Eve Of St. Agnes

A detailed Summary of Eve Of St. Agnes


In the "Eve of St. Agnes", John Keats created a tale of young love not by forgetting what everyday existence is like, but by using the mean, sordid, and commonplace as a foundation upon which to build a high romance. The result is no mere fairy tale, but a poem that has a rounded fullness of mystery wherein Keats' perplexes the reader with the questionable fusion of antithetical elements. Moreover, Keat's commingles Madelines experience of her ideal world with that of her real world. Furthermore, Keats uses nature to illustrate one of many mystical powers.

One might argue that the most mysterious aspect of the poem is the fusion of antithetical elements. Keats baffles the reader as he amalgamates Madelines ideal world with that of reality. When Madeline is awakened from her divine vision, her capacity to perceive both human life and the spiritual revelation of her transcendent dream, allows her to experience simultaneously both the mortal and the immortal. Ideally, the sensory-visionary state should correspond to the nature of heavens bourne, where the human and the ethereal, beauty and truth are one. The mortal Porphyro presented to her senses and the ideal P


The most striking feature about the climax is the peculiar confusion of wake and sleep that characterizes Madeline's perception of Porphyro when she is being roused from her vision. "Her eyes were open, but she still beheld, Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep" (298, 299). One has already seen that in Keats' mind dreams are synonymous with imagination, for both are powers whereby man may penetrate into heaven bourne, where the intensities of mortal life are repeated into a finer tone and divested of their mutability. Madeline's dream does not take place in the ordinary course of mortal events, but is occasioned by the mystical power of St. Agnes' Eve, when, by observing special rites, "Young virgins might have visions of delight" (47). It is a "hallow'd hour" (66), an extraordinary condition that, being outside the normal framework of experience, permits the imagination to rise to supernatural heights and correspondingly to penetrate most deeply into the beauty-truth that is to come. If dreams are imaginative visions of a future reality, St. Agnes' dreams are "the sweetest of the year" (63).

orphyro of her vision should fuse mystically into an immortality of

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Approximate Word count = 790
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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