“The Eve of St. Agnes”

by Consuela Cooper

This poem, like many of John Keats’ odes, explores imagination, reality, dreams, visions and life as a mixture of contradictions. In addition to these themes, it appears that Keats is discussing love and religion with the use of hot and cold imagery. This poem is a romance narrative portraying over zealous love on a holy day. While the old and “weak in body and in soul” are praying and offering their penance, the young are caught in a quest for true love.

The opening language of the poem created a setting and image of a cold mysterious night. “Ah, bitter chill it was.” This is one of many references made to the cold. The first stanzas set the scene inside a chapel where the isolated Beadsman is praying for the guest inside the warm castle. We are told that the Beadsman’s breath is so icy that he seems to be heading for the afterlife. This along with other religious imagery gives the reader a visual picture of a comfortless religion, where not even death promises a release of pain. Religion has always seemed very mysterious and cold. The Catholic Church for example, is filled with gothic statues depicting death and torture. Later we are introduced to Madeline, who like the Beadsman, has isolated her self from the crowd because of her total absorption in the superstition that surrounds St. Agnes’ Eve. Unlike the Beadsman, she is surrounded by images of warmth and gentleness. Keats uses phrases like, “honey’d middle,” “soft adoring” and “lily white” to describe her belief in the virgin tale. Porphyro, another main character is filled with heat. When he is first introduces to the reader, he is described as being a man “ with heart on fire.” Warm images surround Madeline and Porphyro possibly to portray their heightened sense of emotions and the longing for love within the two. When we think of love, images of warmth usually come to mind.

Despite the contradicting uses if warmth and cold to describe love and religion they are still similarities that persist amongst the characters. There is a great deal of worship that appears in the poem. In addition, these characters are swept up in beliefs and rituals that cause them to isolate themselves and reject what is going on in society in hopes of finding truth in a legend as well as the hope of the fulfillment of promises. The Beadsman is following his religious rituals and worshipping his god in the chapel. Madeline is swept up in rituals as well in hopes that’s he will be rewarded with true love. Porphyro on the other hand isn’t swept up in performing rituals, but he is absorbed in love worship, that puts him in great danger. He decides to risk his life by entering the house of his enemies in order to see Madeline. Another important similarity amongst these characters is that they all end up in the same place. We first see the Beadsman in the icy chapel and Madeline and Porphyro in the castle. By the end of the poem we find them all end in the cold. Madeline and Porphyro leave the castle and drift away “like phantoms” while our holy figure now sleeps “among the ashes of the cold.” By given these characters the same fate, Keats might be examining the idea of uniformity through death. No matter where we start in life we all end up at the same place.

It is possible that the return to the cold represents a discovery of some form of truth in death or movement back to reality. In Keats “Ode to a Nightingale”, he writes that “the fancy can not cheat so well.” In other words, imagination is wonderful but it is not a state in which we should live. I believe that is a lesson that we can take from “The Eve of St. Agnes” as well. Madeline was consumed by this dream state for so long that it left her vulnerable. When she did awake it was difficult for her to decipher what reality from imagination.