The Eve of St. Agnes: An Analysis

The Eve of St. Agnes: An Analysis:

             The Eve of St. Agnes was first published in 1820 along with La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Isabella and the five famous odes and Lamia and Hyperion. The story narrated in the poem is simple one. It is the story of the elopement of two lovers – Porphyro and Madeline who belong to two different families hostile to each other. After the feast of St. Agnes, Madeline prepares to dream of her future lover. Porphyro steals into her bedroom and hides. As she dreams, he awakens her and she sees him in a living dream. Then Porphyro elopes with Madeline on St. Agnes’ eve. It is “a story where-in something of Romeo and Juliet is mixed with something of young Lochinvar.” Though the story is simple and has been dealt in many poems and dramas, Keats with his mature craftsmanship distills the entire medieval spirit of romance and chivalry in this poem. As a romantic poet, he with his treatment of the theme of love, use of sensual images, pictorial quaity and rich musical effect leaves a high watermark in this poem. According to Drinkwater, the poem “must be reckoned on the whole, the most splendid of Keats’ poem.”

            The poem deals with the theme of romantic and idealistic love. Porphyro, the lover, has taken great risk to meet her lady love. Madeline also wishes to dream of her future husband on the eve of St. Agnes. Their love is presented as something divine and unearthly. Madeline is depicted as an angel without wings: “She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,/ Save wings, for heaven.” She is a deity for Porphro and he is her devotee as he says: “ Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite.” Madeline,too, has deep affection for Porphyo as she says to him:

“Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,

For if thy diest, my Love, I know not where to go."

But the warmth of their youthful love is always threatened by a sense of uncertainity and doubt. Porphyro appears to be cold and pale as contrasted to the bright and shining Porphyro of Madeline’s dream. At the moment of ultimate consummation of their love, “Love's alarum” is heard in the “pattering the sharp sleet.” The warmth and cosiness of the room is contrasted with the bitter cold and stormy environment outside. The poem is structured around a series of oppositions of dark and light, warm and cold, permanence and mutability. The most central of these is the opposition between dream and reality. The world of young lovers might be thought of as a dream world, a world a rose may shut “and be a bud again.” But we are often reminded, they actually live in a world where roses can only wither and die. If their love is to be validated, they must leave the protection of the warm and magical room and go out to face the storm. In Ode to a Nightingale, the poet, too,  after his brief sojourn in the world of Nightingale says:  “the fancy cannot cheat so well.” As a poet of “negative capability”, capability of mysteries and uncertainty, it is typical of Keats that he can hardly keep faith in the values of the ideal world though he desperately craves for it. That’s why some critics are at a loss to decide whether the poem celebrates the youthful love of romance or subverts it.

            The poem encapsulates the entire spirit of medievalism with old castle, gothic art, superstition, chivalry and heroism. Above all a sense of mystery and wonder, an important aspect of medievalism, pervades the entire poem. The poem opens with the picture of bitterly cold night. An ancient beadsman returns from his prayer through an empty chapel. He hears the sound of music coming from a medieval castle but continues on his way to say prayer for the soul of the sinner. In the castle, a celebratory feast is held on St. Agnes eve. All the Knights and Barons have arrived. There is a popular medieval superstition that on the eve of St. Agnes one who performs certain rite will have the vision of her future husband. Believing this Madeline goes to bed preparing her mind to dream of her future husband. Potphyro, the lover, also makes hazardous journey to meet his beloved Madeline in the castle of his enemy. Thus a complete medieval environment is depicted.

            The poet not only makes use of typically medieval incidents, but also mentions medieval arts and crafts to give a medieval setting to the narrative. He refers to the plume, tiara, carved angel and the gothic window. His subtle description evokes the sheer beauty of the multi-coloured window of a medieval castle:

“A casement high and triple­arch'd there was,

            All garlanded with carven imag'ries

            Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot­grass,

            And diamonded with panes of quaint device,”

Then there are medieval curtains, the cravings of angels near the cornice. All these are described very clearly. Moreover, “(T)he rich perfume and the perfect silence of Madeline’s room, the fine description of the gothic chapel and the various ceremonies connected with the festival of St. Agnes’ eve all combine to create an atmosphere of medieval romance.”

            The Eve of St. Agnes is a rich feast to all the senses – the eyes, the ear, the tongue, the nose and the touch. The pictorial description, rich in colour, makes an excellent appeal to the sense sight. Goser in this respect remarks, “It was an axiom with Keats that poetry should surprise us by a fine excess. The pictures of Keats are all aglow with colour, not always very accurate painter’s colour but colour which captivates the senses.” His pictorial description of the gothic window and art appeals to our eyes. Description of the sumptuous foods and drinks appeals to our different senses:

            “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;

Madeline’s bodice is fragrant and her bed is lavendered. The description of Madeline’s body and her undressing is sensuous enough:

            “Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;

            Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;

            Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees

            Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:

            Half­hidden, like a mermaid in sea­weed,”

There are a plenty of sounds that appeal to our ear. In Madeline’s house a feast is going on. The silver trumpets are being played upon. There is also the music of clarion, the kettle-drum and the clarinet. Porphhyro himself plays upon the lute in chords. Keats appeals to multiple senses with a single expression which is often called synesthesia. Following line is a remarkable example: “Filling the chilly room with perfume light.”

            Keats was also a pictorial artist. Like Pr-Raphaelite poets, he portrays a detailed picture of what he describes in the poem. In The Eve of St. Agnes, a complete picture of a cold night is depicted with the images of frozen grass, the limping hare, the shivering owl and the numb finger of the beadsman. Like a miniaturist artist, Keats draws the effect of the reflection of moonlight upon different parts of Madeline’s body. Here he makes beautiful use of colour:

            “Rose­bloom fell on her hands, together prest,

            And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

            And on her hair a glory, like a saint”

Equally important is the sense of chiaroscuro (light and shade) in the following description:

            “Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

             And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,”

Then the moon sets and all is dark:

            “'Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw­blown sleet:

             "This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"

            'Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:”

Apart from the detailed pictures of the above lines, there are pictures created by single phrases and lines. The following are some of them: “azure-lidded sleep”, “Thy beauty's shield, heart­shap'd and vermeil dyed” etc.    

              

Ode to a Nightingale: A Critical Analysis

Ode to a Nightingale: A Critical Analysis: 

Ode to a Nightingale is one of the famous odes of John Keats. It addresses a bird, Nightingale which stands for an ideal world where everything exists in a perfect order. It may symbolise the pure or unmixed joy. It may also stand for an artist and its song for a perfect piece of art. But the poem is structured around a series of binaries of ideal and real, joy and pain, intensity of feeling and numbness or lack of feeling and life and death.  The poet wavers between these binaries throughout the poem. Even at the end of the poem he is doubtful of the existence of the ideal world of the Nightingale as well as his imaginative flight into that world. His conflict and doubt may be attributed to his ‘negative capability’, capability of being in mysteries, uncertainties and in doubt. This conflict forms the heart of the poem and makes it more appealing to the reader.

                The poem begins with the poet listening to the song of Nightingale. His senses become numb and dull due to the excess of feelings of joy that Nightingale is pouring forth in his song: “MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pain/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk”. The poet compares this state of numbness to a state of having drunk hemlock, a poisonous European herb, or consumed an opiate and “Lethe wards sunk.” Lethe is an allusion to one of the five rivers of the Ancient Greek underworld, Hades. The Ancient Greeks believed that a soul drank from Lethe before reincarnation to eradicate the memory of their previous life. The repetition of ‘s’ in ‘a drowsy numbness pains my sense,’ combined with the long ‘o’ and ‘a’ sounds, sonically reflects the speaker’s soporific state .The poet’s ambivalent emotional response, which constitutes a mixture of pain and pleasure, to the song of Nightingale is possibly due to the imperfect nature of human mind and its inability to experience the absolute happiness. That’s why perhaps P.B. Shelley says in To a Skylark :  “We look before and after, / And pine for what is not:/  Our sincerest laughter/ With some pain is fraught;/ Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”.

              In the next stanza the poet longs for wine to “fade away” in the mystic world of Nightingale. The description of the beautifully picturesque, sensuous and appeals to our different senses. This wine not only consists in all the goodness of flowers and country green but also it evokes the entire festive mood merry making in an idyllic village: “Tasting of Flora and the country-green,/Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!”. In the next stanza the poet stops his imaginative flight for a while and comes back to the real world of “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” what Nightingale “among the leaves hast never known”.  Here youth and beauty are transitory and thinking only causes despair. So the poet decides to escape into the world of Nightingale again not by dint of wine but by poetic imagination, “ the viewless wings of poesy”. Now the poet reaches the world of nightingale. In spite of the presence of the full moon, it is dimly lighted because of the dense green forest which casts “verdurous gloom” and allows a meagre amount of moon light to reach the earth through its “mossy ways”.

                  The 5^th  Stanza is the climax of the poet’s imaginative flight.  It is a rich description of the speaker’s surroundings. It is so dark that he identifies the plants and flowers around him through their scents, employing olfactory imagery. But the stanza gives the impression of the juxtaposition of beauty and death as Keats refers to an “embalmed darkness”, “Fast fading violet covered up in leaves” and the allusion to the funeral flower of musk-rose. Keats seems to be telling us that death does not mean the end of beauty for his soul. Death maybe is not just a release from the earthly confinements and mortal pains but also the way to perpetuate the moment of ecstasy. This is clearly expressed in the next stanza. The intensification of contrasting feelings of pain and pleasure turns into his death wish: “I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,/ To take into the air my quiet breath;/ Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” .But the poet’s attitude to death is ambivalent as he realises that death will not bring him closer to nightingale. It leads the poet to non-existence, inability to feel the bird's ecstasy:  “Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—/ To thy high requiem become a sod.”

            The meditative trance with which the poem begins and which reaches its peak in the fourth and fifth stanzas and that starts declining in the sixth, continues in the stanza VII through the mundane images of "hungry generations". The poet again compares the nightingale’s care free state of existence to his present one, in which “hungry generations tread” each other for survival. Nightingales’s song also soothed agony of the distressed soul to different persons (Ancient emperor, clown, Biblical homesick Ruth and captive princess of the Middle age) at different times in the past. Though they sought inspiration from the song of nightingale, they could never be united with nightingale remained at their solitary state of his existence. The solitary state of the existence of the captive princess reminds the poet that of his own, the unbridgeable distance between the poet and the nightingale. The widening of this eternal gap is marked by the slow rhythm of the verses towards the end of the poem.

           This decline, this awareness and awakening will be completed with the transition between this penultimate stanza and the last as the word "forlorn" (l.79 and l.80) closes the former and opens the latter with a change in its meaning, the second one referring to the dreamer, now back to his "sole self”(l.72), to the physical and real world, and the Romantic flight of imagination not being sustained any more..  "Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well" (l.73) It is the end of the poet’s exaltation. That stanza VIII begins with the poet bidding farewell to the nightingale. The bird has ceased to be a symbol and is again the actual bird the poet heard in stanza I, closing in a perfect circle the poem. The bird flies away to another spot to sing, but he cannot follow it as he had hoped; he had only momentarily been separated from himself by its song. Even as he listens, the melody fades into the distance like an illusion, slowly. The end of the dream, the return to reality is also accompanied with a hard awareness as a painful pilgrimage that the Ode has been: the knowledge of the limitation of the power of imagination which is identified with the nightingale and that parallelism is made complete when imagination departs the poet at the same time the nightingale does.

John Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci : A Critical Analysis

La Belle Dame sans Merci is a ballad, a medieval genre revived by the romantic poets. As a ballad was usually written to be sung or recited by the common people, its very form demands a simple and straightforward narrative in an equally simple language.  Though the poem offers an apparently simple story of a Knight abandoned by his lady love, a very common motif of many love lyrics in English literature, the poem is full of doubts and misgivings about the nature of love spoken of here. Moreover a feeling of frustration pervades the entire poem. Behind this simple narrative structure the poem is highly symbolic in portraying love as a self-destructive, self-consuming passion (as Shakespeare has done in many of his sonnets) with suggestive images. The poem can be also taken as an illustration of the unbridgeable gap between the ideal and the real, the ideal mystic world of the elfish lady and the desolate reality of the Knight.

            The frame narrator of the poem asks the Knight at arms the cause of his present state of misery. Then the knight proceeds to tell his sad story of love. He met a lady “Full beautiful—a faery’s child” in the meadow and fell in love with her. Her wild eyes made a hypnotic spell on him. While admiring the lady he made a garland for her. The lady sang an extremely enchanting song, a “faery’s song”. She treated him with sweet roots, honey and nourishing dew. She reacted with great love. Though the Knight does not know the strange language of the lady, he was sure of her confession of her love for him: "And sure in language strange she said—/ “I love thee true.” These lines cast doubt upon this mysterious woman and her nature of love. It also indicates that the Knight’s assertion comes only out of his intense passion for the lady. Then the lady takes the knight to her faery cave and weeps and sighs. The reason of her unhappiness may be her realisation of the fact that they can never be united as they are from different worlds. Otherwise it may be the pretension of a mischievous elf. The knight soothes her agony with kisses. Then the knight falls asleep by the magic spell and horrific dream follows. The pale Knights and warriors come in his dream and declare that he has been enslaved by the beautiful woman without mercy. It appears from their “death-pale” faces that they also been cheated and betrayed by the lady. He wakes up to find him “…on the cold hill’s side”, symbolising a life devoid of warmth of love. This is the reason why the knight at arms explains that he is here when it is extremely cold and nobody even no animal is seen outside.

                  The setting of the poem is the coming of winter suggested by the images like withered sedge, lake without birds, saturated granary of the squirrel and empty field after harvest etc. The cold, desolate and empty condition of the environment at the coming of winter reflects the inner world of the knight which is lonely and devoid of the warmth of love. Lily which signifies death, “anguish moist and fever dew” that suggest the feverish death -like condition of the knight and  the “fading rose” that signifies dying spirit of the knight are all negative images that helps to build the gloomy atmosphere of the poem. At the end the cold hill’s side where the knight roams symbolises the knight’s own life devoid of warmth love.

             Written in the traditional ballad stanzas of four lines each, the form seems to be perfect for stating the unhappy existence of the knight. The sad undertone, the mournful elegiac note is obviously as well as effectively carried on through the free flowing movement of the stanzas.

                Keats as we know is famous for being the poet of negative capability, the capability of being in mysteries, uncertainties and in doubt. That is why in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, he comes down to reality after having flight into the realm of the Nightingale, the ideal existence for him where everything exists in perfect order. In La Belle Dame sans Merci the Knight too meets with hard reality after flight to the realm of supreme satisfaction in love.

             Keats as Romantic poet shows a love medievalism. In many of his poem he idealised the  Middle Age. The Eve of St. Agnes is such an example. Though the poem is shaped around a series of intense contrast of cold and warm, of dark and white, of hardness and softness, of cruelty and love and though sometime it appears the negative images make stronger sway on the paradigm of the poem, yet the hero and heroine Porphyro and Madeline reach the destination for which they crave. The end shows uncertainties as to the future of these two, but we can never doubt the oneness of heart and the warmth of love of the hero and the heroine. But the present poem deconstructs the Romantic assumption concerning the aspect of medievalism.