Clearly, in answering this question, you need to refer to
the presentation of the knight in this poem, and in particular how he feels after being
left alone by the mysterious lady that gave him every indication that she felt the same
way about him as he did about her. In this sense, the poem captures the universal theme
of unrequited love, or love that is expressed towards someone else and not
returned.
Notice how the poem ends in the final stanza, and
the kind of justification that the knight gives for his presence in such bleak place at
such a inhospitable time of year:
And this is why I sojourn
here
Alone and palely
loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the
lake,
And no birds
sing.
The sickened and ailing
knight is obviously coping with several emotions, such as desolation, loss, despair and
embarrassment at having been taken in so easily by the fairy maid that managed to
enchant him without hardly any effort at all. The setting of the approaching winter
seems to parallel his own feelings of bleak desolation and emptiness as he struggles to
get over this relationship.
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