Jeannie Tanner

Compare the ways in which physical sensation is presented in Eve of St. Agnes and one
other poem.

Many of Keats’ poems greatly appeal to the senses, and throughout his work he uses rich,
sensuous language as a medium through which physical sensation can be communicated.
Keats strongly believed that the poet had to be intensely receptive to the world around him
and by engaging through his senses with a particular object or moment, Keats rises above
the ordinary to reveal an underlying meaning with which the reader can identify, allowing
them to vividly imagine the perfection of the moments he describes. Both Eve of St. Agnes
and To Autumn explore the idea of physical sensation and its relationship to the sublime and
transcendence, thus exposing themes of life and death, love, religion and illusion and
reality.
In both poems, it could be argued that physical sensation is caused by the interaction
between an overwhelming, powerful force and humans – in Eve of St. Agnes, this force
comes in the form of love and in To Autumn, it takes the shape of nature. This physical
sensation could easily be termed as the sublime, a Romantic trope that refers to a realm of
experience beyond rational thought. Although most often associated with man’s
relationship with nature, moments of the sublime can be found within both poems through
the presentation nature in To Autumn and through the presentation of love in Eve of St.
Agnes. In To Autumn, Keats uses deeply embodied language to capture and describe all the
human senses, and his personification of Autumn acts as a vessel for this. The ‘apostrophe’
form of this poem (and the use of second-person narration, as such) further adds to the
grandeur and sense of awe as within the poem, as though the speaker acknowledges the
power of nature as a force. Visual imagery is used to capture the sense of movement within
the autumn scene, as seen in the evocative image of Autumn “conspiring” with the
“maturing sun” (“conspiring” literally meaning the ‘mixing of breaths’, an intimate and
ethereal image) or her sitting and watching the “last oozings” of the cider-press, “hours by
hours”, the use of the present continuous tense helping to illustrate the sense of slow
growth throughout the poem, and the onomatopoeic “oozing” reinforcing this. This
onomatopoeic language is continued in the soft, round sounds of the line “Drows’d with the
fume of poppies”. Here, Keats not only highlights nature’s ability to alleviate pain and offer
temporary comfort with the reference to opium, but also emphasises the feelings of
intoxication felt not just by Autumn, but within the reader as they read the line themselves.
Additionally, Keats’ description of Madeline going to bed in the 26th stanza of Eve of St.
Agnes is multi-sensory. Her jewels are “warmed” by her body’s heat, her bodice is
“fragrant”, her rich attire “creeps rustling” to her knees. The language enables the reader to
see, smell, hear and feel Madeline preparing for bed whilst simultaneously suggesting the
erotic effect this has on Porphyro. Similar to the reader being aligned with the speaker’s
perception of Autumn in To Autumn, the reader is aligned with Porphyro’s voyeuristic male
gaze as he watches her going to bed in Eve of St. Agnes (signified by his lingering on the
details of her procedure such as her unclasping her jewels “one by one” and loosening her
bodice “by degrees”.
Furthermore, in both poems physical sensation is used to create binary opposition – the
most prominent opposition being the contrast between life and death. Keats uses contrast
to heighten and intensify awareness of all the body’s senses, to highlight change of mood,
and above all, to lead us to a deeper understanding of how art can, as he famously wrote in
Jeannie Tanner

a letter, make “all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty
and truth”. In Eve of St. Agnes, this is achieved through the contrast of warm and cold
imagery. The poem opens and closes with the cold of winter, and the first stanza’s semantic
field of coldness (“bitter chill”, “frozen grass”, the “frosted breath” of the Beadsman)
contrasts with the warmth and brightness of the party being held inside the castle. It is
significant that much of the religious imagery found within the poem is also associated with
cold – the numbness of the “Beadsman’s fingers” indicates that within this Christian chapel,
all the body’s senses are dead or dying. In addition to his fingers being numb from the cold,
this could also be read as an embodiment of his spiritual numbness, potentially revealing
Keats’ disapproving view of institutionalised religion. The figure of the Beadsman reinforces
this idea, as he is presented as being cut off from reality in a liminal state between life and
death (“seem’d taking flight for heaven, without death”). This frozen state of religious
penance, as signified by the image of his numb fingers counting “his rosary”. His mind is
consumed by thoughts of sin and mortality, with “pious”, “wan” and “purgatorial images
highlighting his moribundity and creating a sense of impending doom as his approaching
death frames the warmth and vitality of the party and the lovers. The relationship between
these forces is especially overt in the contrasting image of the shining image of “Music’s
golden tongue” with the deathly silence of the chapel – the Beadsman is tempted by the
music and “flatter’d to tears” by the musical summons to life, but “another way he went”, a
deliberate decision to turn away and embrace, if not death, then “harsh penance”. It would
be naïve to overlook the parallels between the Beadsman’s renunciation of life and Keats’
preoccupation with his own mortality that permeated many of his later works. It is
interesting to note the Romantic idea of nature and religion being intrinsically linked, mainly
in terms of the Romantics’ deep appreciation of nature that rivalled devotion to the church.
Such parallels can be seen in the language used in both poems, with the lexical choices used
in the semantic field of religious imagery of the first few stanzas being contrasting with the
semantic field of indulgence and abundance that is prominent in the first stanza of To
Autumn. The use of tactile verbs such as “fill”, “swell”, “plump” and “o’er-brimm’d”
reinforces the atmosphere of vitality and fecundity that the season brings. Keats creates a
sense of being entirely immersed in the natural world and a vision of warmth and prolonged
abundance as one season provides for its successor. However, this sense of fullness is
balanced by an awareness that the burgeoning of Autumn must come to an end. Time
moves through the stanzas of the poem, starting at the beginning of Autumn and
progressing further towards winter and death. Such imagery pervades the final stanza of the
poem: the image of the “barred clouds” that “bloom the soft-dying day”, the horticultural
adjective “bloom” possessing natural connotations, points towards the inevitability of
death, but also the idea that life can stem from it, as is the law of nature. Perhaps this rather
dignified and calm acceptance of death mirrors Keats’ feelings about his own mortality or,
conversely, could express the opposite – a desire for transcendence. The search for
something transcendent beyond the ordinary world was a source of deep fascination the
Romantics and nature - a typically Romantic focus – was often considered to be a gateway
to that world. Therefore, in To Autumn, a great deal of emphasis is placed upon holding
onto momentary beauty before its inevitable decline, and the natural beauty of this final
stanza is tempered with an awareness of its ephemerality, as seen in the impending
migration of the “swallows”, for example, or the “bloom” of the clouds alternatively acting
as a powerful mask for the blazing sun of high summer. In particular, the whistle of the “red-
breast” exposes this conflict between physical sensation and a desire for transcendence, as
Jeannie Tanner

a whistle being on the one hand quite cheerful, also could mean to ask with little hope of
receiving, and this adds a sense of hopelessness and morbidity to the end of the poem.
Both poems explore the conflict between physical presence and sensation and the desire for
transcendence, however Eve of St. Agnes arguably places more emphasis on this idea,
whereas To Autumn celebrates finding beauty in the mundane. The contrast between life
and death in Eve of St. Agnes helps to emphasise the Romantic trope of the idealisation of
romance, as the young lovers act as a celebration of the warmth of love over cold piety and
hatred – the “pale, lattic’d, chill” of the chapel contrasting with Porphyro’s “heart on fire for
Madeline”. It is the sharpness of this contrast that alludes to the idea that Porphyro and
Madeline and, by extension, Keats himself, are exhibiting a desire for transcendence. The
theme of illusion vs. reality is prominent in the poem, as love is presented as passionate and
ritualistic, however the idea that this romance is being undercut with voyeuristic and
predatorial behaviour illustrates its illusory nature. There is no doubt that Porphyro and
Madeline’s relationship is impassioned and intense, however Madeline’s consummation of
dreams, fantasies and illusions of romance contrasts concerningly with Porphyro’s actions in
the present reality. These boundaries are collapsed when Porphyo enters Madeline’s dream
“as the rose blendeth its odour with the violet” – one reading of this image could be that in
entering her dream, the lovers achieve a metaphorical immortality by uniting in an alternate
realm together, therefore perpetuating the Romantic idea that love transcends all bounds.
However, the blending together of two strong-scented flowers (again, sensory imagery is
used effectively here) has the potential to be quite overwhelming and merging the two
scents together runs the risk of obscuring each flower’s individual scent. This simile is
elevated if we view the rose to be a yonic image, as this blending of scents would leave the
rose’s scent to be indistinguishable and lacking in autonomy – this image, combined with
the accompanying phrase “solution sweet” raises the issue of consent, as the double
meaning of “solution” could reference a mixture of elements (linking to the flower image) or
could suggest the resolution to a problem, implying that their encounter was planned. This
is evidence of the dangers that come with a desire for transcendence and an inability to be
present in the current reality. Similar to the imagery of enchantment that pervades Eve of
St. Agnes is Keats’ personification of Autumn in To Autumn. Autumn is depicted as an almost
Classical, goddess-like figure as she is able to morph herself into a number of different
attitudes and postures as she might in a decorative Frieze or a series of frescoes: her sitting
in the “granary”, her asleep on a “half-reap’d furrow”, her being compared to a “gleaner”. In
this second stanza, Autumn is imagined both as the farmer who works the land and the
cottage-dweller who depends upon scraps for their survival – these agricultural images a far
cry from the ethereal depiction of her “conspiring” with the sun in the previous stanza.
Moreover, Keats directly addressing Autumn in this stanza shows his sympathy for the
season, which he proves to be no austere god-like being because it can indulge in its own
produce (as seen in the images of her sitting by the “cyder-press” as mentioned above). By
humanising Autumn, the poem dramatises nature’s transcendence of the boundaries we
draw across it rather than the other way around. Finally, it is important to note the auditive
polyphony in this stanza that sharply contrasts with the soft, still silence of the first and
second stanzas: the “songs”, “music” and “choir” of the scene are accompanied by
“bleat[s]”, “whistles” and “twitter[s]” of the countryside. This final verse, in contrast to the
silence that fills the cold and grey chapel in Eve of St. Agnes, proves Keats not to be a self-
indulgent poet, as he fights against the inevitable silence associated with death with this
cacophonous end to the poem. Perhaps Keats reminding is himself (and the reader) of the
Jeannie Tanner

unexpected autumnal beauty in our midst as he hears these sounds and sings these songs
whilst suffering his own physical decline. Therefore, an alternative interpretation of this final
stanza could suggest that Keats is implying that sources of meaning and value are not
located in a remote transcendental Beyond, but in the beauty of the mundane and the
familiar.
Overall, contrast between life and death, physical sensation and transcendence, is explored
effectively and thoroughly within both poems. For the characters of Porphyro and Madeline
in Eve of St. Agnes, a desire for transcendence through love is presented on the whole to be
deeply romantic, however it is quickly undermined by the conflicting forces of reality and
fantasy that create an unjust power dynamic between the two. In To Autumn, however, it is
the physical presence of nature that causes the speaker in To Autumn to come the
conclusion that the divinity of the world comes simply from natural existence and arguably
acts as an example of physical sensation and the human experience triumphing over a
desire for transcendence.