“with heart on fire”
This contrast shows how Porphyro cannot be stopped by the extreme weather because he is fuelled by the thought of Madeline.
Youth and age is briefly written about within the poem. The old Beadsman is portrayed as a very elderly man:
Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor;”
Compared to the young stimulated youth shown by Porphyro and Madeline, the old man becomes even more elderly:
“But soon his eyes grew brilliant,”
Keats has used the bursting youth of Porphyro to enhance the age of the old Beadsman and towards the end of “The Eve of Saint Agnes” Keats brings the idea that life is not permanent and can end just as quickly as a life is made:
“ages long ago…
Angela the old
Died palsy-twitch’d”
Keats knows that he is dying as he wrote this and want to use this idea that he could die any day into this poem.
Light is one of Keats favourite factors that he plays with in his work. He uses the comparison of light and darkness to expose an atmospheric mood of a certain place or person.
“’Tis dark:”
Madeline does not want to leave with Porphyro because of the nasty weather outside and how Madeline had been beamed with multiple colours but now is left out in the dark. Keats great description of light in Madeline’s room shining through onto her is immensely thoughtful:
“She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest,”
The moon light shining through the stain glass window is projecting an image of a halo upon Madeline’s head, and Porphyro is seeing her as a gracious angel. It is known that moon light is not strong enough to penetrate a window and shine into the room but Keats wanted to play with the delicate imagery of the moonlight. The colours are a main part of description in this part of the poem.
Visual imagery is enhanced by the contrast in colour that Keats has brought forward top the reader as a Romantic Poet does:
“Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,”
Madeline’s blazing beauty has been shown off by the incredible display of colours in her room. Compared to the colours that are being made by the moonlight, the moonlight itself is a sombre form of light.
“the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight,”
The evening, which has been engrossed in colour and a fury of feelings, has been made more serious by the weakening intensity of the moon. The contrast of colour and sombreness has given the idea of playfulness and then commitment.
Sound and silence comes into the poem occasionally, where a clarinet is being played and the doors shut and it all stops:
“The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.”
This can give a feeling of concentration and the sounds that are being produced create pictures in the readers mind.
A family feud is present within the story line of the poem “The Eve of St Agnes” between Porphyro and Madeline’s family. Porphyro is fighting for love and will do anything for Madeline, but the family hate him:
“Yet men will murder upon holy day:”
Whereas when hate is brought into the poem it is overruled by love:
“Let us away, my love, with happy speed;”
The whole poem contains love and the feelings that Porphyro holds for Madeline are the main foundations to the poem. The family are also willing to kill which is bad and all Porphyro wants is love. There is a constant thought of Good against Evil.
“The Eve of St Agnes” is the only night that a girl can see her future husband in her dreams. In all of Keats poems there is a constant reminder of dream and reality. In “La belle dame sans merci” there is no clear boundary of dream and reality:
“And there I dream’d Ah Woe betide!”
The faery’s child is lulling the Knight to sleep and he dreams of dead knights and Princes. In “The Eve of St Agnes” Madeline doesn’t want to be woken into reality because Porphyro is not the man she wants him to be:
“How chang’d thou art! How pallid, chill, drear!”
Madeline finds dreaming much more pleasant to live with and is disappointed by reality.
“La belle dame sans merci” features a Knight that has been seduced by the “Femme Fatale”:
“She look’d at me as she did love
And made sweet moan”
There is a strong comparison between the innocence of a virginal child that can bring any man to love her and in his dreams he sees all the men that she has dangerously lured to their deaths on the side of the mountain, and once he awakes he finds that he has been treated the same way; left to die by the Femme Fatale. This lady, who is mentioned in many of Keats’s poems who is known as the “Femme Fatale”, links to Fanny Brawne. She could be so innocent but yet distract Keats away from his writing and so he did not want to be stupid fall for her ways of meaningless seduction, even though he had fallen in love with her.
Imagery of nature is a typical idea to write about by Romantic poets. They believed that God is in everything and is contained in his creations. This is also known as Pantheism, which means all God. Keats shows extremely relevant examples of natural imagery and enjambment in “To Autumn”:
“With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,”
The use of enjambment has made it easier to imagine the vines growing so much that the apples that are being produced are leaning over, as the description is into the next line. With all the explicit imagery Keats has given to the reader it is easy to see why Keats was named a romantic poet. In the second stanza Keats has used alliteration to help the reader feel the wind in the autumn:
“Thy hair soft-lifted by the willowing wind;”
It is not only visual imagery that Keats is trying to give to the reader but also a sense of movement through Autumn as he uses time scales between each stanza and a carefully placed stasis as the girl falls asleep in the granary:
“on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,”
It breaks up the poem to show effect of the vivid descriptions that the reader has just read and prepares them for the beginning of another nature filled stanza:
“And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;”
Once the lambs were newly born in spring and now in autumn the lambs are not quite fully adults but between those two ages, as autumn is the almost forgotten season as that age is. Sound imagery is used by Keats to bring more life into his writing.
Autumn is seen as female by Keats and uses it in his poem. Keats relates the fact that he is slowly dying to the last days of autumn as they slowly die themselves:
“Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.”
The whole poem could be relevant to his own life where he his life has been filled to the brim with happiness and cannot be overloaded any more as in the end of Summer, but it slowly all turns and gets colder and darker, just as his life would have.
The growth of Romanticism led some writers such as Keats to embrace a fascination with Gothic forms that emphasized the supposedly bizarre and grotesque aspects of the Middle Ages.
The words “I felt before I thought” was the basis of these radical Romantic Poets. They didn’t want to think logically about life and the way they wrote but from the heart. An example of this in one of Keats’s poems, “The Eve of St Agnes”, is when Angela, the elderly servant lady, chose to let Porphyro see Madeline even though she knew that he could be killed if he stayed in the castle:
“Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place;
They are all here to-night, the whole blood-thirsty race!”
Angela has a heart and chose to follow her feelings instead of using her brain and making Porphyro leave or be killed.
Keats’s use of vivid description for the reader follows the use of Rousseau’s words. Keats poems are typical of a wide range of contrasts to show the true extent of the two factors used in the contrast. Natural imagery is a very important part of the poems and without it Keats would not be a Romantic poet. The natural descriptions do not only show nature but they also illustrate life and ways of living. The natural descriptions used by Keats wanted to break away from the Augustan Satirists that wrote in an intellectual manner, which the Romantic poets disapproved of and so wrote in a free-style manner. Romantic poets were republic due to they saw people as freed spirits. Keats has used the same qualities of contrasts, great use of nature and the Gothic style of writing, which follows the same manners as other Romantic poets.
