III Third level of meaning

The lily is a traditional symbol of purity, innocence, virginity. It is a customary and almost mandatory attribute of the Virgin Mary in medieval and renaissance paintings of the Annunciation. As an attribute it expresses that the Knight, the Poet had been innocent, a “virgin” poet before the encounter with the Lady-Muse, so the poem is about the birth of the first poem by the romantic poet. The rose, a traditional symbol of love on his face is fading now, so the love-encounter is over, the Muse has been lost, but it is the fate of the romantic poet to have a never-ending desire to escape from the actual reality and go back to the world of imaginative creation, the world of the Muse. Thus, at this level of meaning, we can interpret the text as a poetic account of the first artistic production of the poet, as well as a poetic representation of the typically romantic understanding of the fate, the destiny of the artist. In romantic poetry the artist is often represented as a social outcast who is not understood by the environment, and commutes incessantly between the world of reality and the world of artistic imagination. The French title alludes to a traditional image of the “femme fatal” type of Muse, the fatal attraction of the world of creation, which is internationally present in world literature.