erl king

• The woods enclose. You step between the first trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up - erl king


  Feelings of developed as the narrator never exits the woods, and the reader is the same denied exit from the woods as the use of “You” in the opening paragraphs, which situates the reader inescapably inside 
• this wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again - erl king


  A feeling of claustrophobia/ entrapment is created in Carter’s description of the overbearing forest. Personifying the forest and making it seem above the powers of human control enforces the idea that nature is in control
• the imaginary traveller walking towards an invented distance that perpetually receded before me. It is easy to lose yourself in these woods. - erl king
• He is an excellent housewife - erl king
• He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off come all my clothes. - erl king
• A little of the cold air that blows over graveyards always goes with him, it crisps the hairs on the back of my neck but I am not afraid of him; only, afraid of the vertigo, of the vertigo with which he seizes me  - erl king
• ach! I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses 

  you sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream. - erl king


  vampire vulnerability willing participant but recognises the danger awake, in an act of kissing – sexual, compared to Lucy who wasn’t conscious. 
• He strips me to my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlized satin, like a skinned rabbit - erl king
• What big eyes you have. Eyes of an incomparable luminosity, the numinous phosphorescence of the eyes of lycanthropes - erl king


  hinting to the evil intentions of the Erl-King towards the narrator, as in the original tale the wolf tricks and eats the girl.
• Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, 

  you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty - erl king
• I have seen the cage you are weaving for me; it is a very pretty one and I shall sit, hereafter, in my cage among the other singing birds but I - I shall be dumb, from spite - erl king
• When I realised what the Erl-King meant to do to me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages - erl king
• His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven - erl king
• now I know the birds don't sing, they only cry because they can't find their way out of the wood, have lost their flesh when they were dipped in the corrosive pools of his regard and now must live in cages - erl king
• he lays his head on my lap and lets me comb his lovely hair for him - erl king
• he lies at my feet and I comb the dead leaves out of his languorous hair - erl king
• I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him with them. - erl king


  like in bloody chamber, before he kills her he holds her hair against her like a rope
• she will open all the cages and let the birds free; they will change back into young girls, every one, each with the crimson imprint of his love-bite on their throats - erl king