University of Cape Town – ELL2015S

Peter Anderson

17 October 2015

‘Making Love’:
The Evocation of Romantic Materialism in John Keats’s ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’

“The power of Keats as poet and humanist is in an apotheosis of the human senses.” – Harold Bloom in The Visionary Company (1961: 369)

“[T]he whole enterprise [of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’] is ‘hazardous’ because it is committed to the belief that engaging in fantasy, when it is responsible and self- respecting, can help us to live in the world of fact; the essential tact and precariousness are that the fantasy must incorporate a recognition of fact such as will make it clear that we are neither to feel a disabling guilt at imagining such innocent contemplation nor think that out in real life we could retain innocence in acting so.” – Christopher Ricks in Keats and Embarrassment (1974: 90)

““I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours” – I said that”- Bob Dylan in his ‘Talking World War III Blues’

The legacy of John Keats is writ in adjectives; of which the most accurate and least used is, perhaps, ‘cinematic’. To speak of his ‘Romantic Vision’ is always to articulate it as vision, which is to say as the reification of desire through language. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the supreme erotic heft of his ‘ironical quest romance’ of 1819, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’. Here is a poem you’d pay to see on a big screen: a perfectly lit Shakespearean swashbuckler, presented in sumptuous technicolour, ranging the entire spectrum of heroic devotion, finished with a flourish of sex and running. Yet neither ‘The Eve’s’ story nor its overtones bear the majority of Keats’s attention or genius, and so they shouldn’t untowardly distract our focus either. Instead, we must engage Keats’s own private partaking of the Romantic Imagination through what is most characteristic in the moment of his performed expression. We have to know – and enjoy – how he does things to us with words. 

Keats is perhaps most rightfully compared to Shakespeare in the regard that through even his most immature verse he is never unaware of the lived-in textual experience of his readers. He caresses our ears with the subtle announcement that he is doing so. As such, the sensual beauty of his language is anything but an escape from reality. It is, for sure, a yearning for transcendence, but such a state, Keats always intimates, is only achievable through an undertaking of intercourse with material existence.1 Thus Keats is the worldliest of the Romantic poets while of course forever remaining the youngest. The excess of the world – the excess that is the world – is then what Keats seeks to righteously embody, against dogma, shame, false tact and all the other forces preventing humanity from communion with the Real. Nothing, however, will stop us from meeting ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ at the heart of things.

The Romantics, especially Keats, loved Love. Our idea of Love is, one can argue, a commodified version of theirs. This may seem obvious given their collective term but it is surprisingly overlooked as a basic inheritance. ‘Romance’ has been present since Arthurian days at least, but the notion of living Romantically, as a for-itself ideal, is a signature of Keats’s own time, revolutionary as it was in every other respect too. Such

1. “The beauty of visible things carried Keats into ecstasy, and this was the goal of his desires, since it explained the extraordinary hold which objects of sense had on him and justified his wish to pass beyond them to something permanent and universal.” (Bowra, 1961: 16)

a shift of emphasis, from Love as holy precept to Love as personal categorical pursuit, partly serves as both the context and substance of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’: “It seems fairly certain that [the latter] had some impulse from Keats’s falling in love, and possibly from his anticipation of marriage. The poem was created January-February 1819, and Keats seems to have declared his love to Fanny Brawne on December 25, 1818, a few months after meeting her.”2 Let us face the fact that the poem is unremittingly horny. We know it concerns Porphyro, a dashing young noble who, “with heart on fire” (75) and the help of sexless elders, sneaks like Romeo under the cover of revels into the home of his sworn enemies so as to watch, ravish and slip away with his virginal beloved Madeline.3 In a formal sense too though, the work is an act of continuous union. The stanza chosen (Iambic pentameter, 9 lines, ABABBCBCC) is from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene4, thus binding the modern and the medieval in synthesized Romance. The rhyme scheme itself is quite entwined: a pair of evenly spaced couplets echo each other’s simultaneous linkage and separation, like a pair of lips always about to meet. Even the sounds of each couplet are, for the most part, examples of lengthy, rounded assonance which bring together and push out our lips in a kind of puckering5 (‘resort’-‘sport’ (67-8), ‘unshorn’-‘morn’ (71-2) ‘doors’-‘implores’ (76-7) etc.). This structural conceit is its own form of voluptuousness, and it means to thoroughly intoxicate and seduce us. So, to an extent, if it succeeds, we do lose our bearings: “A sober summary of the plot makes it sound preposterous, and any account of the poem which accentuates its narrative is bound to

2. (Bloom, 1961: 369) Though it should be remembered that another beautiful woman, Mrs. Isabella Jones, made perhaps an equal contribution to it, at least in that she first suggested the myth of St. Agnes’ Eve as a necessary distraction for Keats from his floundering work on ‘Hyperion’ and possibly that Keats still bore a repressed desire for her while he was composing it.                                                                                                         3. Keats himself was in no way a virgin at this time but he was still young and healthy enough to consciously know the perils of satisfaction.
4. Keats’s infatuation with Spenser on just this account deserves a far grander investigation than I can provide but the present opportunity should not be lost to mention Keats’s teacher Charles Cowden Clarke’s anecdote of him as a teenager coming across the phrase “sea-shouldering whales” in The Faerie Queene and subsequently “hoist[ing] himself up, and look[ing] burly and dominant, as he said, ‘What an image that is – sea-shouldering whales.’” (Quoted in (Perkins, 1967: 1114)) If primary evidence were needed to show that Keats lived through the physicality of language, there it is.                                                    5. And do I need add what else a held ‘O’ sound connotes in a charged mind?

emphasise its Gothic parentage in a seriously disabling way.”6 This is not a criticism of Keats. Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton weren’t the most realistic writers themselves. Fantasy makes its own rules but the greater game is won through an exemplification of content in the glories of style. ‘The Eve’, as mentioned, was a distraction for Keats. He was tired and had no great enthusiasm for the genre of poetry he was writing in when he composed it. But only as such could he abuse and reconfigure its antique formal precepts to reinvigorate it as a turn of slightly mad wet dreaming. In this, Keats grasps and expresses, as Christopher Ricks puts it, that “though it is not true that in dreams anything goes, it is true that it is exceptionally difficult to say why not everything does go.”7 One can also say much the same thing of the Romantic vision of Love.

Keats’s imaginative freedom finds its clearest outworking in his devilish attention to detail. And since this pedantry is so often demonstrated in the service of fantastical narratives (and especially so with ‘The Eve’), his technique conspires to deposit the reader in a ‘middle state’ of extreme feeling, where the malleable figures of thought and desire are given complete portrayal. To return to his particularly ‘cinematic’ quality, Keats constantly presents us with word-images that entail within themselves all the faculties of sense and meaning he cares to associate with a particular state of being. On St. Agnes’ Eve, goes the old wives’ tale, virgins who prayed and slept naked in honour of their patron saint would

… have visions of delight
And soft adorings from their loves receive                                                                             Upon the honey’d middle of the night (47-9).

A “honey’d middle”, as well as being the sweet-sounding centre of the line and stanza, is equally a time, a place and a taste, just as “upon” makes no distinction between a particular hour and a particular body. As it is, the suggestion of mutually pleasurable cunnilingus is both explicit and not, with the girl’s identity also

6. (Motion, 1997: 339)

7. (1974: 94)

compounded with that of “the night”, such that reality itself is only the becoming of happy experience. Even more explicitly euphemistic is Stanza XXXVI:

Beyond a mortal man impassion’d far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,                                                                        Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star                                                                           Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose;                                                                          Into her dream he melted, as the rose                                                                            Blendeth its odour with the violet, –
Solution sweet…
(316-22).

This is the moment of both Porphyro’s and the poem’s transcendence. The instant of clearest materiality – when Madeline’s and the poem’s ‘voluptuous accents’ have finally strained Porphyro’s and our own potential for feeling to breaking point – coincides with a fall into fragrant and flagrant formlessness. Sex is equated to mutual dreaming, which seems as collaborative a fantasy as poetry itself. And the ‘solution sweet’ is the lovely, necessary answer to the entire situation and a good description of its own construction as a phrase – a simple combination of delectable words.8

If we prefer these examples over illimitable others, this is not entirely due to dirty- mindedness. The moments of clearest delicacy of phrasing are also the most overwhelming moments of sensual immersion. For Keats in ‘The Eve’, ambiguity seems synonymous with climax. Otherwise, the poem is mostly comprised of vocally embellished phrases, as alliteration and assonance together treat our hearing like a sex-organ9:

In the retired quiet of the night
(274)
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon

8. Finally, ‘standing erect, red and ‘like a throbbing star’’ is a description that needs no explication.
9. Poetry’s supremacy over Cinema – in many eyes though not mine – could be asserted here in the fact that the former gracefully combines the virtues of vocalization and reference while the latter functions perfectly well in its ‘Silent’ form but does portray a more direct surface encounter with the Real.

(267)
The music, yearning like a God in pain (56)
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart                                                                        Made purple riot: then doth he propose (137-8)

The sounds of words become their referents and vice versa. Thus, complexity is the point of Keats’s enterprise. He desires a richness free from reductionism, a degree of reaction beyond compartmentalization. Through the basic confusion of synaesthesia he attempts to achieve a kind of “purified and liberated scopophilia”10, which is to say a voyeurism that essentializes humanity and materializes spirit. The beauty of the physical world is enough in itself, he believes, to inspire the individual imagination to the vanquishing of propriety. And so, ‘The Eve’ is, in every sense, a gross poem. Like copulation itself, experiencing it is always to feel on the brink of discomfort. But being the master of oxymoronic sensation, Keats makes us feel joyful in our disturbance and free in our physicality. We are always both Porphyro and Madeline, lover and beloved, subject and object.

This brings us to the nub of Keats’s poetical character in ‘The Eve’: his foundational delight in the pleasure of dialectics and his own dialectic of pleasure. As it can only be known in the material world of appearances, the worship of pleasure is seen as a state of mind that makes the secular sacred and immanently binds reception and creativity. For Keats, if there is a world at all before or in spite of Imagination then it is a cold, barren and unnatural shadowplay like the one inhabited by Angela and the Beadsman. Their equally sexless and despairing separation in the poem is the extreme demonstrative contrast to Madeline and Porphyro’s ecstatic bondage and thus it serves as both their story’s prelude and afterword.11 While the latter couple’s fate is left open and untold after their climactic escape, it is made emphatically clear in the poem’s final lines that

10. (Ricks, 1974: 89)
11. “[The Beadsman’s] icy faith frames the passionate center of the poem, where warmth and sexual passion glow more brightly against [his] death-in-life.” (Bloom, 1961: 370)

… Angela the old
Died palsy-twitched, with meager face deform;                                                                  The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold. (375-8)

And even the noble revelers from whom the lovers had made their escape are depicted as later being “long be-nightmar’d.” (375) Neither the route of humble penitence nor that of mere consumption is preferable then, at least if you desire an unpredictable life that might encompass true pleasure. The question apparently comes down to how you choose to objectify yourself. If you deny the body, attempting to “tak[e] flight for heaven … without a death” (8), you are doomed to join “[t]he sculptur’d dead … / [e]mprison’d in black, purgatorial rails” (14-5) or to become “[a] poor, weak, palsy- stricken, churchyard thing” (155), but if you choose to bare yourself before another in “empty dress” (245), as Madeline does, or to prostrate yourself “pale as smooth- sculptured stone” (297), like Porphyro, then you have ostensibly chosen your own possession by another and so your ultimate oppression coincides with your highest agency. This philosophy is made most explicit in the contrast between Stanzas XXXV and XXXVI, in which Madeline is awoken from her dream of Porphyro’s coming only to be utterly disappointed by his objective reality:

… “but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,                                                                        Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;                                                                                And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How chang’d thou art! How pallid, chill, and drear! (307-11)

It is this outburst that, after a breathless pause, finally ‘impassions’ Porphyro “[b]eyond a mortal man” (316) and so ensues their love-making. Only in his most earthly incarnation before Madeline can Porphyro exceed himself and aspire to a state of utter subjectivity through love. This ‘holy’ form of relations is Keats’s application of the Christian values of charity and self-sacrifice to the here irredeemably physical domain of the erotic. By secularizing consummation, Keats then recreates it as an act of pure fantasy. He includes and combines the erotic and poetic imaginations within materiality but as powers which nonetheless point beyond it towards an even more vital world of spiritual essence worthy of worship. As such, ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is perhaps Keats’s most affecting hymn to the aesthetic realm, bridging beautifully as it does both the Physical and the Ideal worlds. Throughout the poem he showcases sex as the triumph of life over death through the loving embrace of mortality, and we are very willingly seduced into following him all the way.

At a necessary distance now, we can notice that ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ exemplifies Keats’s brilliance at being and believing ‘both’. “[His] mind was [indeed] the least dogmatic it is possible to be”12 but this does not mean he bore indifferent thoughts; precisely the opposite in fact. He was in love with simultaneity, with the fact that he knew he possessed an intellect that could cherish and relish the presence of ironies in everything. Thus he could, among many other feats of imagination, assign the greatest spiritual significance to material beauty, find the highest degree of realist expression in the composition of Romantic Fantasies, excite his reader’s constant enjoyment in his most common phrase, and even confuse every sense as just part of a freewheeling experiment in intimate affect. He wanted to bring beauty into the world because doing so would assist in the further appreciation of its nature and presence.13And in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ he eminently achieves this “through the intense manifestation of all phenomena as being truly themselves.”14 This inherent generosity of spirit is Keats’s own gift. He addresses us always, as he addresses himself, with all-encompassing love and understanding.

Word Count: 2179

12. (Perkins, 1967: 1116)
13. “His art, though not didactic, is concerned to educate our thoughts, feelings, and sympathies, and it does so by being exemplary.” (Ricks, 1974: 95)
14. (Bloom, 1961: 371-2)

Reference List:
Bloom, Harold. 1962. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic

Poetry. Faber and Faber: London.
Bowra, Sir Maurice. 1961. The Romantic Imagination. Oxford University Press: London.

Motion, Andrew. 1997. Keats. Faber and Faber: London.

Perkins, David. 1967. ‘Introduction’ to John Keats in English Romantic Writers [pgs. 1113-22]. Ed. D. Perkins. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.: New York.

Ricks, Christopher. 1974. Keats and Embarrassment. At the Clarendon Press: Oxford.