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Essay on The Eve of St. Agnes
John Keats had what Brian Bartlett calls "an intense historical imagination." Equal emphasis ought to be placed on all three terms in that description. Like the other major Romantic poets, Keats possessed a keen sense of the intimacy between consciousness, time, and interpretation. What makes him unique is his belief that each kind of experience, given certain circumstances, can have a place in that imagination. In Keats's view, the task of the poet is to live through and with them all: not to choose one over the others, but to understand what each has to offer, to experience in full the circumstances under which each becomes valuable.
Keats's determination to live out the poet's task—to move from recreation through imagination to the re-creation of life—makes for his greatest poems. One of these is "The Eve of St. Agnes." Written early in 1819, this is his first successful extended poem. Here Keats tells a good story well. But this does not fully account for the poem's success. Keats's handling of the narrative, his choice and arrangement of detail: these proceed from the pattern of Romantic time and the musical emblems of its moments. Music provides a vocabulary and a method. In the Romantic age, music was highly syntactical; the Romantic poet's use of music is no less so. Music-as-idea is a system, from rhetorical through Pythagorean to affective. That system gives the poet freedom to explore Romanticism's central concerns, as the following discussion will show.
In the poem's opening, all nature is numb: the owl, the hare, the "flock in woolly fold," and an old Beadsman. As opposed to the others, however, the Beadsman is not all "a-cold." There is more to his experience than winter's "bitter chill." His "frosted breath [is] / Like pious incense from a censer old"...............
