The Eve of St. Agnes The Eve of St. Agnes Bookmark this page Manage My Reading List Summary The setting is a medieval castle, the time is January 20, the eve of the Feast of St. Agnes. Madeline, the daughter of the lord of the castle, is looking forward to midnight, for she has been assured by "old dames" that, if she performs certain rites, she will have a magical vision of her lover at midnight in her dreams. Madeline believes in this old superstition and prepares to do all that is required, such as going supperless to bed. On this same evening, Porphyro, who is in love with Madeline and whom she loves, manages to get into the castle unobserved. Madeline's family regards Porphyro as an enemy whom they are ready to kill on sight. The presence of many guests in the castle helps make it possible for Porphyro to escape notice. By chance he meets Madeline's old nurse, Angela, who is his friend; she tells him of Madeline's quaint superstition. At once the idea of making Madeline's belief become reality by his presence in her bedroom at midnight flashes into his mind.

He assures Angela that he means no harm and she reluctantly agrees to help him. She leads him to Madeline's chamber where he hides in a closet. Madeline soon enters and, her mind filled with the thought of the wonderful vision she will soon have, goes to bed and falls asleep. The ritual she has performed produces the expected result; her sleep becomes the sleep of enchantment and Porphyro, looking as if immortalized, fills her dreams. After Madeline falls asleep, Porphyro leaves the closet and approaches her bed in order to awaken her. His whispering does not stir her; her sleep is "a midnight charm / Impossible to melt as iced stream." He picks up her lute and plays it close to her ear. Suddenly her eyes open wide but she remains in the grip of the magic spell. Then "there was a painful change, that nigh expell'd / The blisses of her dream so pure and deep." She now sees Porphyro, not immortal as in her dream, but in his ordinary mortality. The contrast is so great that Madeline even thinks that the human Porphyro is on the point of death. She wants her visionary Porphyro back again.

Her wish is granted; the operations of magic are powerful enough to enable Porphyro, "beyond a mortal man impassion'd far," to enter her dream vision and there they are united in a mystic marriage. When the magic visionary state comes to an end, Madeline expresses her fear that Porphyro will abandon her, "a deceived thing; — / A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing." Porphyro, who now addresses her as his bride, urges her to leave the castle with him. "Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be, / For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee." The two leave the castle undetected and go out into the storm. That night the baron and all his guests have bad dreams, and Angela and the old Beadsman both die. Analysis In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats uses the metrical romance or narrative verse form cultivated extensively by medieval poets and revived by the romantic poets. Scott and Byron became the most popular writers of verse narrative. Keats' metrical pattern is the iambic nine-line Spenserian stanza that earlier poets had found suitable for descriptive and meditative poetry.

Because of its length and slow movement, the Spenserian stanza is not well adapted to the demands of narrative verse. It inhibits rapidity of pace, and the concluding iambic hexameter line, as one critic has remarked, creates the effect of throwing out an anchor at the end of every stanza. Keats clearly was not very interested in writing lively narrative in The Eve of St. Agnes. The story is trifling and the characters are of no great interest. Porphyro is an idealized knight who will face any danger whatsoever to see his lady love, and Madeline is reduced to an exquisitely lovely and loving young lady. Keats is interested in celebrating romantic love; romantic love is literally a heavenly experience, and for its culmination Keats puts his lovers temporarily in a heaven that is realized through magic. The Eve of St. Agnes is, in part, a poem of the supernatural which the romantic poets were so fond of employing. The Eve of St. Agnes is a heavily descriptive poem; it is like a painting that is filled with carefully observed and minute detail. In this respect, it was a labor of love for Keats and provided him with an opportunity to exploit his innate sensuousness.

Imagery such as "he follow'd through a lowly arched way, / Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume," all of stanzas XXIV and XXV describing the stained glass window in Madeline's room and Madeline's appearance transformed by moonlight passing through the stained glass, stanza XXX cataloguing the foods placed on the table in Madeline's room, the lines "the arras, rich with horseman, haw, and hound, / Flutter'd in the besieging wind's uproar; / And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor," show Keats' picture-making mind at work. The poem has to be read with scrupulous attention; every detail makes a distinctive contribution and even though much of what is in the poem is there for its own sake, everything at the same time makes its contribution to the exaltation of romantic love. Some critics view the poem as Keats' celebration of his first and only experience of romance. It was written not long after Keats and Fanny Brawne had fallen in love. Readers have been struck by Keats' use of contrast in The Eve of St.Agnes; it is one of the chief aesthetic devices employed in the poem.

The special effect of contrast is that it draws attention to all the details so that none are missed. Keats deliberately emphasizes the bitterly cold weather of St. Agnes' Eve so that ultimately the delightful warmth of happy love is emphasized. The owl, the hare, and the sheep are all affected by the cold although all three are particularly well protected by nature against it: "The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold." The hatred of Madeline's relatives for Porphyro, for whatever reason, highlights the love of Madeline and Porphyro for each other. Age is contrasted with youth; the poverty and self-denial of the Beadsman are contrasted with the richness of the feast that Porphyro prepares for Madeline. All the senses are appealed to at one time or another throughout the course of the poem, but, as in most poems, it is the sense of sight that is chiefly appealed to. The most striking example of Keats' appeal to the sense of sight is to be found in his description of the stained glass window in Madeline's room.

This window was "diamonded with panes of quaint device, / Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes." Madeline is transformed into a "splendid angel" by the stained glass as the moonlight shines through it: Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast, As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon; Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest, Save wings, for heaven: — Porphyro grew faint: She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. Keats put a stained glass window in Madeline's room in order to glorify her and put her firmly at the center of his story. The concluding stanza of the poem raises a problem. Why does Keats have Angela, who had helped Porphyro and Madeline achieve a happy issue to their love, and the Beadsman, who had nothing to do with it, die at the end of the story?

Their death does not come as a total surprise, for earlier in the poem Keats implied that both might die soon. Possibly Keats, looking beyond the end of his story, saw that Angela would be punished for not reporting the presence of Porphyro in the castle and for helping him. Death removes her from the reach of punishment. Keats may have used the death of the Beadsman, to whom he had devoted two and a half stanzas at the beginning of the poem, to close off his story. And so the Beadsman "For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold." Keats needed a good concluding stanza to his poem, whose main characters disappear from the scene in the next to last stanza, and so the lives of his two minor characters end with the end of the poem. The Theme of "The Eve of St. Agnes" in the Pre-Raphaelite Movement The Theme of "The Eve of St.

Agnes" in the Pre-Raphaelite Movement Meredith Ringel '07, English/History of Art 151, Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, and Decadents , Brown University, 2004 [ Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Victorian Painters Pre-Raphaelitism ] n the twenty-first of January in what is customarily believed to be the year 304 A.D., a thirteen-year-old Christian girl, Agnes of Rome, was martyred when she refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods and lose her virginity by rape. She was tortured, and though several men offered themselves to her in marriage, either in lust or in pity (" Catholic Forum "), she still refused to surrender her viriginity, claiming that Christ was her only husband. She was either beheaded and burned or stabbed (sources vary), and buried beside the Via Nomentata in Rome. She became the patron saint of virgins, betrothed couples, and chastity in general, and iconographers almost always represent her with a lamb, which signifies her virginity.

The eve of her feast day, January 20th, became in European folklore a day when girls could practice certain divinatory rituals before they went to bed in order to see their future husbands in their dreams. Fifteen hundred years after her death, St. Agnes' Eve would translate itself into one of the richest and most vivid literary and artistic themes in historys. Of all the works, artistic or literary, that use the subject of St. Agnes' Eve as its basis, John Keats 's narrative poem "The Eve of St. Agnes" written in 1819 is undoubtedly the most famous. There appears to be only one other poem that also uses this theme, which is Alfred Lord Tennyson's much shorter "St. Agnes' Eve", first published in 1837. Within the realm of painting however, six well-known Victorian artists chose to depict scenes from the poems, and five illustrated versions of Keats's poem have been published using the drawings of five different illustrators, who, again, lived in the Victorian era or the early twentieth century.

Of the paintings, two were painted by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood ( William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais ) and one by a Pre-Raphaelite Associate ( Arthur Hughes ). The questions to which all this lead are what and why: what was Keats trying to say in his original poem and why say it through the filter of St. Agnes' Eve? Why did the Eve of St. Agnes theme become so popular among Victorians, and the Pre-Raphaelites in particular? Why did they feel it could express what they wanted to say in their art, visual or otherwise? Which elements of the theme did each artist or writer emphasize and why? In order to answer all of these, we must begin by dealing with the first question, which deals with only Keats's poem, since all subsequent works drew from it. We do not know what prompted Keats to write "The Eve of St. Agnes", as we have very few comments from him on the poem itself, no less his motivation for writing it (Stillinger 32).

The little that he said about the work is that it is" 'on a popular superstition'" (32), and also that he wrote at least two drafts of the poem before it was published in 1820, the first, according to critics, more "innocent" (25) and the second more explicitly sexual than the published version. No one will ever be certain if there is a single true meaning of the poem that Keats was trying to convey, and still less what that meaning is. In Reading "The Eve of St. Agnes" Jack Stillinger lists no less than fifty-nine different interpretations of the poem and still says that "These by no means exhaust the interpretive possibilities, and in any case the list and my summaries are simplifications of more complicated arguments" (39) and that "[t]he chief responsibility for understanding the poem continues to lie with the reader, where Keats lodged it from the beginning" (33).

The options fall under subject headings as diverse as "Sex, Love, Marriage" , "Poetry, Art, Creativity", "Epistemology, Ambiguity" and "Politics." The oldest and most traditional interpretations generally fall under the "Sex, Love, Marriage" heading, while the more recent critics such as Stillinger, Earl Wasserman, and Harold Bloom instead focus on "issues of psychological motivation, philosophy, and genre" (Scott 88). The visual artists were clearly most concerned with the poem's imagery and how they could portray it; I will discuss those later. The relation of Tennyson's poem to Keats's is somewhat more difficult to apprehend. Tennyson first published his work under the name "St. Agnes" but in 1857 changed the title to "St. Agnes' Eve", "thus bringing it near to Keats' poem, which certainly influenced Tennyson in writing it, as a comparison of the opening of the two poems will show" (Collins). This is not surprising, given that Keats influenced Tennyson greatly in many of his poems.

I believe that it is worth actually juxtaposing the two opening stanzas of the poems in order to explicitly make this comparison, quoting Keats and then Tennyson: Keats: St. Agnes' Eve -- Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold; The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass, And silent was the flock in the wooly fold; Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told His rosary, and while his frosted breath, Like pious incense from a censer old, Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death, Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith. [ll. 1-9] Tennyson: Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon: My breath to heaven like vapour goes: May my soul follow soon! The shadows of the convent-towers Slant down the snowy sward, Still creeping with the creeping hours That lead me to my Lord: Make Thou my spirit pure and clear As are the frosty skies, Or this first snowdrop of the year That in my bosom lies. [ll.

1-12] Both stanzas use very similar images not only in creating scenes of a frozen winter's night, but even in specific details, such as the Beadsman's visible breath "taking flight for heaven" and the way in which Tennyson's speaker's breath "to heaven like vapour goes." On the other hand, while the Beadsman only functions as a minor character in Keats's poem, Tennyson's speaker, in recreating the actions of the Beadsman, subtly takes on the Beadsman's role and functions as the work's protagonist. This idea becomes even more reasonable when one takes into account the fact that the austere Beadsman appears to only be concerned with issues of religious devotion and that Tennyson's poem seems to be much more religious than Keats's -- notice that the scene takes place outside a convent and that the speaker's thoughts are concerned with God and Christ. If one accepts this notion of Tennyson's narrator in the role of the Beadsman, Tennyson is essentially humanizing him, giving the reader a window into his mind. Keats narrates his poem in the third person and fills it with movement; one could imagine a playwright dramatizing it.

Tennyson's poem, however, is static and describes just one picture of the world and what happens in the speaker's imagination. Through his speaker, Tennyson could very well be making a pro-religious statement, since all of his protagonist's beautiful fantasies are about God. The speaker goes from contrasting all that is mortal with all that is heavenly (finding the mortal lacking), prays for release into God's kingdom, and ends with a joyful fantasy of being united with Christ. Given that Tennyson used typological symbolism in other poems, a religious reading of the poem is perfectly plausible. By suggesting this heavenly union, he implies that the speaker's wish for his soul to follow his breath to heaven may not be as sad at it first appears, and that the Beadsman's death at the end of "The Eve of St. Agnes" "among his ashes cold" (l. 378) is only dismal from this world's point of view. Yet God might not be the only thing that the speaker longs for when he wishes that his soul would fly to Heaven.

In the chapter "Keats, Sexuality, and Tennyson's Reticence" from his book Victorian Keats, James Najarian proposes that Tennyson "uses Keats to hint at an eroticism that depends on Keats's sexually borderline reputation [Najarian explains how the Victorians viewed Keats as an effeminate and not completely heteronormative poet] and on the suggestion of not entirely heterosexual masculine desire in his verse" (71). Critics sometimes view his In Memoriam as a piece expressing same-sex desire (53), in particular for his late friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833. In this vein "St Agnes' Eve" might articulate the wish to be reunited with Hallam, especially if one reads the last line of the poem, "The Bridegroom with his bride!" (l. 36) as a representation of a more earthly coupling. Furthermore, in this somewhat ambiguous merger of Christ and an mortal lover, Tennyson elevates sensual love to a higher plane of value (which is one way of interpreting Keats' poem -- this is another way in which the second poem draws from the first ).

In this sense too he adds another dimension to the Beadsman's character. Essentially Tennyson uses the language, the setting, and some of the imagery from "The Eve of St. Agnes" as a jumping off point in order to offer the possibility of a three-dimensional personality to a minor character, express religious and earthly love, and blend the two into a coherent whole. Though Tennyson was certainly a Victorian, he was not a Pre-Raphaelite and it was the Pre-Raphaelites, especially in the early stages of the movement, who were particularly captivated by the works of Keats (even more so by the works of Tennyson himself; see Holman Hunt's The Lady of Shalott or Millais's h for example). They were fascinated by the theme of romantic love and medieval subjects, and "The Eve of St. Agnes" most definitely provides the first, and while Keats does not expressly set a time period for the poem, the "Knights, ladies" in line 16 and the "carved angels" and cornices in stanza four strongly suggest a medieval castle. More importantly for the artistic Pre-Raphaelite movement, it is a highly visual poem.

Take, for example, stanza twenty-four: A casement high and triple-arch'd there was, All garlanded with carven imag'ries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings; And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings. [ll. 208-216] These lines are filled with detailed descriptions of the architecture of and objects in Madeline's room, and one could easily imagine how an artist could paint a picture based on these descriptions. Even William Michael Rossetti, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, said "'The power of "The Eve of St. Agnes" . . . lies . . . in making pictures out of words, or turning words into pictures'" (Scott 86), and Holman Hunt, who created the first important visual rendering of the poem, wrote to Millais in recommending it as paintable subject matter that "St.

Agnes" was "'brimful of beauties that will enchant you'" (Scott 87). In his book Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts, Grant F. Scott claims, [I]t was this notion of the poem as a storehouse of "beauties," as a material object rather than a transparent narrative, that came to epitomize the Pre-Raphaelite response. "St. Agnes provided a rich source of vibrant and colorful images for these artists, but more importantly, I think, it showed tham that Keats was doing in words what they so desperately wanted to achieve in paint — luxuriating in the texture of the medium itself. [87] Essentially Scott posits that Keats is "attempting his own Pre-Raphaelite painting" (89) and goes on to cite the many instances in the poem in which the action stops and fixates upon description and the many descriptions that are analogized to aspects of visual art, such as when Porphyro is "[b]uttres'd from the moonlight" (l.

77) (a comparison to architecture) or when he is kneeling by Madeline's bedside "pale as smooth-sculptured stone" (l. 297). He also notes the importance of color in the poem and how Porphyro becomes associated with warm, dark colors such as vermilion and purple (not surprising, given his name), how Keats describes the couple's consummation scene in terms of melding colors, and lastly argues that Madeline is not associated with any color, thus, he claims, demonstrating that her dream of Porphyro is "positioned outside the material sublime of Keats's writing, as if some part of the poet, siding with Angela, wished to keep it and its heroine 'free from mortal taint'(l. 225)" (95). This reading of the poem for all intents and purposes falls under Stillinger's thirty-fifth interpretation in his list, that of "Pure aestheticism: art is the only thing that matters" (Stillinger 61). In accordance with Scott's analysis, Stillinger looks at Keats's letters and finds in his expository writings the things about him that made him appealing to the Pre-Raphaelites.

For instance, he quotes Keats's letter to his brothers in which he says, "'with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration'"(Stillinger 61). He concludes by saying that art was by Keats's own intention a fundamental subject of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and that his overt concern with aesthetics made him "an instant hero to the Pre-Raphaelites" (61). It was actually William Holman Hunt's Porphyro during the drunkenness attending the revelry (The Eve of St. Agnes) that was the instigation for bringing the PRB together in 1848. Dante Gabriel Rossetti saw the painting when the Royal Academy exhibited it that year, and though previously he had been superficially acquainted with Hunt, "[h]e now sought Hunt out loudly declaring that his 'picture of "The Eve of St. Agnes" was the best in the collection'" (Watkinson 40). A strong friendship developed when Rossetti subsequently came to visit Hunt in his studio and the two of them plus Millais became the three original members of the PRB.

Meanwhile, they recruited four other promising young artists (William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner , and F. G. Stephens) to join them in the Brotherhood. Hunt's picture illustrates stanza forty-one of Keats's poem: They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl, With a huge empty flagon by his side: The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, But his sagacious eye an inmate owns: By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide; -- The chains lie silent on the footworn stones; -- The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans. [ll. 361-69] The work is typically early Pre-Raphaelite in its detail, its even lighting, and its bright "blue-greens, purples, violets, which came to be one of the marks of Pre-Raphaelite painting" (Watkinson 39), and in its close attention to nature.

Hunt wrote of his painting, I am limited to architecture and night effect, but I purpose after this to paint an out-of-door picture, with a foreground and background, abjuring altogether brown foliage, smoky clouds, and dark corners, direct on the canvas itself, with every detail I can see, and with the sunlight brightness of the day itself. [Watkinson 40] But though technical aspects of the art were clearly of great concern to, he does not focus solely on art as his subject matter. His profound conversion to Christianity came after he finished the painting, but even before this religious experience he still had a "habitual fascination with moments that are turning points in human life, though here, of course, the subject is secular rather than religious" (Landow 480). Of the members of the PRB, he was the most serious, most moralizing, and after his conversion, the most religious. As in the poem itself, Hunt connects the spiritual and sensual. Another of his comments on the painting reads, "'In the meanwhile the story in Keats's "Eve of St.

Agnes" illustrates the sacredness of honest responsible love and the weakness of proud intemperance, and I may practice my new principles to some degree on that subject'" (Pointon 32). He equates virtue with the devoted, if sensual, love of Porphyro and Madeline, and contrasts it with the debauchery of the intoxicated celebrants. Along similar lines, Paul Barlow makes the case for a different sort of moral representation in the painting in his essay "Pre-Raphaelitism and Post-Raphaelitism: the articulation of fantasy and the problem of pictorial space." He points out that Hunt chooses to depict the most psychologically intense point in the poem's story in that he shows the moment of the lovers' escape, the moment when the door could creak and the dog could bark, waking the drunken revelers, the moment when Madeline stops Porphyro from pulling out his sword. This tension, he argues, is part of the tension between fantasy and reality that is an element of the underlying structure of the picture, which in turn is created by pictorial space.

The lovers, since they are posed near the castle door, are just about to make the move into the "real" (Barlow 73) world, and the drunken porter, who seems to stretch out "perversely"(Barlow 74) into the viewer's space, creates the division between the real and imaginary world. The conflict between the real and the artificial is never resolved. Barlow concludes, The Eve of St. Agnes . . . undermines at its conclusion the progressive movement from artifice to reality. It turns back on itself once it reaches the border between the two. This is Hunt's confrontation with the problem of style from within a pictorial regime which presupposes a norm of notional stylelessness. It is through these mechanisms that pictorial morality is established, a concern which was to dominate Hunt's thinking about art throughout his career. [Barlow 77] Hunt wanted to bring art to a higher plane, believing that whether it is pictorial or literary it is best when it uplifts the viewer or reader morally or spiritually. After his religious illumination, he turned toward even more explicitly religious subjects and religious symbolism, the most famous of these being The Light of the World and The Shadow of Death .

Left: Mariana. Right: St. Agnes' Eve from the Moxon Tennyson -- both by John Everett Millais John Everett Millais was a close friend Hunt even before Hunt met Rossetti. As a painter, he was the most technically talented of the PRB and the most critically acclaimed. He did no less than three different works using the St. Agnes' Eve theme, whether taking his inspiration from Tennyson's or Keats's poem. The first, a small pen and ink drawing created in 1854, derives from the Tennyson version and depicts a nun looking out a window over snow-covered roofs of the convent. The nun is effectively the speaker in Tennyson's poem, waiting for her "Heavenly Bridegroom" (l. 31). In "Millais's "Mariana": Literary Painting, the Pre-Raphaelite Gothic, and the Iconology of the Marian Artist", Andrew Leng calls attention to the similarities between this drawing by Millais and his full sized painting Mariana done in 1851, focusing on the likenesses in subject matter (both show lone women standing before an open window) and iconography.

Mariana, longing for her lover, Angelo, thoroughly sick of her embroidery, and trapped and miserable in her castle, looks out of her window and stretches sensually, emphasizing her body and its sexuality. Leng calls the nun in St. Agnes' Eve the "ascetic counterpart of Mariana" in that the nun longs for the absent Christ and says that the crucifix in front of her altar is "the nun's equivalent of Mariana's glass angel." Millais does not approve of her situation any more than he does Mariana's miserable one, as her virginity is a counterpart to the freezing landscape outside; Leng cites Herbert Sussman in saying that "'the twisted body of the crucified Christ above her personal altar is equated with the gnarled leafless tree in the garden.'" In biographical context, this reading of the drawing is quite reasonable. Millais drew the picture on the now infamous trip to Glenfinals with John Ruskin and Ruskin's wife Effie, during which Millais and Effie fell in love. In a letter to her mother, Effie writes that the nun's face bears a remarkable resemblance to the face of Millais himself.

In this way, the nun's melancholy virginity represents Millais's own unhappiness in longing for his heavenly spouse. His next rendition of the same poem from 1857 for the Moxon Tennyson is even smaller than the first (4.5 x 3.3 inches) and is purely book illustration. His later The Eve of St. Agnes however, relies on Keats's poem and is much more sensual. The original study for the painting was done in 1849 and shows Madeline's clothes as they fall from her body. Marcia Pointon remarks, Represented thus, neither a naked model nor a clothed woman, the figure of Madeline is highly provocative. Clothing as a social practice defines the boundaries between nature and culture, and the act of divesting the clothing is an act of avowal in the physical, a declaration of the body. It is the sight of the empty dress, after all that entranced Porphyro in Keats's poem. [Pointon 114] Millais compounds the eroticism with the addition of Madeline's thick, flowing hair and long neck (similar to D.G.

Rossetti's eroticized Fair Lady ), and the addition of moonlight streaming through the window. Furthermore, Madeline stares longingly not out the window but at the bed, expressing the wish for a more earthly union as opposed to a spiritual one like the nun wishes for as she stares out at the heavens. But conversely, another interpretation of the painting proposed in 1894 by Esther Wood claims that there are no references to Madeline's sexuality in the scene and that it in fact highlights her innocence: There is about her an extraordinary spiritual loveliness, born of the utter artlessness and sincerity of her pose and the girlish innocence of her look, as if the absolute naturalness of the situation were its own protection from all thought of ill. Everything around her speaks of her simple holiness and purity, and seals, as it were, the pledge of the answering purity of Porphyro's love. [E. Wood 249] This interpretation of the picture is probably a function of the time in which Wood created it. Keats undeniably meant that Madeline and Porphyro have a sexual union in the poem.

We know this not only from his unpublished second draft of the poem, but also from Richard Woodhouse's letter to John Taylor (both were friends of Keats, Woodhouse his publisher) in which he writes about the revisions made to the poem to make it less explicit. This letter was published in 1925 in Amy Lowell's biography, and for Wood, writing before the twentieth century, it would easier to deny erotic implications in either Keats's or Hunt's works. Since 1925 though, critics have had to factor sexuality into their assessment of the poem. Given this and the previously mentioned aspects of the painting that indicate an erotic meaning, it would be fairly simple to effectively undermine Esther Wood's argument. In terms of its technical aspects, the painting is typical of Millais's later style after he married Effie; now that he had a family to support, he wrote that "he could no longer afford to spend a day painting an area 'no larger than a five shilling piece'"(C. Wood 37), referring to the obsessive detail that characterized the early Pre-Raphaelite works.

His looser style is evident in this painting in that Madeline is the only carefully painted object; the walls and the decoration on them in the background, the bed in the foreground, are all somewhat blurred. Though Hunt and Millais were the only members of the PRB to base pictures on "The Eve of St. Agnes," they were not the only members of the Brotherhood to have an intense admiration for it. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was particularly fascinated by the medieval elements of Keats's poems, and in fact it was Rossetti "who chose Keats as spiritual leader of the Brotherhood: he bragged that he had discovered and then popularized Keats's verses between 1844 and 1846. Critics have recently shown how Keats's aesthetic acted as a prelude to Rossetti's own poetics, and to the Aesthetic Movement" ( Bottai ). His favorite of Keats's poems were "Eve of St. Mark," "Isabella," and, of course, "The Eve of St. Agnes"; he wrote, " 'The Eve of St.

Agnes" "and the fragment 'The Eve of Saint Mark' are in manner the choicest and the chastest of Keats' works'"(Bottai). It was even the seventy pounds that Hunt received for his rendition of the poem that enabled the two to move into an apartment together and set the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in motion. Outside the Brotherhood, the most important artist to create a pictorial version of "The Eve of St. Agnes" was Arthur Hughes. Hunt's earlier painting probably influenced him, and his triptych is very much in the Pre-Raphaelite style, with the bright colors, great detail, moonlight, and stained glass (C. Wood 52). William Morris , an artist and poet associated more with the second phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, owed a debt to Keats's "St. Agnes" when he wrote the poems "Jason," "The Lovers of Gudrun," and "Interlude for April", especially in his choice of diction (Short 514-515).

Other lesser known Victorian era artists (not Pre-Raphaelite associates) such as Charles Hutton Lear, James Smetham, and Daniel Maclise also created paintings illustrating scenes from the Keats poem. It would seem that all of the artistic translations of Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" created by Pre-Raphaelites and their associates focus on the tension between romantic and sexual love abd between love and aesthetics; given the nature of Pre-Raphaelitism (especially early Pre-Raphaelitism, which was the period in which most of the renditions were created) this is not surprising. Each artist or poet, however, was able to create a highly individual work: Tennyson both humanizes a minor poetical character and adds a religious element to secular love, bringing it to a higher plane; Hunt establishes a moral message through his subject matter and the way he uses pictorial space; Millais aggrandizes romantic-sexual love in the contrasting ways he depicts Tennyson's and Keats's two poems. All of these variations on a theme barely begin to exhaust its possibilities, for numerous other artists have worked with the St. Agnes ' Eve subject as well.

It is a tribute to Keats's power as a poet and to the human mind's power of imaginative expatiation. References Barlow, Paul. "Pre-Raphaelitism and Post-Raphaelitism: the articulation of fantasy and the problem of pictorial space." Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed. Ed. Marcia Pointon. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989. Collins, John Churton. The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Jones, Terry H. "Agnes of Rome." Patron Saints 2003. 12 December 2004. Landow, George P. " Shadows Cast by The Light of the World: William Holman Hunt's Religious Paintings, 1893-1905 ." The Art Bulletin. 65 (1983), 471--84. 13 December 2004. Najarian, James. Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pointon, Marcia.

"The artist as ethnographer: Holman Hunt and the Holy Land." Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed. Ed. Marcia Pointon. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989. Pointon, Marcia. "Histories of Matrimony: J.E. Millais." Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed. Ed. Marcia Pointon. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1989. Scott, Grant F. The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts. Hanover NH: University Press of New England, 1994. Short, Clarice. "William Morris and Keats." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. Vol. 59, No. 2. (Jun., 1944), pp. 513-523. 13 December 2004. Stillinger, Jack. Reading "The Eve of St. Agnes". New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Watkinson, Raymond. Pre-Raphaelite Art and Design. London: Studio Vista Limited, 1970. Wood, Christopher. The Pre-Raphaelites.

London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1981. Wood, Esther. Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1894. Katie Sharp on Keats's Eve of St. Agnes by Katie Sharp Abstract John Keats, after many months of hardship and loss, began what is known as his "living summer when he wrote "The Eve of St. Agnes" in January of 1819. Having lost his brother to tuberculosis as well as having fallen in love greatly changed the twenty-three year old Keats, morphing him into a poetic genius. The upheaval in Keats, life lead him to a poetic place, and that journey is mapped within the careful story of young Madeline and her husband to be, Porphyro. The joining of the brave poetic spirit, Porphyro, with the innocent receptacle of the poet, Madeline, is found within the poem's story. Keats tried to edit the poem to include an explicit allusion to premarital consummation, but his publisher threatened to let another publisher handle the indecent poetry if the poem was allowed to include such lewd suggestions.

It was after this threat that Keats washed his hands of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and allowed the original to be published without much argument. The Life that Lead to the Poem John Keats, having given up his study of medicine, dedicated his life to his poetry. After two years of writing poetry that was for the most part unsuccessful, Keats went on a walking tour in the Lake District in the summer of 1818. However, before he could finish his tour, Keats became ill. It was upon his return that Keats met Fanny Brawne, who he quickly fell in love with. Tom Keats, however, soon became terminally ill with tuberculosis and Keats nursed him until Tom died in December 1818. After being swarmed by his friends, who were hoping to console the young poet, Keats began to write poetry. It was now January 1819, and the beginning of what is often referred to as the "living year" for Keats (1). "The Eve of St. Agnes" is the first poem that Keats writes in this new, creative period. "A little poem called St.

Agnes Eve" Keats is believed to have written "St. Agnes Eve" at the end of January and in the beginning of February, while on a trip to Chichester to visit some friends. He wrote the nineteen page poem on incredibly thin stationary that was usually used to write letters to his brother, George, in America. Keats was not very impressed with the poem, referring to it as a "little poem" in a letter to his brother on February 14th of 1819 (2). His friend, Richard Woodhouse, thought that he was a genius and took it upon himself to transcribe "St. Agnes Eve" himself a few weeks after Keats had written it. This was not an easy task, however, because the manuscript was heavily edited and many of the words had leaked through the thin paper because Keats wrote on both the front and the back of each sheet. The original is the only known draft that is in Keats handwriting. In September of 1819, Keats began editing the large number of poems he had written. He was very unsatisfied with the poem so he heavily edited "St. Agnes Eve," using Woodhouse's copy which was much easier to read.

After the editing, Woodhouse recopied the entire poem into a third manuscript. Keats, however, was still not satisfied with the poem and continued working on it, which accounts for the changes that are found in the manuscript that was created by Keats brother, George, on his short visit to England in search of funds. Keats, wanting to marry his beloved Fanny, was hoping to rush this poem through the press so he could make enough money to demonstrate he could support a wife. He went into London to see if he could get "St. Agnes Eve" and Lamia published immediately. However, his usual publisher, John Taylor, was out of town and Taylor partner, J.A. Hessey, that the poem was not ready for immediate publication. Keats began editing the poem, which he never really liked, until it met his standards while he was editing the rest of his works so that they all could be published together. It was during this time that "St. Agnes Eve" took a vital turn. Keats changed the scene where Madeline announced her love of Porphyro, making it explicit that the lovers consummated their love, despite the fact they were not married yet.

This subject was deemed inappropriate for women to read, by both Woodhouse and Taylor. Keats was outraged, and perhaps amused, at their prudish response. According to a letter written to Keats publisher, Taylor, by Woodhouse, Keats declined that he wanted the readership of women: He says he does not want ladies to read his poetry: that he writes for men - & that if in the former poem these was an opening for doubt what took place, it was his fault for not writing clearly & comprehensively that he [should] despise a man who would be such an eunuch in sentiment as to leave a maid, with that Character about her, in such a situation and [should] despise himself to write about it(3) This is an amusing diatribe, and would have remained so if not for the fated response of Taylor. As it is, the flying in the face of the Face of Decency & Discretion is doubly offensive from its being accompanied with so preposterous a Conceit on his part of being able to overcome the best founded Habits of our Nature.

Had he known truly what the Society and what the Suffrages of Women are worth, he would never have thought of depriving himself of themif he will not so far concede to my Wishes as to leave the passage as it originally stood, I must be content to admire his Poems with some other Imprint, & in so doing I can reap as much Delight from the perusal of them as if they were our own property, without having the disquieting Consideration attached to them of our approving, by the "Imprimatur, those parts which are unfit for publication." (3) Thus threatened with the inability to publish, the illicit section of the poetry was never spoken of again. The poem remained in its original form and the three changed stanzas have never been found. Keats reaction to Taylor's veiled threat was never spoken of, although his actions demonstrate that he caved into the pressure of his publisher. The publication of this book of poetry was slowed because Keats was suffering from horrible bouts of lung hemorrhaging caused by tuberculosis. Woodhouse wrote on his second transcription something that clearly demonstrates the fact that Keats was afraid of not being able to publish his greatest poetic work: "The Published Copy differs from a few particulars.

K. left it to his Publishers to adopt which [readings] they pleased, & to revise the Whole" (1). Woodhouse had joined with Taylor in editing "St. Agnes Eve" to the point that the title of it was changed to "The Eve of St. Agnes." There is only one letter, written by Keats to his Publishers, that demonstrates that many of these changes were not sanctioned by him because he asks Taylor to change the poem back to his original wording in a few places after reading the proofs. The number of these unwanted changes is unknown and yet it is only the published version of these poems that is considered to be the authoritative version of the poem. The Cold of Public Opinion: A close reading of the Poem in regards to Publication This poem reflects Keats reception with the public in his earlier poetry, as well as his desire to gain the support of the public. The poem begins in the cold, with the experienced "beadsman" who is praying in the cold chapel. This experienced beadsman is surrounded by dead people and freezing nature. Everything around him is cold, stony and lonely. This state of coldness represents Keats at this point in his life.

All of his pervious volumes of poetry had not sold and he was very unpopular with the critics. Keats was out in the cold as a poet, having the experience but no one there to read what he has to say. The beadsman, who is perhaps the Keats before he fell in love with Fanny, is given a voice that is already spent despite the fact he is surrounded by music which touches him: "The joys of his life were said and sung" (lines 20-23). The poem quickly switches from this sad, mute figure that is never allowed to speak to a young innocent girl who is greatly influenced by the "old wives tales" about the significance of Saint Agnes Eve. Madeline, this innocent new character, listens to all the superstitions and follows each as she retires to bed without supper and does not look up from the floor. This innocent girl calls to mind the youthful Keats who surrounded himself with the literary figures of the "Cockney" group who were idealistic to a fault and who Keats followed blindly for many years until he was no longer in their favor (5).

It was at that time, around 1818, that he slipped out of the group, just as Madeline quietly slips out of the party to go to bed without supper with her head humbly bowed just as she was told. A new part of himself is drawn out from the suffering and joy caused by his brother's death and his new love, Fanny. This new part of himself is demonstrated in the dangerous courage of Porphyro who carefully talks Angela into allowing him to hide in the room of the innocent Madeline. Angela is jaded and suffering and seems to represent death in the poem with her described as "a poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, / Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll;" (lines 155-156). Keats reaction to the death of Tom could be represented in this jaded, weak woman who is allowing Porphyro, the creative force of poetry, in to the innocent side of himself. When Madeline and Porphyro finally see each other, there is a great feast that suddenly appears as an offering to the innocent Madeline while she is sleeping.

After singing a poem that Keats had rewritten, Madeline finally wakes up to see the pale figure of Porphyro and is started by how weak and cold he appears to be (stanza 35). She calls to him to be vital and immortal. This makes her into the more human of the two because Porphyro is the creative force of the poem while Madeline simply receives and responds to the will of Porphyro. Madeline is still the innocent Keats, but she is being overpowered by the brave new spirit of her lover, Porphyro, just as Keats is overpowered by the energy that allowed him to believe in "Negative Capability." This vision of a marriage between two warring families allows the conflicts of the self to be shown as a split of the poet into the innocent receptacle of Madeline and the passionate invader of Porphyro. This is the first time that this poetic invader comes to Keats, through the death of his brother and his new exposure to love. The fact that Keats wanted these two characters to make love clearly demonstrates that these two sides of the poet were merging for the first time. By not allowing this to happen, his editors take away a vital part of the story.

These two lovers are never allowed to fully connect with each other before they leave the dangerous castle. Porphyro seems to steal the innocent Madeline from her family to marry her, although she is willing. Within the house, the characters are warm and safe with each other, despite the threat of "a hundred swords" that would quickly attempt to kill Porphyro (line 83). However, they leave the safety and warmth of her room to go back into the storm. This return to the cold seems to demonstrate the return of Keats to the idea of publishing. The warmth is the creation process with leads to the birth of the poem, through the connection of the innocent receptacle and the passionate spirit of the poetry that enters into the space of that innocent until she is ready to see and understand him. The fact that the innocent, who in my opinion represents the poet himself, is a woman leads me to think of the poet as the creator of life, giving birth to the poems through the inspiration of the male lover. Porphyro calls to her, saying "Awake! Arise, my love, and fearless be," which is something that the poet would need in order to journey back into the cold, intolerant world of publishing.

The reactions of both Woodhouse and Taylor to the changes made in the poem demonstrate the rejection and the concessions that Keats would have to make in order to be heard. The creative couple flee from the publishing and not spoken of at the end of the poem (line 371). They are instead replaced with the beadsman, who represents the cold reception that Keats received previously, as though he were expecting the public to reject this poem as well (lines 377-378). This is very telling because Keats gave up his opinion about the poem once confronted with the threat that he would have to find a new publisher. It is as though the creative side of himself ran away and left behind the silent and tolerant man that he once was, which allowed the poem to be given without complaint to the publishers to do with as they saw fit. Bibliography 1. Stillinger, Jack. Reading The Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. 2. Lord Houghton. Life and Letters of John Keats. J.M. Dent and Sons, New York, 1927. 3. Stillinger, Jack.

The Texts of Keat's Poems. Harvard Press, Cambridge, 1974. 4. Hill, Douglas. John Keats. International Profiles; Great Britain, 1968. 5. Lowell, Amy. John Keats. Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1925. 6. Brown, Charles A. Life of John Keats. Oxford Press; London, 1937. 7. Levine, Philip. The Essential Keats. Ecco Press; New York, 1987. 8. Stillinger, Jack ed. John Keats Poetry Manuscripts at Harvard: A Facsimile Edition. Belknap Press; 1990. 9. Ridley, M.R.. Keats's Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Development. Russell and Russell; New York, 1962. 10. Wu, Duncan. Romanticism An Anthology. 2nd ed. Blackwell; Great Britain, 1994. The Eve Of St. Agnes | Novelguide Home › Literature › The Eve Of St. Agnes The Eve Of St.

Agnes by Keats When Robert Graves said, "There is one story and one story only that will prove worth your telling," he was talking about romance. A great work of romance offers an environment that is amenable to the mysterious and the miraculous. Keats uses images of mystery, adventure, and of the unknown to enhance the romantic feel of his poem "The Eve of St. Agnes". In the second line of the poem, Keats uses the image of the owl to set a tone of the mysterious and unknown. We all have associations of the owl and wisdom or mysticism. The owl is a nocturnal bird of prey that has held mankind's curiosity for thousands of years. We are two lines into the poem and we already feel that there is something supernatural and romantic about the setting. The use of the words "frozen grass, numb fingers," and "frosted breath," place us deeper into the unknown romantic world. We get the impression that we should be home; huddled around a fire. Only a hero or a villain would be out on a night like this. Since we feel this way, the story is starting in a quiet, but a foreboding way. This improved the romantic feel of the poem.

The image of the beadsman praying for the virgin is a strange, romantic idea to us as well. The thought of someone being paid to pray for someone long dead is foreign to us. Since this is something that does not happen very much anymore, we are pulled into the past; a romantic past with which we associate castles, dragons, knights, and magic. The adventurous and therefore the romantic feel of the poem is amplified. The word virgin itself brings up feelings of curiosity and romance. Virgins have been sacrificed, guarded by dragons, and kept in tall towers in romance stories. A feel for the type of poem is beginning to be formed in our minds. The romantic feel of the poem is reinforced because now we are expecting a wondrous tale of adventure and heroism. In the chapel, the beadsman feels that "the sculptured dead seem to freeze." He senses that the statues that line the sides of the chapel are somehow alive, but frozen. Although at first I passed over this line, it left an impression of darkness and unknown details. This magnified the mysticism and the romance of the poem.

As we approach midnight, Keats improves the romantic feel of the poem by using the phrase, "the hallowed hour was near at hand." This piques our interest. Something is going to happen at that "hallowed hour," but exactly what, we don't know. The fact that the hour we are waiting for is midnight also adds to the occult sentiments we are already feeling. Midnight is the witching hour; the hour when our coach turns back into a pumpkin. Something magical is going to happen. The romantic feel of the poem is intensified. The author also uses the phrase "He cursed thee and thine, both house and land." This leaves the impression that a mystical spell has been cast. Visions of witches and evil surface, and we begin to think that our hero may be in for a bit more than he bargained for. The supernatural forces him to handle. The adventurous feel of romance is heightened. The romantic feel is emphasized further when the hero is trying to find Madeline; his love. He asks Angela to tell him "by the holy loom which none but secret sisterhood may see," where she is. He is referring to the custom of leaving lambs wool on the alter for nuns to weave into garments for themselves.

We feel there is some kind of secret organization that has existed for untold ages. This adds to the romantic feel of the poem. In the fourteenth stanza the romantic feel is developed further by the use of the words "Thou must hold water in a witches sieve, and be liege-lord of all the Elves and Fays." This entire line is full of wonder and mystery. We should also note that the words "Elves and Fays" are capitalized. This is Keats' way of putting even more emphasis on the mystical idea of elves and fairies. This arouses our feelings of adventure; which is part of romance. The fact that the old crone kept a closed wondrous book of riddles also fortifies the romantic feel of the poem. Firstly, riddles are questions or statements testing ingenuity. This itself is curious enough, but the fact that the book is closed places this statement off the scale. We cannot know the riddles now or ever because the book is closed. The romantic feel of the poem has been augmented. The romantic feel of the poem, "The Eve of Saint Agnes", is enhanced by the use of images of mystery and the unknown.

These types of images cause us to think about far away lands, dragons, witches and other magical wonders. Since one of our aims when we read romance is to escape, these images are very effective. The Eve of St. Agnes, XXIII, [Out went the taper as she hurried in] - Poems | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization. browse poems & poets sign up to receive a new poem-a-day in your inbox sign up Pirate Story by Robert Louis Stevenson Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson Loneliness by Trumbull Stickney Alphabet Poem by Edward Lear from the book read this poet's poems English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London.

The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother's death, Keats's maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry. Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and "O Solitude." Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth . The group's influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats, published in 1817.

Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt's literary circle "the Cockney school of poetry," Blackwood's declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats's genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews. Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne.

Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on "Hyperion," a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing "Hyperion" upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as "The Fall of Hyperion" (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his "posthumous existence." In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing.

The volume also contains the unfinished "Hyperion," and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "Ode to a Nightingale." The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion. The fragment "Hyperion" was considered by Keats's contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor's orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

Selected Bibliography The Poems of John Keats (1978) The Poems of John Keats (1970) The Poems of John Keats (1970) Collections: The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1831) Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) Poems (1817) Letters of John Keats: A New Selection (1970) The Letters of John Keats (1958) Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848) Drama Otho The Great: A Dramatic Fragment (1819) King Stephen: A Dramatic Fragment (1819) The Eve of St. Agnes The Eve of St. Agnes The Eve of St.

Agnes Introduction In A Nutshell The next time you're frustrated that your significant other isn't texting you back quickly enough, remember that it could be worse: she could be locked up in a castle surrounded by her family (which has an ancient blood-feud with your family) trying to complete an ancient Christian ritual in hopes of being delivered a vision of you. Skype's not looking so bad now, huh? This is exactly the situation that Porphyro finds himself in in John Keats 's "The Eve of St. Agnes." To those who know Keats for such fan favorites as " Ode on a Grecian Urn " or " Ode to a Nightingale ," "The Eve of St. Agnes" is going to feel a little different. Actually, it's probably going to feel a lot different. Instead of a sweet little Ode talking about nature or art, it's a long, narrative poem written in an archaic meter that seems to be retelling some bizarro version of Romeo and Juliet . Also, unlike the Odes, "The Eve of St. Agnes" gets a lot of flak from critics. Why all the hate?

Well, when compared to the Odes and longer poems like " Hyperion " and " Endymion ," "The Eve of St. Agnes" looks distinctly… short on substance. If you were to sum up the criticism of St. Agnes, you'd find that the bottom line frequently ends up being, "this is really gorgeous and well-written, but nothing really happens and there's basically no there there." In short, critics have labeled "The Eve of St. Agnes" the pretty, blonde floozy of Keats's longer poems. "The Eve of St. Agnes" was written in the dead of the winter of 1819, which was basically The Year for Keats because it was the year he wrote all but one of the Odes, his most famous poems. In short, if Keats had a Greatest Hits album, it would be titled "Stuff I Did in 1819," and "The Eve of St. Agnes" is the first thing he wrote that year. "The Eve of St. Agnes" was published alongside the Odes in 1820 and was, in the memory of history, outshined by those stellar little siblings.

1819 was a big deal for Keats for other reasons: "The Eve of St. Agnes" was written pretty much directly after Keats's brother Thomas died of tuberculosis in December 1818, and smack dab in the middle of Keats's courtship of Fanny Brawne, to whom he proposed in October 1819. As if that weren't enough, towards the end of 1819 Keats started to himself exhibit the first signs of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. What's a gifted young guy to do when embroiled in overwhelming emotional tumult? Write some really awesome poems, that's what. "The Eve of St. Agnes" may not be the most famous thing Keats wrote in 1819, but the hallmarks of that year—death, sex, the dangers of the imagination—are stamped all over it. Why Should I Care? It's easy to write off "The Eve of St. Agnes" as being kind of, well… dumb. The characters aren't all that complex, and we've seen General Hospital episodes with more plot. But beneath that first superficial layer, there's a lot more going on. "Like what?" you say?

We're glad you asked. Think about this: we've all had the experience of waking up and wondering if we were still dreaming. John Keats takes this experience and gets a little more philosophical. In a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey in 1817 he wrote . I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be the truth—whether it existed before or not… The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream—he awoke and found it truth. Now, if you read around a little, you'll discover that dreaming is one of Keats's favorite things , and "The Eve of St. Agnes" goes deep (super-deep) into this topic. As we said above, this is the poem that Keats writes right before he enters his famous Ode phase, and it actually addresses a lot of the topics that make the Odes themselves so powerful and relevant: Is the imagination capable of creating something real? How far can you trust your imagination? How do you deal with the conflict between the real and the ideal, the dream and the thing you wake up to?

You may say Keats was a dreamer, Shmoopers, but he's not the only one. We've all been there: wanting to head back into that dreamy state that seemed so real to us while we slept, or not totally trusting our sense of the world because it seemed—if just for a second—like a waking dream. Sure, if "The Eve of St Agnes" were a television show, you'd be bored stiff. As a poem, though, it's digging deep into the human mind and its imaginative powers—something we all enjoy—and it's doing it in a pretty spectacular way.

Question: Who wrote the poem 'The Eve of St. Agnes'?
Answer: JOHN KEATS