Holly Pretsky

The Freezing Beadsman

            “The Eve of St. Agnes” is distinctly religious in its imagery and its themes. It opens with the name of a saint, then pans toward the beadsman, who tries to ward off frostbite as he prays the rosary. If one were to read only the first two stanzas of the poem, they would have no idea of its true contents. For some reason, the opening of this poem is about a man paid to pray. The poem ends with the beadsman too. “The beadsman, after thousand aves told, / For aye unsought for, slept among his ashes cold.” It is striking that this story, ostensibly about two star-crossed lovers so full of life (“Ethereal, flushed,” “throbbing” etc), is bookended with this beadsman, who is enveloped completely in imagery of winter and of death. The inclusion of the frozen, dying beadsman at the beginning and end of the tale makes the lovers’ scenes, by contrast, all the hotter and more alive. It also emphasizes the hopeless mortality of the lovers. For even the beadsman, the holiest figure in the poem, is ultimately extinguished.

            The poem takes place on the Eve of St. Agnes, January 20^th, on a freezing cold night. We hear of the beadsman’s “numb” fingers, of his “frosted breath” (6). The sculptures he passes in the chapel “seem to freeze” (14). The beadsman is completely unable to connect with his own body. He can’t feel his fingers. He lives among lifeless, cold statues. In addition to being cold and lifeless, the man is aged. “The joys of all his life were said and sung” (23). The beadsman resides beneath the party rooms in a classic gothic trope of the subterranean dwelling. (“Soon, up aloft, / The silver, snarling trumpets ‘gan to chide.”) Throughout all of the sexy action in the rest of the poem, the beadsman is always there below, freezing, praying. Keats writes of the beadsman’s frozen breath moving upward “Like pious incense from a censer old, / Seemed taking flight for heaven” (7 - 8). But what is directly above the beadsman is not heaven, but rather a ball and some bedchambers. The whole erotic scene above him then is touched if not enveloped by this cold, religious smoke. Indeed, right as the couple begin to have sex, Keats writes, “Meantime the frost-wind blows / Like love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet / Against the window –panes.”

            In contrast to the beadsman, the lovers Madeline and Porphyro are fully conscious of their bodies, which are warm, almost feverish. Of Madeline: “Anxious her lips, her breathing quick and short” (65). Of Porphyro “with heart on fire” (75). Keats goes on to describe Porphyro’s heart as “love’s fev’rous citadel” (84). These lines would hardly be so evocative and erotic without the nagging awareness of the freezing beadsman, camped out in the dark chapel below, uttering constant prayers.

"That Beadsman Old" James Smetham (1821-1889) As accessed on artuk.org