The Eve of St. Agnes
by Isabela M. Tobias
In The Eve of St. Agnes John Keats illustrates once more the genius of his skillful poetry. Even though he sets the stage for a plot that appears to be as real as life itself, he also introduces us into the spiritual realm, of imagination, vision, and dreaming, and the fusion of the two planes is so subtle that instantly they become one. This is a theme that Keats has manifested in other odes, where life is being presented as a strange mixture of the two.
Keats based his poem on the superstition that a girl could see her future husband in a dream if she performed certain rites on the eve of St. Agnes: if she went to bed without looking behind her, and lay on her back with her hands under her head, he would appear in her dream, kiss her, and feast with her. The plot somehow lacks substance, being mostly a fairy-tale of two young lovers that are planning to escape a hostile adult world.
At the same time, we are being reminded of the story of Romeo and Juliet, and Keats employs a style alike Shakespeare’s. The lines are full of enjambment that shows Keats’s emotional involvement with what he is about to describe. The stanzas pour out many layers of utter pleasure that – in a spiritual way – Madeline is indulging in when dreaming about her lover! The irony is that since it is all a dream, it is therefore an illusion.
In this trance state we see the young Madeline having “visions of delight” (866) about her lover. Sometimes the perspective darkens and scenes become almost spooky: the beloved Porphyro comes from the moors, and together with his ally “good Angela” (the name Angela not only evokes Juliet’s nurse Angelica from Romeo and Juliet, but also the significance of her name implies an angelic quality, therefore innocence, which is not quite the case here), they conspire to “hide/Him in a closet, of such privacy/That he might see her beauty unespied,/And win perhaps that night a peerless bride.” (869) Keats also mentions about ghosts and cobwebs, “many a dusky gallery”, all in the castle where only Madeline’s chamber is “silken, hush’d, and chaste”(870). She is of royal blood, and “so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.” (871) Her name though reminds of Mary Magdalene, the prostitute that Jesus befriended and became one of the three women that believed in Jesus’ resurrection even before the apostles. After her encounter with Jesus she did live a life in purity. Here there is a sense of a very strange association between Keats’s heroine’s name and that of Mary Magdalene, implying that chaste before Madeline will now become unchaste, for she flees with her lover, and thus become unwed. Nevertheless, we should not forget that it is all a dream – or is it – for even though Porphyro is “stol’n to this paradise, and so entranced” (871) by gazing upon “her empty dress”(871) – alluding thus at Satan’s entering the Garden of Eden to tempt Eve – they will escape their circumstances only to go back to the moors where Porphyro came from: “They glide like phantoms, into the wide hall;/Like phantoms to the iron porch they glide;” (874) – the repetition is meant to focus our attention that we are not in the presence of real human beings, but rather eerie creatures, whose legend is being told and dreamt about by a certain Baron and “all his warrior-guests”, that Keats mentions at the end of the poem.
The two lovers meet only in the realm of dreams, and are ardently confessing their love to each other; they flee together for they cannot conceive life without their mate: “Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,/For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.” (873) The language is often extremely sensual and overtly sexual, in stanzas such as 8, where Madeline is imagining “all the bliss to be before to-morrow morn”, or in stanza 16, where Porphyro’s senses are heated at the thought of a plan to see his bride in “close secrecy”: “Sudden a though came like a full-blown rose,/Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart/Made purple riot; then does he propose /A stratagem, that makes the beldame start:” (869)
Even though Keats invokes a Christian setting – time frame is St. Agnes’ Eve, and uses language filled with words such as “seraph”, and “eremite”, and the mentioning of heaven is recurrent throughout the poem, the irony appears once more in the name of Porphyro, which means purple, a color used for the clothing of nobles. Purple was later associated with the aristocracy and royalty in the phrase "purple blood" (we say "blue blood" today). There are numerous references to the color purple in the poem. His namesake, the historical Porphyro (3rd c. A.D.), was an active enemy of Christianity in the third century.