Monday, January 17, 2011

Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes

Some academic over at CUNY (City University of New York) has helpfully posted a background file on The Eve of Saint Agnes. If we read that site, we can get a  grasp on the sort of meanings critics go hunting for in the poem:
Splendid language, sharply etched setting, and vivid mood--"The Eve of St. Agnes" has them all. What the poem lacks for some readers is significant content; it is, for them, "one long sensuous utterance," "a mere fairy-tale romance, unhappily short on meaning." Clearly, the portrayal of ardent young love dealing with a hostile adult world and contrasted with aging and death has an inherent appeal. A closer reading reveals more than just a gorgeous surface; it reveals many of the same concerns that Keats explores in his odes--imagination, dreaming and vision, and life as a mixture of opposites.
 That's my emphasis. And this is true as far as it goes, those are the "issues" that Keats explores in his odes and you can find them in this poem if you are really determined to do so. None of the odes, however, is halfway as captivating as The Eve of Saint Agnes. And, however brilliant they are as poetry, Keats' philosophical ideas in the Odes never rise above the level of clever sophistry. (This is also true of the letters, BTW, there are few more reliable signs that you are dealing with an intellectual fraud than finding the expression "negative capability" treated at length.)

No, what makes this poem so powerful is the wonderful story in it.

And if we read the poem as a story, one of the really interesting questions about is whether it is a heroic story. At first glance, it really seems like one but it seems to keep refusing to be heroic just when we want it to.

What do I mean buy a heroic story?

Read any mythological or religious literature and you will find there is a progression. At first you have the era of the gods. Huge, supernatural figures clash and the result of their clashing is the creation of the world with its tensions. The next step is heroic literature. Heroes are human but they interact with gods. They can see them and talk to them. Gods show up and help or hinder their efforts. The heroic era tends to connect to the creation not of the world but to particular parts of: the founding of nations, creation of cities, even such small things as the digging of certain wells. Both the Greek myths and the Hebrew Bible have their heroic stories*.

But Keats seemingly heroic lovers refuse to connect to history. They ride out into the storm and are gone: aye, ages long ago. Abraham and Achilles, by comparison, keep breaking into history. Real nations are founded, real cities are destroyed. Even a complete fraud and liar like Dan Brown, has characters who connect to big historical events.

But Madeline and Porphyro just float through a story that, although it has the seeming trappings of a heroic story, just exists to be a story. And I think that is the glory of the thing. It may have some of Keats usual sophomoric concerns with imagination, truth and reality and so forth, but they don't matter to us. The thing that troubles Abrams is in fact the glory of the poem. It is a great romance.

It's almost like an allegory where we have forgotten what the allegorical comparison was supposed to be. Imagine some future era where the Soviet Union has been entirely forgotten and some archeologist finds a copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm. And people read it and love it having no idea that the pig Napoleon is supposed to recall Stalin and the pig Snowball is supposed to recall Trotsky. They might read it and think they had found a fairy tale romance that they might imagine people of our era would read to their children (which is exactly what it is slowly becoming). And, in some ways, they would be less deceived than we are. Trotsky was actually a brutal psychotic thug and not the attractive character Snowball is in Orwell's mythology.

More to the point, we might imagine a world in which Queen Elizabeth I and the English reformation were completely forgotten and someone found a copy of Spenser's The Faerie Queen. Again, the story could be read with great pleasure and even with meaning of a certain sort. No doubt some critics would come along to torture us with the thought that the poem is no good unless we can decipher some deeper points about perception and reality but them, let us wish away. Let's read the poem all by itself and think of the questions only in reference to things in the poem itself.



* What makes them different is not the kind of story but the moral derived from the stories. In the Greek heroic stories, as was the case for almost the entire ancient world, the gods created human beings in order to serve them and to suffer:
                    ... This is the way
the gods ordained the destiny of men,
to bear such burdens in our lives, while they
feel no affliction. Iliad
(Bk 24 as translated by Fitzgerald)
The great moral conclusion of the Iliad, by the way, is that that's just the way it is so no need to make it worse. The problem of evil is often taken as a strike against the Judeo-Christian world view but it is  actually one of the uniquely distinguishing facts of Christianity that it recognizes that suffering is not simply a normal fact of human life; that this is not the way it should be. Some, like Homer, simply accept evil and others, like the Buddha, decide that the only solution to suffering is to cease being human.

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