ENG341 - Romantic Literature

John Keats - "The Eve of St. Agnes"

The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in ' The Eve of St. Agnes' - Jack Stillinger

Keats, Walter Jackson Bate

• Some obvious contrasts are made in the poem: the lovers' youth and vitality are set against the old age and death associated with Angela and the Beadsman; the warmth and security of Madeline's chambers are contrasted with the coldness and hostility of the rest of the castle and the icy storm outside; the innocence and purity of young love are played off against the sensuousness of the rrevellers elsewhere in the castle.
• The poem seems to dramatize certain ideas that Keats held a year or two earlier about the nature of the imagination, the relationship between this world and the next, and the progress of an individual's ascent toward spiritualization.
• According to the popular superstition connected with St. Agnes' Eve, a young maiden who fasts and neither speaks nor looks about before she goes to bed may get sight of her futue husband in a dream. Madeline follows this prescription, dreams of her lover, then seems to awaken out of her dream to find him present in her chamber.
• Lines 136-139: The full foce of "stratagem" comes to be felt in the poem - a ruse, an artifice, a trick for deceiving. For Angela, the deception of Madeline by good angels is funny; but Porphyro's is another kind of deception, and no laughing matter. She is startled, and calls him "cruel", "impious", "wicked" (140-143); the harshness of the last line of her speech emphasizes her reaction: 'Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem' (144).
• Lines 168-171: Strengthens rather than dispels our suspicion that Porphyro is up to no good.
• Line 257: Porphyro's call for a "drowsy Morphean amulet" - a sleep-inducing charm to prevent Madeline's awakening when the music bursts forth into the room. Earlier he has wished to win Madeline while "pale enchantment held her sleepy-eyed" (169). Here he would assist "pale enchantment" with a "Morphean amulet."
• It may be best to think of Porphyro as representing, like the storm that comes up simultaneously with his conquest, the ordinary cruelties of life in the world.
• There are reasons why we ought not entirely sympathize with Madeline. She is a victim of deception, to be sure, but of deception not so much by Porphyro as by herself and the superstition she trusts in.
• Serves to introduce a preoccupation of all the major poems of 1819: that an individual ought not to lose touch with the realities of this world.
• In the poems of 1819, Keats's most explicit, unequivocal statement about the conditions of human life comes in the Ode to Melancholy. Life in the world, we are told in the third stanza, is an affair in which pleasure and pain are inseparably mixed. Beauty and the melancholy awareness that beauty must die, joy and the simultaneous fading of joy, "aching Pleasure" and its instant turning to poison - all are inextricably bound up in life. There is no pleasure without pain, and, conversely, if pain is sealed off, so also is pleasure.