The mythical figures invoked in Keats’s poems are at once allusive and elusive. In his unsigned review of Endymion and Keats’s 1820 volume of poems, Francis Jeffrey noted that the author borrowed little more from ‘the Pagan mythology’ than a ‘general conception’, bestowing ‘an original character and distinct individuality’ upon the beings he peopled his poetry with. This essay seeks to explore the mobility of Keats’s poetic discourse - the way his poetry seems to manifest presence and identity only to immediately dissolve or qualify it - through an analysis of his use of mythology in some of his odes. La Belle becomes a representation of the disease in Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci and reflects the poet's struggle with tuberculosis. It is worth recalling its history and its association with literature with special reference to John Keats and his poetry-and specially La Belle Dame Sans Merci that shows a dominant forebrooding over man's mortality from it. Tuberculosis remains with us today, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia where more than a million people die of this disease each year. Keats is austere in poetry and yet he keeps high colouring and variety of appeal to the senses and the mind. His experiences often accord closely with his personal, life and the disasters he had. All the senses-tactile gustatory, kinetic, organic, as well as visual and auditory combine to give the total apprehension of his experience. In Keats' poems we see a concreteness of description of the object he contemplates. In acute distress and emotional turmoil, in 1819 masterpiece followed masterpiece.

Hailed as Consumption's Poster Child, Keats' life, like Beethoven's, served as a pattern tor the Romantic artist. ―Youth grows pale and spectre thin and dies‖ – John Keats, (Ode to Nightingale) Tuberculosis was one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented diseases of all times.

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