Stanzas 11 & 12 Summary
Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Stanza 11, Lines 41-44
"I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gapèd wide
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill's side.
- The knight continues to describe the pale warriors from his dream – in the "gloam," or dusk, all he can make out are their "lips."
- Their mouths are "starv'd" and hungry-looking, and their mouths are all open as they cry out their warning to the knight.
- The word "gloam" just means dusk or twilight, but it's no accident that Keats uses it – after all, "gloam" sounds a lot like "gloom."
- The knight wakes up from the dream alone and cold on the side of a hill.
Stanza 12, Lines 45-48
"And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing."
- The knight has finished his story. He tells the original, unnamed speaker, that this is why he's hanging out ("sojourn[ing]" and "loitering") by himself, even though it's so dismal outside.
- The knight repeats the unnamed speaker's words from the first stanza, so that the poem ends with almost exactly the same stanza with which it began.
People who Shmooped this also Shmooped...