Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
- Okay, prayer time's over, and Madeline's getting ready for bed. That means, you guessed it, she's got to get out of her clothes.
- In the last stanza, Madeline was figured as an angel and a saint. In this stanza, she is a 5,000% warm-blooded woman. (The mermaid description is just a simile to describe how she might look once all her clothes are bunched up around her legs.) Keats describes her hair, and, in a kind of backwards way, her body.
- What do we mean by backwards? Well, apart from that little bit about her dress falling to her knees, Keats doesn't actually describe Madeline's body per se, he instead he gives us a sort of negative space drawing by describing the things immediately around her body: her jewelry, warmed by her skin, and her bodice, which is "fragrant" because it's been right next to her skin all night.
- Whereas the last stanza described how Madeline-the-Saint looked, this stanza describes how Madeline-the-Woman feels and smells, which is quite a gear-shift for the reader.
- About to get into bed, Madeline imagines that she sees St. Agnes there. To us, this sounds kind of scary ("Oh, hey there, ancient dead martyr chillin' in my bed"), and also surprising because so far Madeline's been anticipating the vision of Porphyro, not St. Agnes.