1. Summary of the whole poem
It is a cold St. Agnes¡¯s Eve—so cold that the owl with all its feathers shivers, so cold that the old Beadsman¡¯s fingers are numb as he tells his rosary and says his prayers. Passing by the sculptured figures of the dead, he feels sorry for them in their icy graves. As he walks through the chapel door, he can hear the sound of music coming from the castle hall. He sadly turns again to his prayers.
The great hall of the castle is a scene of feasting and revelry, but one among the merry throng is scarcely aware of her surroundings. The lovely Madeline¡¯s thoughts are on the legend of St. Agnes¡¯s Eve, which tells that a maiden, if she follows the ceremonies carefully and goes supperless to bed, might there meet her lover in a dream.
Meanwhile, across the moonlit moors comes Porphyro. He enters the castle and hides behind a pillar, aware that his presence means danger, because his family is an enemy of Madeline¡¯s house. Soon the aged crone, Angela, comes by and offers to hide him, lest his enemies find him there and kill him. He follows her along dark arched passageways, out of sight of the revelers. When they stop, Porphyro begs Angela to let him have one glimpse of Madeline. He promises on oath that if he so much as disturbs a lock of her hair, he will give himself up to the foes who wait below. He seems in such sorrow that the poor woman gives in to him. She takes Porphyro to the maiden¡¯s chamber and there hides him in a closet, where is stored a variety of sweetmeats and confections brought from the feast downstairs. Angela then hobbles away, and soon the breathless Madeline appears. She comes in with her candle, which blows out, and kneeling before her high arched casement window, she begins to pray. Watching her kneel there, her head a halo of moonlight, Porphyro grows faint at the sight of her beauty. Soon she disrobes and creeps into bed, where she lies entranced until sleep comes over her. Porphyro steals from the closet and gazes at her in awe as she sleeps. For an instant a door opens far away, and the noises of another world, boisterous and festive, break in; but soon the sounds fade away again. In the silence he brings dainty foods from the closet—quinces, plums, jellies, candies, syrups, and spices that perfume the chilly room. Madeline sleeps on, and Porphyro begins to play a soft melody on a lute. Madeline opens her eyes and thinks her lover a vision of St. Agnes¡¯s Eve. Porphyro, not daring to speak, sinks upon his knees until she speaks, begging him never to leave her or she will die. St. Agnes¡¯s moon goes down. Outside the casements, sleet and ice begin to dash against the windowpanes.
Porphyro tells her that they must flee before the house awakens. Madeline, afraid and trembling, follows her lover down the cold, gloomy corridors, through the wide deserted hall and past the porter, asleep on his watch. They flee—into the wintry dawn.
2. Romance: A Definition
A fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting: or, more generally, a tendency in fiction opposite to that of REALISM. The term now embraces many forms of fiction from the GOTHIC NOVEL and the popular escapist love story to the 'scientific romances' of H. G. Wells, but it usually refers to the tales of King Arthur's knights written in the late Middle Ages by Chrétien de Troyes (in verse). Sir Thomas Malory (in prose), and many others (see chivalric romance). Medieval romance is distinguished from EPIC by its concentration on COURTLY LOVE rather than warlike heroism. Long, elaborate romances were written during the RENAISSANCE, including Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532), Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-6), and Sir Philip Sidney's prose romance Arcadia (1590), but Cervantes's PARODY of romances in Don Quixote (1605) helped to undermine this tradition. Later prose romances differ from novels in their preference for ALLEGORY and psychological exploration rather than realistic social observation, especially in American works like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852). Several modern literary GENRES, from SCIENCE FICTION to the detective story, can be regarded as variants of the romance (See also FANTASY, MARVELLOUS). In modern criticism of Shakespeare, the term is also applied to four of his last plays---Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest--- which are distinguished by their daring use of magical illusion and improbable reunions. The Romance languages are those languages originating in southern Europe that are derived from Latin: the most important of these are Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. In Spanish literature, the term has a special sense, the romance being a BALLAD composed in OCTOSYLLABIC lines.
3. Bloom on The Eve of St. Agnes
In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats comes close to so prodigious a conception. His lovers are completely physical in a physical world, and their sensuous concreteness is emphasized by an ironic interplay with worlds that fail to be completely physical, whether by an extreme resort to spirituality or by a grossness that abolishes the individuality of the atoms of perception which make up Keats's human reality. The "spiritual" that seeks to establish itself by denying life and "life's high meed," death, is the more important of these juxtaposing realms in the poem(p. 370).
At the heart of the poem (stanzas 29-36) Keats strives to suggest a supreme intensity by particularizing a wealth of concrete sensuous details, which not only deliberately confuse and mix senses, but tend to carry the other senses over into the tactile. Salvation, according to The Eve of St. Agnes, is only through the intense manifestation of all phenomena as being truly themselves. The lovers are saved by surrendering themselves to a world of objects, and to one another(p. 371).
(From The Visionary Company)
4. Eros and Romance
Yet Keats moves beyond irony, including the historicizing irony that distances the beliefs of "old Romance." His impulse, indeed his devotion, is to discover a new eroticized romance, with eros not as a power of dubious enchantment but as a means of connecting with the physical world. The quest of Keats's lovers is not for any world of wish-fulfillment(Frye), nor for the powers of the wishing self(Harold Bloom), but for an erotic reality that fulfills even as one strips away the self's illusions. As Porphyro proclaims to Madline in The Eve of St. Agnes after they make love, "this is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"(326)(p. 58)...
Sexuality offers Porphyro and Madeline a way to heal the splits in their world, ¡°saved by miracle¡± (339). Having framed their erotic romance in opposition to life-denying religion (the Beadsman), to the riots of the merely material (the foemen), and to fairy-fancy ¡°all amort,¡± Keats wants his lovers to discover a physical reality that has the value of an ideal, that offers earth as heaven. The lovers escape to another realm – ¡°o¡¯er the southern moors I have a home for thee,¡± Porphyro promises Madeline (51)– leaving this cloven world to collapse into nightmares and death(p.65).
Together, Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes combine a critique of society's mishandling of desire with an argument for the erotic as a power of social transformation. Beyond Lamia's triangular of desire and Isabella's privatized emotion, The Eve of St. Agnes reclaims the immediacy and power of erotic pleasure, fulfilling, on the far side of irony, the liberatory, salvific promise suggested in the preceding poems. As McGann writes of Shelley, "Eroticism[...] is the imagination's last line of human resistance against [...] political despotism and moral righteousness on the one hand, and on the other selfishness, calculation, and social indifference(p. 66) (Jeffrey N. Cox in The Cambridge Companion to Keats)