and man, as the poem portrays man's ignorance towards nature's power, and therefore has nothing to stop him falling in love with nature's concoction of natural beauty.
This is also quite a contrast to "An Advancement of Learning", as this time the dominance lies with man and man's manipulation of nature with industrialisation and urbanisation; "The river nosed past, Pliable, oil-skinned-. Out of this sickening image of nature comes another revolting image, this time of the rat, "a rat Slimed out of the water and My throat sickened-. Therefore, a time span of one hundred and fifty years has seen the "beautiful faery's child" turn into "a slimy rat". This has come about after the industrial revolution, which has led to nature being overpowered by man, as there is no faery's child to stop man.