2 February 1819: “The Eve of St. Agnes”: Evocative without Affectation
Wentworth Place, Hampstead
On or just about 2 February 1819, Keats, aged 23, returns to Wentworth Place, Hampstead, after about two weeks spread between Chichester and Bedhampton. Keats stays with two families, and is with his very close and generous friend, the minor writer, Charles Brown. Keats shares half of one side of Wentworth Place (a double-house in Hampstead, planned and built over 1814-1816) with Brown, who is co-owner of the house. Keats has a small sitting room downstairs and a bedroom upstairs. The Dilke family (also great friends) live in the other side of the house. Today, Wentworth Place is a museum: Keats House.
Keats returns from his trip with a draft of a new poem: The Eve of St. Agnes, which is greatly unlike but in some ways more accomplished than the unfinishable Hyperion. If Hyperion is a lingering burden, The Eve of St. Agnes acts as a quick though complicated release for Keats. Despite the characteristic limitations of the Spenserian stanza (the form often encourages scene-setting), the manuscript of the poem shows Keats letting loose his compositional gifts within a fairly simple romance narrative, and clothed within Gothic and medieval tropes.
The poem is remarkable and remarkably complex. Remarkable: compared to almost all of Keats’s earlier poetry, the pace, tone, and atmosphere are extraordinarily controlled and sustained, and description masterfully encases and reflects the plot (the same cannot be said for Keats earlier Endymion, where plot feels undirected and the description distracting). The poem is dense without being over-written; deeply ironic yet without insincerity. Little is random, yet it finely pushes up against immoderation and luxuriousness. Remarkably complex: Keats’s polished handling of contrasting, suggestive imagery—of warmth and cold, light and darkness, life and death, the erotic and pious—as well as his playing of contrasting subjects—reality and imagination, expectation and fulfillment, dream and waking, love and deception, youth and age, the spiritual and the sexual. Neither an egotistical nor sociable narrator figures in the telling; rather, Keats fashions a narrative voice that, tonally, draws us into both the story and the feeling with its own subtle responses to the action. In a way, the teller enters the telling of the story like Porphyro enters Madeline’s chamber—hidden, to watch her preparation for her dream, into which he will physically enter. Keats sets up the remarkable scene so that we, too, watch and participate, and we leave the scene without a kind of knowing upon which we can agree. Thus Keats’s method is to profitably intertwine the swelling, sensual beauty of the scene with moral uncertainty. This is, of course, Shakespeare’s territory, and now Keats makes such sensuous mystery and doubt his own.
The poem, then, invites and intertwines an allegorical reading with a dramatic narrative. In the end, the warmed lovers (versions of both Romeo and Juliet as well as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde) enter cold history by escaping the old castle and old conflicts; but Keats’s new gift in his poetic progress is to have them (and you, the reader) enter the poetical realm of ahistorical beauty and uncertainty (what will happen to the fateful lovers as they flee into the icy storm?)—that place of joy and sorrow and fine excess that Keats names in his poetics. Again, the poem is evocative without affectation, strongly sensual without any compromising sentimentality, and the potentially challenging parts of the poem are handled with poetical equivocation—in fact, in a way we could call (at last!) Keatsian: that acute sense of in-betweenness that, remarkably, haunts and balances all his best work. There is no moralizing mopping-up by a narrator keen to explain the meaning of what happened, nor, now, any apology for wanting to write enduring poetry. We are led to a profitable, timeless blurring of romance and tragedy.
Despite some potential controversy over the poem’s portrayal of Madeline’s hoodwinking (70, 253-324), the scene of Porphyro melting into Madeline, as suggested, amounts to a form of perfected uncertainty as hard reality tests dreams of desire: we look upon it and are teased into (or seduced by) the beauty of such irresolution; thus potential violation is set against desire, bliss, love, and consciousness itself, just as (imagistically) pallid chilliness set against flushed warmth.
All this begins to percolate the moment Keats prepares to publicly present his poem:
in
September 1819 in letters to each other, Richard
Woodhouse and John Taylor, who are
Keats’s closest editorial friends, and who have a say in the published version of
the poem,
jointly worry over how readers might respond to such sexual inferences; Taylor is
particularly
concerned that this part of the poem might cause offence, and he disapproves. Despite
all
this, Keats always thought enough of the poem to wish it might commence
his final 1820
collection (so Brown relates, 13 March 1819).
During this period, Keats’s chronic sore throat signals some kind of lingering infection.
He
writes to his sister that this state has
haunted
him at intervals
for about year (11 Feb), and just earlier he mentions
that he has not been entirely well for some time—all from my own fault of exposing myself
for the Weather contrary to medical orders
(letters, 4 Feb). This does not bode well.
Almost exactly a year later, on 3 February 1820, Keats will be exposed the cold weather
while
travelling by open carriage; he hemorrhages, thus signaling the beginning of the end—and
he
knows it.