Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes

Faeries!
The good professor over at CUNY suggests that perhaps Madeline is hoodwinked by Porphyro and her superstitions. And, for good measure, she tosses in a  suggestion that Keats may have chosen his characters names with intended irony. Madeline, of course, is a form of Magdalen who was historically believed to have been a reformed prostitute saved by Jesus. And of Porphyro, she says

His namesake, the historical Porphyro, was an active enemy of Christianity in the third century.

And thus this rationalist Porphyro might be a sort of Antichrist achieving an overthrow of religion by fooling Madeline into giving him her virginity and then fleeing with her to a marriage meant to be a parody of the marriage of Christ and his church.  Maybe.  Porphyry was an exponent of rationalism over superstition and he did indeed write a work called Against the Christians.

We should not forget, however, that Porphyro's name might just as easily derive from Porphyrion, who was one of the Giants who fought with the Olympian gods. Porphyrion is particularly interesting in that he tore Hera's clothing off and meant to rape her only Zeus and Hercules double-teamed him and saved her. It is just as easy to draw parallels between that character as it is with Porphyry.

But the bigger challenge is on the other side of the ledger. What are we to make of Madeline and does Keats mean to sneer at her?

And we should remember that Keats is recently engaged when he writes this poem. We can over-read autobiography but it would be odd for Keats to set about mocking Madeline given his own recent experience. And the concerns that Porphyro might be disqualified from marriage to Madeline because he is dying had echoes that were all to clear for poor Keats.

And while it may seem that Madeline's beliefs in superstition are meant to be laughed at, they could just as easily be a stand in for Keats own beliefs about imagination. Consider this from his letter to Benjamin Bailey of November 22, 1817:

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty.

And this from a little later in the same letter:

The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream, - he awoke and found it truth. 

Adam's dream would have taken place when God put him to sleep to create Eve! If anything, Madeline, is the character who most directly embodies Keats own beliefs in the poem: she awoke and found her dream to be truth. (Although we must acknowledge again that, despite Keats' supreme virtues as a poet, no one would call him a deep and profound thinker for stuff like the above.)

Mixed feelings about fairies
Keats was, of course, a huge fan of Spenser's The Faerie Queen in which events in a magical world are an allegory for the real world. When Spenser compares Elizabeth I to a Faerie Queen he means this as a compliment. And The Faerie Queen includes an interesting sequence in which Britomart, a female knight who embodies chastity, falls in love with Arthegall, a male knight embodying human justice, when she sees his image in a magic mirror. Arthegall is freed, by her, from a harsh Draconian justice so that he may be more humane (a familiar theme we see also in Portia in The Merchant of Venice).

At the same time, however, the image of the world of fairies had become by Keats' time a powerful metaphor for the Catholic church and was regularly used by rationalists to mock her. There are hundreds of examples I could cite here but I'm going to go for the gold here and quote one of the most beautiful bits of prose ever cranked out in the English language:

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

That is Thomas Hobbes*  from Leviathan.

And therein lies the whole problem of the English Romantic Catholic tradition. On the one hand, the enlightened English thinkers had attacked and, in their opinion, demolished the silly superstitions of Catholicism and the papacy and old wives' tales about fairies and elves. On the other hand, England was forever haunted by these things in places such as Tintern Abbey or in great works of art such as, to pick only one, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The final thought on the subject is this: Keats seems rather enthralled by this superstition.  Here is a rather longish bit from John Aubrey's Miscellanies in which he reports on the superstition regarding Saint Agnes Eve and several other related superstitions:

The women have several magical secrets handed down to them by tradition, for this purpose, as, on St. Agnes' night, 21st day of Jannary, take a row of pins, and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Pater Noster, or (Our Father) sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him, or her, you shall marry. Ben Jonson in one of his Masques make some mention of this.

      And on sweet Saint Agnes night
      Please you with the promis'd sight,
      Some of husbands, some of lovers,
      Which an empty dream discovers,

Another. To know whom one shall marry.

You must lie in another county, and knit the left garter about the right legged stocking (let the other garter and stocking alone) and as you rehearse these following verses, at every comma, knit a knot.

      This knot I knit,
      To know the thing, I know not yet,
      That I may see,
      The man (woman) that shall my husband (wife) be,
      How he goes, and what he wears,
      And what he does, all days, and years.

Accordingly in your dream you will see him: if a musician, with a lute or other instrument; if a scholar, with a book or papers.

Is this Keats' source? If so, he has taken liberties here by mixing in all sorts of stuff together to create a new superstition of his own. More tellingly, he has really sexed the thing up. Aubrey says nothing of getting into bed naked without looking back and laying there supine.

I think the right conclusion here is that the world of Catholicism had become, by Keats time, an enthralling thing. Keats does not seem to have been a religious man and we have no reason to believe him interested in promoting any side of religious controversy. But he was attracted, as would be many others, to the richness and beauty of the tradition. In a sense, the very things that made Catholicism seem dangerous to the English—intrigue, ritual, magic, smells and spells—has now become the thing that pulls in young Romantic rebels like Keats.




*If I remember correctly, Hobbes is playing with fire here because that second sentence is a deliberate parody of a sentence from the Bible. I don't have the time to look it up this morning however. I may come back to this later.