When invited to revisit a favourite piece of English literature for this edition of Sofia I didn’t hesitate for a moment about what to choose. It had to be Keats’, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, a poem which has enchanted me from when I first encountered it in school as a young teenager. What hadn’t immediately occurred to me when I began my revisit were two happy coincidences: The first was the realisation that January 20th, the evening before Dinah’s copy deadline, when I would be putting final touches to this piece, was indeed St. Agnes’ Eve, and the second, that this poem, written in January 1819 (although not published until 1820) is celebrating its bicentenary this year – and this month too!
‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is a narrative poem of 42 Spenserian stanzas, set, unashamedly, in a highly romanticised Middle Ages. Keats, being of the second wave of Romantic poets, writing as the eighteenth century merged into the nineteenth, was exploring the experience of visions, heightened emotion and free-ranging imagination, whilst looking nostalgically and selectively back to the medieval world of troubadours’ chansons and courtly love. In doing so he was also reviving often quaint and archaic vocabulary and spelling.
St. Agnes’ Eve was one of several related festivals traditionally celebrated by girls and young unmarried women in a number of European countries. In England, these included the baking of a Dumb or Dump Cake, the ‘dumb’ being a corruption of ‘doom’ or fate. This was an ‘all girls together’ fun activity, albeit one with strict rules. Each girl would break off a small piece of the cake and place it under her pillow, and if she then went to bed without looking behind her she would hope to see in her dreams a vision of her husband-to-be.
St. Agnes herself is the patron saint of virgins. She died a martyr in fourth-century Rome, having been saved by a miraculous thunderstorm from what threatened to be an all-night gang-rape in a brothel. In early 1819, Keats aged 21 was still sexually attracted to Isabella Jones before their intimacy gradually cooled to close friendship after the arrival in the April of Fanny Brawne at Wentworth House. It is thought that it was Isabella who suggested St. Agnes’ Eve to Keats as a suitable subject for a romantic poem.
In the original version of the poem Keats emphasised the young lovers’ sexuality, but his publishers, who feared outrage from a prurient public, persuaded him to tone down the eroticism. Keats complied. However his efforts were such that, thankfully, enough emotional colour and suggestive language got through the net for a tantalising build-up through the verses to a satisfactory climax, seven stanzas from the end of the poem – at least for the reader with a fecund imagination.
To the poem itself: Who could better Keats for an opening stanza? ‘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 woolly 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.’
We are catapulted immediately into another world, yet one to which we can strangely relate because we can, at very least, identify with the freezing weather so evocatively depicted. We move from the cold natural world outside the castle to the human world within, with the beadsman – and then in the following stanza, Angela (as we later learn her name is), the sympathetic old woman helping Porphyro, the lover, to reach his sweetheart, contrasting with the ‘barbarian hordes / Hyena foemen’, as the brawling revellers in the hall are later described.
We find ourselves accompanying Porphyro on his dreamlike progress through the castle. A favourite stanza of mine is number 40 which describes in exquisite sensual detail the sweetmeats Porphyro brings out of the closet in Madeline’s bedroom: ‘And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, / In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d / While he forth from the closet brought a heap / Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; / With jellies soother than the creamy curd, / And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; / Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d / From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one, / From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.’
This delicious verse, whose last four lines remind me of lines in Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’, is just one of so many which further come to life when read aloud. I haven’t space to burrow more deeply into the symbolism, language and many other aspects of this magical poem. All I can do is warmly recommend a revisit of your own.
Penny Mawdsley is the Convenor of the Merseyside and scattered North Wales SOF Group. She is a retired teacher.