Fantasy or Reality?

Blog Post # 3

Mary Rose Donahue

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     In John Keats’ poem, “The Eve of St. Agnes” Keats discusses the relation of the natural and supernatural world through the action of his characters, Madeline and Porphyro. On the supposed Eve of St. Agnes, Madeline chooses to “conjure” the spirit of St. Agnes to supposedly be able to gain a view of her true love by the light of moon. While she believes the continuing events of the night are a result of her own conjuring of the supernatural, Porphyro presents a differing view of the situation. His forceful entry and coercion played upon on her assumptions of having a supernatural experience. While amidst Madeline’s slumber, Porphyro plays his flute and enters her dream through his musing. Porphyro’s forceful entrance into Madeline’s dreams allows him to straddle the line between reality and the supernatural. Porphyro effectively takes advantage of Madeline in her half there—half asleep state to be able to enter her subconscious and make her believe it is by the power of St. Agnes that she experiences the vision of Porphyro. 

     This poem effectively employs several Gothic tropes of the genre including, a woman’s virtue in distress, dark passageways, a virginal figure, the dark sinewy and foreboding man, and the issue of being deeply attracted to virginity along with others. Then there is Porphyro, continually perplexed at how to take the innocence from a woman without reducing her intense sensuality that makes the man so attracted (for once he takes her innocence the thing he desires most will vanish). Madeline is always likened to a virginal being, like a, “ring-dove frayed” (198) or, very often a rose. Porphyro is enticed by her innocent virginal qualities. The poem laments that she was, “as though a rose should shut, and be a bud again”, implicitly implying that once a rose has been opened through sexual maturity, it loses the ability to once more revert to a innocent bud. This is what Porphyro deals with throughout the poem. He loves looking upon his beloved woman, “in pallid moonshine” (200) but at the end once, “St. Agnes’ moon hath set” (324) he reveals that, “this is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!/ Tis dark; the iced guests still rave and beat./ No dream, alas! Alas , and woe is mine” (325). Porphyro loves to view Madeline in the moonlight, a deep rooted symbol of female sexual prowess. It is in the moonlight that he seduces her, with her assuming that she is being shown a vision from St. Agnes of her true lover. Porphyro effectively seduces Madeline under false pretenses, and once the veneer of the sexual moonlight has set, he reveals the truth conveniently just as the daylight sheds the truth to Madeline.

     Madeline herself is terrified of what Porphyro has since told her. As the poem comes to a close the narrator says, “She hurried at his words, beset with fears” (351), we learn that though she was seduced by the pretense that it was the work of St. Agnes, the reality of the situation terrifies her. What she believed was a supernatural and spiritual power was actually the work of a manipulating man. The poem begins to close with the second to last stanza, 

They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; 

       Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide; 

       Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl, 

       With a huge empty flaggon by his side: 

       The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide, 

       But his sagacious eye an inmate owns: 

       By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:— 

       The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;— 

The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans. (361-369).

As they run off like phantoms, the perfect veneer of St. Agnes has disappeared. The disillusion that earlier helped Porphyro seduce this perfect woman has disintegrated. Now everything clashes and crashes. They make their escape but not nearly as perfectly as he had entered. The perfect illusion is gone, enhancing the perception that the supernatural was only an illusion of enchantment by another gothic “daemon lover”.