Contrasts
"The Eve of St. Agnes" swings wildly between a series of stark contrasts: hot and cold, music and silence, awake and asleep, old and young, Christian and fairy—you can go on and on. You can actua...
The Scutcheon
The scutcheon, or as well like to call it: that part where Keats takes a nine-line time-out to talk about a window. Just when you think the sparks are about to fly between Porphyro and Madeline in...
Music
Music crops up a lot in this poem, but does so in a funny way. Namely, the poem systematically introduces music and then represses it. The first time you see that is in stanza 3, where our hard-wor...
Sound without Sound
As we discuss in "Wordplay: Contrasts," this poem swings back and forth between contrasts, and one of those is silence and sound. There are two interesting instances, however, where you seem to hav...
Porphyro's Lute
A second, different example of soundless music comes from Porphyro. Unable to wake up Madeline, Porphyro takes the opportunity to break out some tunes on her lute. The song he plays, though, sounds...
Gazing
If you wanted to get simple, you could describe a lot of this poem's plot in terms of looking: Madeline wants to see Porphyro, Porphyro wants to see Madeline (but doesn't want anybody—including M...
Looking in Reverse
Things get crazy when Madeline opens her eyes, though: Her eyes were open, but she still beheld,Now wide awake, the vision of her sleep[…]While still her gaze on Porphyro would keep;Who knelt, wi...