eve of st agnes

Question 1

key themes

Answer 1

• tragedy
• imagination
  -horror

Question 2

tragedy

Answer 2

• protagonist (Porphyro): determination, sacrifices for love, embodied romantic sensibility
• protagonist (Porphyro): deceptive actions (manipulates superstitions), potentiall driven by selfish desires rather than genuine love
  setting: 1 stanza, harsh + violent atmosphere sets scene for tragic events (silent, bitters cold, frozen grass, forested breath)
• idea of torture/ punishment/ imprisonment allows initial sense of worry and tragedy (“emprion’d in black, purgatorial rails”)
• insight/ blindness (hamartia): Madeline’s dreams are source of insight (into subconscious desires) but interpolation is blinded by adherence to superstitions - beadmans’s adherence blinds him to the true essence of faith + spirituality

Question 3

love

Answer 3

• forbidden: passion + power can overcome and restrictions (“heart on fire”), secret meeting emphasis forbidden nature (secrecy, hide, privacy- semantic field of secrecy s19 + “stol’n, crept, noiseless, hush’s”)

Question 4

imagination

Answer 4

• glorification of romantic love/ celebration of human senses
  investigation of processes + mechanisms of the imagination
• watch characters go through stages of wishing, dreaming, envisioning
• Madeline never truly wakens, imagination-dream governs the poem
• imagination renders her powerless, cut off from her surroundings (essentially drugged)

Question 5

extra (scutcheon + music/silence)

Answer 5

• scutcheon (stanza about window, 24): breaks poetic rule established as language of the chapel universally cold + dead, becomes a symbol that brings together 2 opposed dramatic forces (family loyalty + love)
• music/silence: Porphyro plays song that is “tumultuous” + “tenderest” audible but silent, and “touch(es)” Madeline (feels it more than she sees it)

Question 6

form

Answer 6

• spenserian stanza - S1
• narrative poem - contains characters and a plot
• entirely written in Spenserian stanzas (9 lines, first 8 iambic pentameter, last is alexandrine) drawing on old-cool optic form helps poem’s gothic setting (feels slow, long ind eaton short in action)
• form slows reader down (encouraging to contemplate rather than rushing through the plot), slow and dreamy layout (not knowing when the dreams end and waking life begins) - create movement contrasts are created through toy (hot and cold, music and silence, awake and asleep, Porphyro written as hot/fiery but Madeline as “chill and fear”

Question 7

context - Eve of St Agnes traditions

Answer 7

• Girls perform rituals (e.g. transferring pins, walking upstairs backwards, fasting all day, eating a ‘dumb cake’ before bed)
• Agnes: young Christian woman, rejected marriage from someone as she wanted to devote herself to religious purity, he reported her, she was sent to a brothel, but when men tried to rape her, they were turned blind or paralysed - became symbol of chastity, girls, rape victims, virgins

Question 8

context - perosnal

Answer 8

• fell in love with Fanny, unable to marry as they lacked her mothers permission (Keats wasn’t finciallay stable enough), his ill health and his writing
• fascination with dream-like states, letter to Bailey (1817): “Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream - he awoke and found truth”
• allusion to Romeo + Juliet reflects Keats’ feelings for Fanny + major theme of the poem is blurring lines between dream + reality

Question 9

context - society

Answer 9

• original version much more erotic, removed to avoid criticism
• set in dark ages: overrules by religious settlement, marriages int hat periods a business transaction + manu believed in consummation thorihg sex making marriage valid + marriage sacred and required blessing of the Church (particularly for higher class citizens such as Madeline)
• reflects restrictive nature of societal etiquette + expectation in his relationship with Fanny (never consummated their marriage - why he implies sec between two young lovers)
  motif of the moon: nature gives its blessing + nothing else matters