The Eve of St. Agnes
John Keats(1820)
Extract
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, in blanched linen, smooth, and lavendered.
A hare limps trembling through the frozen grass, an owl is cold despite its feathers, and inside the castle the revelry of St. Agnes' Eve has begun, where a young woman will go to bed hungry in the hope that her true love will appear to her in a dream. Keats composed this narrative poem in 1819, during the astonishing year that produced nearly all his greatest work, and he lavished upon it the most sumptuous sensory language in English poetry: casements stained with the colors of heraldry, a table heaped with candied fruits and spiced dainties. Porphyro comes not in dream but in flesh, and the lovers flee into a storm. Warmth and cold, desire and danger, youth and death press against each other in every stanza.
If you loved this
Keats writes the same sensuous escape from the mortal world, but the bird replaces the castle and the dreamer wakes alone.
Spenser builds the enchanted palace Keats borrows for Madeline, and the stained glass colours are the same.
Coleridge conjures the same richly embroidered dream-vision, and neither poet wants the dreamer to wake.