Every Reader's Keats

This is the thirteenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In the Every Reader’s Poets I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.

The poems discussed follow the essay.


     I hesitate to write about John Keats, for to me he is like a youthful romance, somewhat embarrassing while inspiring what I still experience late in life as ingenuous heart-felt affection. Keats, more than any other single writer, attracted me to poetry with his dedication to beauty, his clearly cut concrete imagery, and his lovely melodies.

     His appeal may have been enhanced by his biography, an exemplary Romantic life. Born to parents of modest circumstances – his father had tended horses in a stable attached to an inn which he later rose to manage, but he died when the author was eight. His mother sent him to school where he acquired the reputation of being a bit wild, indolent, and prone to fist-fights, but it was there that he attained a love of Classics (though not a scholar’s expertise) and a dedication to literature, winning an academic prize at the age of thirteen. The following year his mother died and he was sent to live with his grandmother who promptly apprenticed him to the family’s medical practitioner. Successfully completing the apprenticeship, Keats went to something like a residency in London well on his way to qualifying for the Royal College of Surgeons. Yet the more he wrote and entered into a literary scene, the more he resented the time he had to devote to medicine; he ultimately abandoned that work for the dubious career of a full-time poet.

     “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is perhaps the best-known sonnet from Keats’ earliest collection, but to me a little-praised piece provides a clearer model of the poet’s sensibility. The sonnet beginning “Give me a golden pen . . .” was an occasional impromptu written in a matter of minutes toward the conclusion of a social visit. It is nothing but a series of images, each if which renders more precise the subjective experience. Keats begins with the pen, as memorializing the pleasant hours in verse fixes their memory and enables their lasting significance. The pen is golden because of the value of such preserved felicity, the adjective suggesting as well the gap between real and ideal which for Keats only art can bridge. With characteristic extravagance Keats then imagines himself leaning “on heaped-up flowers.” The experience, while sublimed by aesthetic distance (“in regions clear, and far”), sounds almost hedonistic in glad sensuality. The poet proposes beginning with “a tablet whiter than a star,” a vision of the absolute immediately succeeded by a series of concrete images, a more palpable version of the beauty Keats experiences as semi-divine. Having asked for a “tablet” on which to write, he moves to a different art, his poetry now figured as the heavenly music of the blessed. For Keats the mention of celestial song is too vague, he renders the idea photographic, specifying the angelic hand at a particular moment, “the silver strings of heavenly harp atween,” and then goes on to add “a pearly car,” and then “pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar.” Just as he is only just trying his artistic abilities, the presumably newly minted angel has “half-discovered wings.”

     He is then able not only to hear the music of the spheres, but to transcribe a part on his page. Amazed at the sublimity he has attained he exclaims, “For what a height my spirit is contending!” just before the final line reminds the reader that this extraordinary afflatus has been attained simply by passing the evening among sympathetic friends. His reliance on his fancy, and his idealistic aspiration toward the sublime are clear and enthusiastic, and his method of reasoning through images already established.

     A similar pattern is discernable in “Sleep and Poetry” in which, after repeating the familiar sentiment “life is but a day,” Keats proceeds also to identify life with “A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way/ From a tree’s summit” and then, even more extravagantly to “a poor Indian’s sleep/ While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep/ Of Montmorenci.” This fatalistic description is then immediately succeeded by more positive images: “the rose’s hope while yet unblown,” “the reading of an ever-changing tale,” “the light uplifting of a maiden’s veil,” and “a pigeon tumbling in the summer air.” He then concludes the series with an altogether optimistic figure “a laughing school-boy, without grief or care,/ Riding the springy branches of an elm.” Note however, that the burden of mortality is never denied, the rose, the story, the maiden, the pigeon, even the “laughing school-boy” each must come to an end, and Keats was acutely aware that he, too, shared that fate toward which one may cultivate an enlightened acceptance, but which one cannot escape.


     Keats’ odes are likely his best-known works, and of them surely the popular favorite is his meditation on a Greek vase of the sort that fills many little-visited galleries in the great museums of Athens and Paris and New York. The ode had evolved in English literature into a far more flexible form than it had in antiquity. (Pindar possesses sufficient complexity that a reader might think he is “free-styling,” to use an almost contemporary idiom.) Keats here devised an original form though he used a traditional name which to him signified strong emotion and a certain looseness of structure.

     The poem is an ekphrasis, a literary description of a work of art. He begins writing not about the pictured scene as much as about his lack of knowledge of what is before his eyes. What does the scene represent, he asks, who are represented, what is going on?

     One might be tempted to reduce the poem to the neat concluding apothegm.


"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."


     While this may seem to declare an unconflicted aestheticism, wholly satisfied by the rapt contemplation of an objet d’art, such a reading would ignore the balancing complaint that runs through the poem, a lament about mortality and the transience of things, painful facts that lead the poet to seek solace in the art of antiquity. Ancient Greece, fetishized in Europe since the Renaissance, was particularly valued by the Romantics (many neo-Classical writers having a taste for Rome), and Keats hopes to escape the terms of human existence, what Marvell called “the iron gates of life,” by contemplation of the clay object. The boughs are “happy,” because they exist outside of time. Of course, their happiness is a construction of the human observer as is their beauty.

     The survival of a beautiful work of art promises a sort of immortality, though at the price that it remain a perpetually “unravish’d bride,” a “cold Pastoral,” while those who appreciate it weep and laugh and celebrate and sicken and die. The poem may, in fact, be said to be about the gap between the feeling, desiring, temporally limited subject and the perfect, timeless object. This opposition, present from the start never develops or changes; there can be no honest resolution. The questions of the first stanza return unchanged in the fourth, while stanzas two and three praise the incorruptible perfection of the scene. What Keats appreciates on the vase the love, the “mad pursuit” and “wild ecstasy” are the very things which in human life he seeks to transcend: the “heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,” the burning forehead” and “parching tongue” all of which evidence strong emotion.

     Keats’ ode “To Autumn” represents another attempt to come to terms with the evanescence of beauty. While springtime is a common theme since the earliest poetry, the autumn, he rightly suggests, is comparatively unappreciated. He invokes no eternal work of art, but rather celebrates the fullness, the perfection of the full maturation of the harvest season, followed though it is by the death of annuals and the chill of winter. In a lush elaboration of Shakespeare’s formula from King Lear “Ripeness is all” Keats details the country scene. The first stanza notes the beauty of the season’s fruit and nuts and suggests people’s joy at collecting this bounty, surely a strong emotion since prehistoric times, but the second stanza is decidedly more Romantic, almost decadent.

     Autumn is personified as a languid, dreamy, “careless,” “half asleep,” as though “drows'd with the fume of poppies,” and the theme of soporific intoxication is echoed by the mention of the “cyder-press.” This suggestion of anaesthesia allows the observer, perhaps, to feel satisfaction in the moment like the bees who “think warm days will never cease,” and to ignore the inevitability of approaching death and barrenness.

     Yet the final stanza defines the music of the season first in the “wailful choir the small gnats” mourning and rising among the “sallows,” or willows that grow by the river. Willows are a common gravestone motif, but the next image, the bleating lambs, is less funereal, and the lambs are succeeded by the sound of the crickets, the robins, and the swallows. The poem ends with this chorus asserting the value of life despite the shortening days. In nature, of course, the cycle continues, the new will replace the old, assuring a sort of immortality, while the individual human subject will come to an end.

     Keats developed a passionate attachment to Fanny Brawne to whom he wrote "My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. . .Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you." He reworked a sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” he had composed earlier to express his love.

     Again, his focus is the gap between the temporal and the eternal absolute he identifies with her and likens to a star. The first eight lines, the octave, portray her as “stedfast,” “eternal,” “unchangeable,” gazing passively over earth, in fact, not unlike the “Grecian urn.” He can participate in this divinity through his love. “Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,” he can feel himself “awake for ever in a sweet unrest.” In this condition of aroused passion he feels in part at least redeemed. If he must die, it will be in a “swoon” of love at which the lover could hardly complain.

     Keats’ literary career was frustrated by low sales – the four volumes published during the poet’s lifetime sold less than a few hundred copies. Apart from the praise of Leigh Hunt and other friends, the critical attention his work attracted was fierce and scathing, more political and social than literary. Keats and his circle were condemned as the “Cockney school” of poetry. The poet had asked that his epitaph be simply “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” but his friends added a protest against his treatment by critics which they maintained contributed to his death. “This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies.”

     Keats remains a poet to whom I can return repeatedly for his lovely melodies and pregnantly suggestive images. In a certain mood I find Shelley is often airy and abstract, Wordsworth plain in language though sometimes tangled in meaning, Coleridge philosophical, and Byron casual and hasty. While, readers may perceive Keats’ weaknesses, I for one have a prejudice in his favor. In a letter he defined “Negative Capability” as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is in art that meaning may be constructed without revelation or positivism. Keats, whose life was difficult in a number of ways, managed to build an imaginative world true to his experience yet lit with joy.




Give me a golden pen, and let me lean
On heaped-up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
Bring me a tablet whiter than a star,
Or hand of hymning angel, when 'tis seen
The silver strings of heavenly harp atween:
And let there glide by many a pearly car
Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,
And half-discovered wings, and glances keen.
The while let music wander round my ears,
And as it reaches each delicious ending,
Let me write down a line of glorious tone,
And full of many wonders of the spheres:
For what a height my spirit is contending!
'Tis not content so soon to be alone.




Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."




To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.




Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Skepticism and Poetry in Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes”

     Keats might well be termed a “poet’s poet” like his model Spenser [1] because of his lavish and expert use of the specific materials of poetry: rhetorical figures, concrete images, and foregrounded emotion. Keats’ sensibility doubtless generated this sort of poetic practice, but his philosophic tendencies led him also to exploit the specific resources of poetry by his embrace of contradiction, ambivalences, ambiguities, and mysteries. Poetry provides a more accurate and effective verbal technology than non-aesthetic discourses in treating the apparently paradoxical, irrational, or inscrutable, and Keats’ unsystematic skepticism was in this sense most appropriate to his poetic practice.
     Subjectively I have always preferred the concrete and sensual Keats to the abstract idealizing Shelley, the discursive mystic Wordsworth, and the knotty intellectual Coleridge. Keats enjoyed a vogue in the nineteenth century; scenes from his narrative in Spenserian stanzas “The Eve of St. Agnes” were painted repeatedly including works by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Arthur Hughes. Yet the poem today has a mixed reputation and, indeed, Keats did not speak highly of it. To some readers “The Eve of St. Agnes” is confusing, its themes unstable and ill-expressed. One critic has catalogued fifty-nine different readings.  Undeterred, he went on to propose a sixtieth. [2]
     Until recent years the story’s popularity derived from regarding it as a glorification of both heightened romantic love coupled with otherwise purely aesthetic values . Hazlitt says, “the reading of Mr Keat's Eve of Saint Agnes lately made me regret that I was not young again.” [3] Rossetti and the Apostles made Keats their poetic model and his influence through them extends to other pre-Raphaelites and the later Aesthetics and Decadents. The sensual strength of Keats’ work could strike readers as excessive. Hazlitt, for instance, qualifies his admiration for the poet by noting that “the fault of Mr. Keats's poems was a deficiency in masculine energy of style.” [4]
     Still, despite differing value judgments, both admirers and critics agreed on the poem’s character. A late nineteenth century article provides an adequate statement of the prevailing view. “The Eve of St. Agnes is pure and passionate, surprising by its fine excess in color and melody, sensuous in every line, yet free from the slightest taint of sensuality, is unforgettable and unsurpassable as a dream of first love.” [5]
     Only recently have critics noted the highly ambiguous character of Porphyro and the dubious qualities of his admittedly passionate love. [6] Yet nearly every figure of the poem displays the most problematic value. In the very first stanza the reader encounters the beadsman, praying and doing penance for the wicked baron’s family. This man is so weak that he shows the mark of death and in fact soon expires.
     Angela, Madeline’s maid, in spite of her heavenly name, is also tottering on the edge of death. She is in danger morally and spiritually as well as rendering very dubious service to her mistress. When Porphyro asks her aid in gaining access to Madeline’s room, she is unqualified in her disapproval, calling him “cruel,” “impious,” and “wicked.” (XVI) She is, however, “weak in body and soul,” (X) and and suffers “agues in her brain.” (XXI) Porphyro distresses her by threatening to rouse the vicious baronial “foemen” while promising, falsely, that he will not touch the lady. (XVII) Feeling “feeble” and anxious, she gives in. She, like the beadsman praying on behalf of the vicious and violent nobles, has been praying for Porphyro, who now seems a Peeping Tom, a potential rapist, importunate and thoughtless at best. (XVIII)
     The associations of his name might have prepared the reader for his problematic moral status. In the sense of “purple,” the name would simply connote aristocratic origins, but is carries allusive associations as well. Porphyry (or Porphyrius) of Tyre was a neo-Platonist of the third century C.E. who wrote anti-Christian polemics as well as a popular logic textbook, the Isagoge. Keats’ skepticism with regard to religion might links the poet and the ancient philosopher. A more likely association, however is Porphyrion, leader of the rebellious Titans according to Pindar, who was killed during the Gigantomachy. As a subversive figure who challenged Zeus he would be a natural Romantic anti-hero, paralleling the role Porphyro plays in defying the tyrannical lords and pursuing his lady as an eloping outlaw. [7]
     Porphyro’s actions are difficult to defend; to idealize him would seem altogether misguided. It is clear that he acts contrary to the expressed wishes of both Madeline and Angela, thinking only of satisfying his desire. His voyeuristic ambition turns to rape, and Madeline’s flight might be thought her only option once she has had sex with him. He sings a song of “la belle dame sans mercy,” presumably imagining himself in thrall as the persona of his own ballad had been to a supernatural feminine figure, though in fact he is in control in this poem’s narrative. (XXXIII)
     Madeline’s name is a form of Magdalene, and her gospel namesake has, of course, varied associations. Apart from her beauty and eventual piety, according to Luke (8:2) and Mark (13:9), she had had devils cast out of her. Most notoriously, she used to be identified with the “sinner” who washed Christ’s feet (Luke 7:37). and was considered a saved prostitute during the Middle Ages . Unlike Mary Magdalene’s reputation, however, Madeline’s virtue is closely identified with her maidenhood. Her room is “chaste” (XXI) and she is “so pure.” (XXV)
     Whether these associations are relevant to the poem is questionable, but Madeline’s actions are clearly as ambiguous as Porphyro’s. She is, like him, seized by an irresistible passion, though in her case it leads her to focus only on the opportunity to have a vision of her beloved, and thus a sort of heavenly warranty on their relation, on St. Agnes Eve. She is so distracted as to be unable to deal with others and retires to bed where her abstraction remains strong enough for her to fail to notice until Porphyro has joined her. She lives in dream, vision, and fantasy until she realizes what has occurred, at which point she comes to, cries out, “woe is mine” and denounces him as “cruel,” a “traitor,” who has “deceived” her, leaving her “a dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing.” (XXXVII)
     Apart from the names, Keats’ literary allusions are likewise fraught with contradiction. Far from being merely ornamental, they are, in fact, disturbing and reinforce the highly ambiguous value of love. Keats compares the encounter of Porphyro and Madeline to that of Merlin and “his Demon.” (XIX) [8] This is surely a reference to Merlin’s infatuation with Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, the ruler of Avalon, a profoundly ambivalent figure who extracts Merlin’s magical knowledge for her own use and then imprisons him. Sometimes identified or associated with Morgan Le Fay, she nonetheless appears in a heroic light in several episodes, presenting Arthur with Excalibur and serving him in other ways, ultimately assisting in carrying him off to Avalon. Her appearances in the Arthurian narrative occur at significant moments and are often highly conflicted. For instance, she raises Lancelot who cuckolds Arthur. She thickens the plot, as Madeline does in spite of her pronounced passivity.
     Should this cautionary story seem insufficient or thin, Keats a few stanzas later identifies Madeline with Philomel whose story concerns rape, assault, cannibalism. Madeline is described as silent, “As though a tongueless nightingale should swell/ Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.” (XXIII) Earlier Madeline had been so distracted by her amorous obsession as to be insensible to company. Here the image not only compares Madeline to the mythic victim of rape and mutilation, but also suggests that her very silence and inaction could result in her demise.

     Keats so conflates Christian and love imagery that it is unclear whether the characters are deceiving themselves about the propriety of their passions or their love is indeed in some sense holy or they cynically claim holy warrant for their actions to cover guilt. For example, Porphyro addresses Madeline as an “angel,” as “paradise,” (XXVIII) she is “paradise” and as “heaven,” calling himself an “eremite,” but then immediately threatens to climb in bed with her. (XXXI)
     This unstable oscillation of values and character does not arise from carelessness, nor solely from the psychological reality of ambivalence; it is based in Keats’ skepticism. “Negative capability” is doubtless the most celebrated consequence of Keats’ philosophic attitude which entertained “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” particularly in poetic texts. [9] Keats spoke in a similar vein on numerous other occasions. For instance he admitted “I have not one idea of the truth of any of my speculations – I shall never be a Reasoner because I care not to be in the right, when retired from bickering and in a proper philosophical temper.” [10] For him, that is, a “philosophic” temper is one in which he, with the ancient skeptics, must withhold judgment on all issues. Art took on the obligations of religion, proving its authenticity not as revelation confirmed at times by its compelling beauty. “I am sometimes so very skeptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthen [sic] to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance.” [11] Strong emotion could have the same authenticating power. “As Byron says, ‘Knowledge is Sorrow’; and I go on to say that ‘Sorrow is Wisdom’ -- and further for aught we can know for certainty ‘Wisdom is Folly!’ –“ [q] He declared to Fanny Brawne “Love is my Religion.” [12]
     The Keats one’s reality is mental and subjective and thus an expression of imagination. To him "The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth." [13] He criticizes Wordsworth for restricting himself to the "wordsworthian or egotistical sublime" and failing to embrace contradiction. In Keats’ view the poet should be nothing himself and thus be all things, changing like a "camelion" and thus "continually . . . filling some other Body." [14] This is reflected in “The Eve of St. Agnes” by the constant confounding of lived reality with dream, vision, drunkenness, and what Keats called “faery fantasy.” The doubt about what is real within the narrative is reflected in practically every stanza.
     Keats is true to the ancient Pyrrhonians in being skeptical about even his skepticism. He is thus, unlike the atheist Shelley, agnostic in religion. In spite of the unequivocal title of his sonnet “Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition,” he does not after all condemn Christianity outright. Though the sermon be “horrid,” binding men in “some black spell,” leading them to neglect the joys of life, still all “should” properly “feel a damp, because of the “chill” of mortality (“ as from a tomb”). The procession of the doomed are “sighing” and “wailing,” though in the end oblivion will be redeemed by beauty, the “many glories of immortal stamp.” Here, though Christianity be mistaken, it is symbolically apt, since it conforms to the needs of people seeking an accessible route to eternity.
     In the end the reader, like Porphyro and Madeline, must flee “into the storm” (XLII)of the world, the storm of suffering and uncertainty, where they and everyone else is motivated by ego and by selflessness and by the two so bound together that the opposites can scarcely be distinguished. The steely sky above may seem beneficent, hostile, and indifferent by turns. Though one may count on neither truth or virtue, one always has art. The enumeration of concrete signs of the cold and dark at the outset (the owl, the hare, the huddled flock in stanza I) or the magnificent table Porphyro sets provide fetishes of beauty, compelling in their appeal yet always about to vanish before one’s eyes. Only the written reality persists, but who could resist it?

“candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, inct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez, and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarkand to cedar’d Lebanon.
(XXX)

     Here indeed we have plenty. Porphyro wins his beloved and succeeds after all in the conjurer’s trick of holding “water in a witch’s sieve.” (XIV) Their egos may disqualify them as ideal romantic lovers, he through his impetuosity, she through passivity, but the sort of mental fancies, the poetry, they each weave to construct their flawed love is likely their best strategy in a fallen world that cannot be understood or controlled.



1. The term, describing Spenser, is attributed to Lamb by Leigh Hunt in Imagination and Fancy.

 
2. For the list of fifty-nine readings, see Chapter 3 of Jack Stillinger, Reading the Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction ( New York: Oxford UP, 1999). The same critic’s “The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Scepticism in “The Eve of St. Agnes” in Studies in Philology (vol. 58, No. 3, Jul., 1961) provides the newer interpretation in which the poem’s arch-Romantic aura is demolished, imagination is skeptically interrogated, and Porphyro appears as little short of a villain. Stillinger is excellent in providing textual evidence, particularly tracing image groups, but in the end, I choose to propose a sixty-first thematic analysis.

 
3. In “On Reading Old Books.” Hazlitt elaborates identifying “young” love and the aesthetic sense. “The beautiful and tender images [in “The Eve of St. Agnes”] conjured up, ‘come like shadows -- so depart.’ The ‘tiger-moth's wings,’ which he has spread over his rich poetic blazonry, just flit across my fancy; the gorgeous twilight window which he has painted over again in his verse, to me ‘blushes’ almost in vain ‘with blood of queens and kings.’ I know how I should have felt at one time in reading such passages; and that is all. The sharp luscious flavour, the fine aroma is fled, and nothing but the stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left.”

 
4. In "On Effeminacy of Character."

5. “The Influence of Keats” in The Century (October 1895, vol. L, no. 6) by Henry Van Dyke. Among the many contemporary examples of the same reductive analysis is the Cliffnotes site which says in part, “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.” See

 http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/k/keats-poems/summary-and-analysis/the-eve-of-st-agnes.

6. See in particular Jack Stillinger’s work noted above.

7. Marcia Gilbreath in “The Etymology of Porphyro’s Name in Keats’ ‘Eve of St. Agnes” (Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 37, 1988) argues convincingly for Porphyrion.

 
8. The possessive suggests either a psychomachia (the demon inside his head) or an aggressive sort of love which seeks to dominate the beloved.

9. Letter to George and Thomas Keats, on 21 December 1817.

10. Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 13 March, 1818.

 
11. Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818.

12. Letter to Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819

13. Letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817.

 
14. Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818.