the eve of st agnes Flashcards
summary:
-In a mediaeval castle, Madeline is preparing for midnight by performing certain rites to have a magical vision of her lover. She believes in this superstition and prepares to go supperless to bed.
-Porphyro, who is in love with Madeline, sneaks into the castle, he meets her old nurse, Angela, who shares Madeline’s superstition.
-Angela reluctantly agrees to help him, leading him to Madeline’s chamber.
-Madeline falls asleep in a dream, filled with the thought of a wonderful vision. Porphyro awakens her, playing her lute close to her ear.
- Madeline believes Porphyro is on the brink of death.Madeline fears Porphyro will abandon her, Porphyro, now addressing her as his bride, urges her to leave the castle with him.
- They leave undetected, leaving the castle in a storm.
-The baron and his guests have bad dreams, and Angela and the old Beadsman die.
anaylsis:
- Keats employs the metrical romance or narrative verse form, a style favored by medieval poets and romantic poets.
-The metrical pattern is the iambic, which is not well suited for narrative verse due to its lack of rapidity.
-The story lacks interest and depth in the characters, with Porphyro being an idealized knight and Madeline being a lovely,stereotypical young lady.
-Keats celebrates romantic love as a heavenly experience, putting his lovers temporarily in a heaven realized through magic.
style/form/structure:
-Narrative Poem
-iambic pentameter, ninth and final
Keats is consciously drawing on this very old-school poetic form that helps him create the poem’s overall romantic, medieval feel- along with the castle, the bloodhounds, the tapestries, and the age-old family feuds, the meter itself helps to create the gothic setting
-Slow pace- dreamy sense of the poem, blurring the line between reality and imagination
Themes (Imagination)
Some people argue that the poem is a glorification of romantic love, others that it celebrates the human senses
Can also be read as an investigation of the processes and mechanisms of the imagination
Various stages of wishing, dreaming, envisioning- even “hoodwinking,” in the case of Madeline
Themes (The Supernatural)
Both Madeline and Porphyro are made out to have some control over supernatural forces
Madeline is described as a “conjurer” (124) and Porphyro as the “liege-lord of all the Elves and Fays”
Difference between the imagination and actual “magic” is subtle- poem is full of terms like “faery fancy,” which seem to seem to encompass both poles of the spectrum
Themes (Lies and Deceit)
Porphyro’s deceit of Madeline and her family
Madeline feels deceived by reality- feels imagination’s closer to truth
Possibility of non-consensual sex
What quotation uses repetitive supernatural imagery to create a dream-like image so that the listener cannot tell the difference between dreams and reality?
“They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall: like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide”
In what quotation does connotations of sex create the idea/ambiguity and astronomical depictions that Porphyro rapes Madeline, which could also be in recognition of Madeline’s dreams?
“Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep response”
What shift in perspective shows Porphyro devoting himself biblically to Madeline using biblical analogy and a metaphor?
“And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake! Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite”
What quotation uses the contextual nature of drug use to show that Madeline’s dreams take her away from reality?
“Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress’d”
Q
What quotation uses intertextuality to Ovid Metamorphoses to refer to Madeline’s speechlessness and suggest rape?
“Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell”
What quotation uses a simile and allusion of flowers to create a further contrast of dreams and reality and use “purple” to connote sex?
“Like a full-blown rose […] made purple riot”
What example of synaesthesia shows Porphyro’s deep infatuation with Madeline and uses a metaphor to show that if anyone found out they would end his dreams and his life, and life without Madeline is not worth living?
l eyes be muffled, or a hundred swords will storm his heart”
What are the two uses of sibilance in: “The silver, snarling trumpets ‘gan to chide”?
An abrasive sound contrasts the silence of the chapel
creates an image of snakes, relating to the upper class at the party
