Blogging the Reef: It is time to speak of Sophy

(To read all posts about The Reef click here.)


There is a persistent strain in the criticism of this book that Edith Wharton is not fair to Sophy Viner. For much of the twentieth century it was common to suggest that Wharton looked down on Sophy and that her purpose to indict Sophy for snobbish reasons.


Since the 1980s, we have known better than to make that mistake because we now know that the Sophy's affair is based on one that Wharton herself had with a journalist named Morton Fullerton. Far from looking down on Sophy, Wharton identifies with her. And yet the sense remains that Sophy is not treated fairly in the novel. Why?

I think the current sense that there is something unfair in the treatment of Sophy derives from the feeling that Wharton has refused to allow Sophy to tell her own story. Meaning that we never get inside her head. There is never any free indirect speech telling us what Sophy thinks. So everything we learn about her comes through the consciousness of others. And there are very good reasons to doubt the motives of those others.

And yet, Sophy Viner remains a compelling and likeable character. In fact, she is easily the most likeable character in the book. This is a sad story entirely because of her. The other characters in this novel may have it hard but we never feel that any of them have had it harder than they deserve nor do we worry that they won't manage to pull through. Sophy Viner, on the other hand, will haunt you if you read this book. You'll wish you could meet her and help somehow.

So, no, Wharton is not unfair to her. Quite the contrary. And rather than ask whether Wharton should have let Sophy tell her story, I'd suggest that the real challenge to us is: Can we treat Sophy as an end and not a means? For all the other characters, especially George Darrow but also Anna Leath and even Owen Leath, treat her as a means to achieve some end of their own.

And let's talk some more about George because he has an interesting history. As I said above, the affair Sophy has is based on one that Wharton herself had with a man named Morton Fullerton. He has come up before on the blog. For Morton was Merton. Henry James based Merton Densher on Morton Fullerton. And that makes for an interesting contrast in itself. For James's Merton is a relatively moral character compared to Kate Croy who is a consumer of persons. Wharton's George Darrow is very much a consumer of persons with regards to Sophy.

Whose name, oddly enough, means wisdom. That could be an accident in that Wharton just needed a girls name and she liked the sound of Sophy but I don't think so.

A couple of things to note. Tragedy makes its appearance again and that, I think, should have us thinking of the contrast between this modern sad story and tragedy. Lily Bart's story is a tragedy but Sophy's is just sad. And, somehow that makes it worse.

Darrow, not surprisingly, wants to see her life in tragic terms. That, of course, is right in character as then she could be a purely aesthetic object, a means for his pleasure and not an end in her own right. (And I ask you, isn't that exactly what Merton tries to do with Milly Theale?)

Let's wrap up with a little erotic voyeurism as is only appropriate for the day after Valentine's.

The influence of Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes on Wharton's Ethan Frome is much discussed but I don't that anyone has noted the reference to it here. George is sitting in his room, which adjoins hers, and he listens to her moving and imagines what he might see if he were in her room (it's a sort of auditory voyeurism):

Now and then a sound from her room brought before him more vividly the reality of the situation and the strangeness of the vast swarming solitude in which he and she were momentarily isolated, amid long lines of rooms each holding its separate secret. The nearness of all these other mysteries enclosing theirs gave Darrow a more intimate sense of the girl's presence, and through the fumes of his cigar his imagination continued to follow her to and fro, traced the curve of her slim young arms as she raised them to undo her hair, pictured the sliding down of her dress to the waist and then to the knees, and the whiteness of her feet as she slipped across the floor to bed...

That ellipsis is in the original. The source for that is this:

Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

And the affair is not unlike Porphyro and Madeline in some ways.

Three prayers

For no reason other than that I want to, I put the three prayers—meaning people who are praying rather than the prayers they said—below.

There are only five certifiably quick beings in this poem: in order of appearance they are the Beadsman, Madeline, Porphyro, Angela and "the wakeful bloodhound". Three of these kneel to pray.

First the Beadsman,

Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
II.   His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,

Then Madeline,

As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

And then Porphyro

Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone.
XXXIV.   Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,
Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep:
There was a painful change, that nigh expell’d
The blisses of her dream so pure and deep
At which fair Madeline began to weep,
And moan forth witless words with many a sigh;
While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep;
Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye,
Fearing to move or speak, she look’d so dreamingly.

What's my point? I don't have any. I just think it fascinating that these three kneel and clasp their hands. There is a progression of sorts from the Beadsman who before the sweet Virgin Upper case and definite article, to Porphyro who kneels before a sweet virgin, lowercase indefinite article. This move from caritas to eros is a fairly common move in Provençal troubadour lyrics so it is nothing new or radical for Keats to do likewise. It's just neat and that is the only reason I mention it.

It is Saint Agnes Eve now. And bitter cold it is where I am. It is minus 15 centigrade or five degrees Fahrenheit, clear and cold. We have no owl but we did have a Sharp-shinned hawk chase some poor sparrow into the cedar bushes beside our feeder today. The hawk flew out the other side so I couldn't tell if the he will be keeping warm on sparrow calories tonight or not.

Anyway, sweet dreams all.

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.

Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes

Where is this sex act?
A whole lot of how we understand this poem depends on how we read stanzas 35 and 36. In stanza 35 Madeline, who has been dreaming of Porphyro, sees him beside her bed and is jolted by how pale, chill and unhappy he looks. The entire stanza is her reported speech. She seems to be not fully aware that this is the real guy as opposed to her dream.

“Ah, Porphyro!” said she, “but even now
“Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
“Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;
“And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
“How chang’d thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!
“Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
“Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
“Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
“For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.”

Jolted by the bloodless appearance of the man who is the real Porphyro as opposed to the more lively dreamed version, she imagines he might be dying. Not surprisingly, Porphyro's move in Stanza 36 is to show her he really is alive. But what exactly does he do here?

Beyond a mortal man impassion’d far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flush’d, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,—
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes; St. Agnes’ moon hath set.

Just about every interpreter I have ever read sees sex happening here; sees the image of the rose blending its odour with the violet as signifying the penetration of Madeline. Solution sweet! And the last sentence, "St. Agnes' moon hath set", seems to seal the deal. But what is being solved?

Let's forget about poetry for a while and consider this purely in terms of what we know about human beings. This is not a realistic poem so it doesn't have to follow the rules but let's ask, separate from that, "Is this plausible?" In the very next stanza, Porphyro tells Madeline that this is no dream. If he has penetrated her, can we credibly imagine that she doesn't realize what has happened? Has Porphyro fed her the date rape drug?

Okay, but I have already admitted that the poem is a romantic fantasy so it doesn't need to follow the rules. But if we read it that way, meaning we read him as deflowering her while she is still unconscious and unable to consent, I think it loses it's power.

Voyeurism
To return to the poem, I think one of the most important things about it is that it's a very voyeuristic bit of writing. I find it odd that more people aren't troubled by Porphyro watching Madeline get naked before getting into bed and by old Angela helping him. For even if Angela really believes that Porphyro has not intention of taking advantage of Madeline in any other way, she has to know that the girl will get undressed on her way to bed and that Porphyro will see this.

It's also voyeuristic in another sense in that it makes us a party of the voyeurism. In some ways it gives us lots of detail. the carvings, the food, the dress, the colours the stained glass casts on her skin (remind me to tell you something funny about that later) are all described so we can imagine them. They are described so well that the Pre-Raphaelites were inspired to paint them. At the same time, however, the poem is voyeuristic in that it helpfully gets rid of any distracting details. The house is full of other people but "These let us wish away". After that we only get the possible menace of their breaking in as described by Angela or by the sound of the music that might wake Madeline.

The whole thing moves the way a suspenseful movie uses voyeurism. We are with Porphyro always. When Angela leaves him to set things up, we stay with him and cheer for him in the same way we cheer for a jewel thief breaking into the suite where the rich and beautiful woman sleeps with her jewels at a hotel on the Riviera. We get sucked into the lead character's perspective and don't question the legitimacy of his motives.

Momentous acts
We know for certain that sex does happen at some point, by the way, because of the publication history of the poem. Keats had originally been more explicit but was dissuaded from this by his publishers who thought, certainly correctly, that it would destroy his career were he to do so. To my mind, however, that is all the more reason to conclude that stanza 36 does not depict sex. It is complete of itself and there is no sense of anything removed or changed.

To read sex into this stanza we'd have to read the long em dash in the last half of the stanza as taking the place of the sex act and the description of the sleet on the window in the same way that the camera used to pan away to a waterfall in old movies as the couple really got down to business.

Into her dream he melted, as the rose

Blendeth its odour with the violet,—

Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows

Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet

Against the window-panes; St. Agnes’ moon hath set.

But, to return to plain psychological terms, we then have to believe that Keats, a medical doctor by training, would seriously believe that Madeline, her hymen now torn, needs to be told she is not dreaming afterward.

It also doesn't fit with the style of Keats' narrative. Every momentous act has been accorded its full due up until now. Think of how Keats lingers on Madeline's undressing and how much significance is accorded the moment when Porphyro, peering through her bed curtains, presses his arm into her pillow back in stanza 32.

Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm
Sank in her pillow. Shaded was her dream
By the dusk curtains:—’twas a midnight charm
Impossible to melt as iced stream:

The act of actually getting into Madeline's bed is of immense significance and I'm certain that is all that happens in Stanza 36.

Roses and violets and Greek and Gothic
If this were Shakespeare, we would worry a whole lot about the significance of the particular flowers. For Keats? I don't know. You can decide yourself.

The first question is which is which. Violets are violet or white and "Porphyro" means purple so we might think that he is that. But Porphyro has been rendered colourless here and Madeline has been given colour and warmth so who knows?

We could also approach the problem in terms of the symbolic meanings of the two flowers.

The rose has two meanings depending on whether we choose to be pagan or Christian about it. The Ancients associated the rose with Venus, which is to say sexual love. They also associated it with secrecy; to meet "under the rose" or sub rosa, was to agree that everything that happens there was to be kept secret. Roses are also associated with death and rebirth and with victory.

Christians, as they always did, gave the best flowers to Mary and so the rose comes to be associated with her. Unlike what we might guess, the rose doesn't necessarily associate with virginity however. In Medieval literature it is often associated with love and always with licit love and not with illicit trysts. It is a flower of chastity not virginity.

Colour also matters to Christians. White roses connect to purity and red roses connect to martyrdom.

What matters to the Greeks about violets is that they grow close to the ground and we might read Porphyro falling to his knees here as a connection to the violet. The Greeks also associated violets with death and lovers remember their lost partners with violets. Again, that matches with Madeline thinking Porphyro to be dying when she awakens and sees him pale and cold.

For Christians, violets symbolized humility and modesty.

If Keats is following the rules of parallel structure, then Porphyro is definitely the rose.

Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,

In that construction, Porphyro is the rose and Madeline's dream is the violet. Oops. It has to be her dream doesn't it? Could Porphyro be both flowers? The dreamed Porphyro the violet and the live one the rose?

What can we conclude? 
Well, your call really. I think Porphyro gets into Madeline's bed and tells her it isn't a dream. I think she is not entirely taken by surprise at this but that the significance of his crawling in with her, she is completely naked after all, is what moves her to see herself as ruined and not any sex act just yet. Her fear is that he will now just take her as he easily could. And if this were a matter of purely Greek morals, that is what would happen.

In Gothic manners, however, the love has to be pure and justified between the lovers no matter how much it might be abhorred and prohibited by the society around them. Porphyro is not a date rapist. Instead he pleads his troth as a true medieval courtier in Stanza 38:

“My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!
“Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?
“Thy beauty’s shield, heart-shap’d and vermeil dyed?
“Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
“After so many hours of toil and quest,
“A famish’d pilgrim,—saved by miracle.
“Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest
“Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think’st well
“To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel.”

And only then, upon her acceptance, do they have sex. Yes, there is room for all sorts of ambiguity here but I believe Porpyhro finds but does not rob her nest. The missing sex scene, I think, would have come after this between Stanzas 38 and 39 like a missing floor number thirteen in a modern apartment building. And then we move to Stanza 39 where they must wake up, as in an Aubade, but escape together.


The funny thing about that stained glass
The stained glass has a funny sequel. Several of the Pre-Raphaelites were moved to paint scenes from the poem. Millais was a stickler for accuracy and when he painted it he had a model stand in front of stained glass window with a full moon shining through in order that he could render the colours as they would have truly appeared. Alas, moonlight is too cold, it does not contain a full spectrum of colours, so it didn't work. There were no warm colours on his Madeline's breast.

By the way, I can't help but notice the significance of number in closing. Even though she is still fully dressed, it's very important that Keats get the number of the object noun correct here:

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,

For the whole thing reads very differently if we pluralize:

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breasts,

And right there, we might say, is a key detail in the difference between Gothic manners and Greek morality.

Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes

Gothic Manners and Greek Morals (revised)
I had thought of going through this poem in a systematic manner but, on second thoughts, decided that such an approach would ruin the thing.

Instead a general observation leaving readers to decide for themselves. There is a fascinating similarity between the Beadsman and Madeline in this poem. Both have elected to reject the appeals made by the men of the house. He won't go where the music plays and she won't pay heed to the appeals of the various courtiers who are clearly interested in her.

If we look at Psalm 141 again, we find this:

Incline not my heart to any evil thing,
to practice wicked works with men that work iniquity;
and let me eat not of their dainties.

Both the Beadsman and Madeline are fixed on heavenly matters.

Of course, Madeline will eat the dainties provided by a man who some might argue is trying to work iniquity but she rejects others. Is her moral judgment god or bad? She seems fooled by the illusions of "faery fancy. But is she?

I am still reading Powell and I found this fascinating bit of dialogue between Nick and Mr. Deacon about Gypsy Jones, a young woman whom Mr. Deacon is putting up at his shop, a situation that is delicate if not outright disreputable. Ralph Barnby, a womanizing painter who also uses space provided by Mr. Deacon does not approve.

I asked about the nature of Barnby's objections to Gypsy Jones.

'When Gypsy and I were first acquainted,' said Mr. Deacon, lowering his voice, 'I was given to understand—well, hasn't Swinburne got some lines about "wandering watery sighs where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories"? In fact restriction to such a coastline was almost a condition of our association.'

'Did Barnby object?'

I think he undoubtedly felt resentment,' said Mr. Deacon 'But, as a very dear friend of mine once remarked when I was a young man—for I was a young man once, whatever you think to the contrary—"Gothic manners don't mix with Greek morals. Gypsy would never learn that.'

What does that mean? Your guess may be better than mine here. Anyway, my short answer is that Mr. Deacon is saying that publicly flouting social norms (Gothic manners) does not go well with privately flouting sexual norms (Greek morals). The long answer could go on for quite a while not least because our  pictures of both the ancient Greek and the medieval Gothic societies are, as Le Bas would have it, largely of our own imaginings.

In a classical conception, social goods and the individual pursuit of happiness line up.  If we think of Pride and Prejudice, we see a novel where it turns out that Elizabeth Bennet's personal quest for sexual happiness through marriage and what is best for the community ultimately line up in a marriage that is good for her and good for the community. Gothic literature was quite different because medieval society was believed to be so rigid and it often featured plots where heroes romantically ran against the norms and desires of parents, family and community to try and find individual happiness. Reading The Eve of Saint Agnes, for example, we don't get the impression that Porphyro and Madeline are going to bring their neighbours and families together for the greater good of the community by running away as they do.

Because they are so at odds with social norms, a Gothic hero must justify themselves in our eyes through the purity or intensity of their love relationship. To put it crudely, Tristan and Iseult would not be nearly so moving if their love was founded on a shared fetish.

This is something worth keeping in mind when reading The Eve of Saint Agnes. Here, quite the opposite of my argument with Brideshead Revisited, I think people project a notion of sex that is far too Greek. To be sure, Porphyro and Madeline have sex but that sex does not occur quite the way people imagine. The poem remains true to Gothic manners and Madeline is, I think, fully aware and in full consent. That puts me in the minority.

Tomorrow I will tell you exactly where I think the sex happens.

Note: I have revised the above to respond to a problem pointed out in the comments.

This is neat

So, here I am reading and thinking about The Eve of Saint Agnes and I go to say Vespers or the Evening Prayer and I hit the responsory which reads as follows:

Accept my prayer, O Lord, which rises up to you.

Like burning incense in your sight.

And I think, of course, of this bit from the opening stanza of the Keats poem:

Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

The particular responsory I used this evening is from a formula that only dates from 1970 but it's not impossible that it draws on a much older prayer. It would be really neat if it drew from a prayer used in January in Keats' time. It would, in fact, pretty much revolutionize scholarship regarding this poem.

But that's all speculation, all we have for certain is this lovely coincidence.

**UPDATE**
Okay, this should have been obvious. As soon as I looked around a bit I found Psalm 141. Read this and tell me that Keats didn't mean to connect the Beadsman's experience to this:

Let my prayer be set forth before these as incense;
and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.
Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth;
keep the door of my lips.
Incline not my heart to any evil thing,
to practice wicked works with men that work iniquity;
and let me eat not of their dainties.

That's pretty much the set up.

I pretty confident that this is not a coincidence but a definite allusion by Keats.

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.