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Keats Reading Chaucer: Troilus and Arrested Time in The Eve of St. Agnes

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Abstract

The Eve of St. Agnes represents Keats’s response to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The network of intertextual allusions and correspondences linking the two works indicates that Keats’s poem was inspired by Chaucer’s account of the Trojan couple’s love story. In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats rewrites the tragedy of Troilus into a narrative exploration of desire and celebration of youthful idealism. Keats arrests the Troilus love-plot at the heights of its happy assurance, in which the lovers’ intimacy offers apparent protection against the threat of social disapproval or tragic consequence. The Trojan tale becomes a Grecian urn, so to speak, a silent form immortalizing the truthful beauty of youthful love.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is an honor to contribute this chapter on The Eve of St. Agnes to a volume dedicated to Jack Stillinger, who is arguably the poem’s most influential critic. While departing from his “hoodwinking” interpretation in significant ways, this chapter remains nevertheless indebted to the vast influence of his voice.

  2. 2.

    As Jack Stillinger reminds readers of The Eve of St. Agnes, there exists in simultaneous tension many different “Keatses” (“Multiple Readers” 557–63).

  3. 3.

    For Keats’s medievalism as an escape from history, see Fay 112–14; for a contrasting view that reads Keats as critiquing Romantic escapism and sentimentality, see Lau, “Madeline.”

  4. 4.

    The most sustained examination of Troilus’s influence on St. Agnes remains F.E.L. Priestly’s article from 1944; discussions of Chaucer’s influence include those of Sackton, Gittings, Primeau, and Lau, “Keats’s Markings”; for Shakespeare, see Bate and White.

  5. 5.

    For the social problems complicating Troilus and Criseyde’s affair, see Spearing 125; the acrimony between Porphyro’s and Madeline’s respective families is registered at lines 82–88.

  6. 6.

    In the interest of facilitating comparisons, I use the following abbreviations in conjunction with textual line numbers: EAS refers to The Eve of St. Agnes and TC refers to Troilus and Criseyde.

  7. 7.

    For voyeurism in Troilus, see Spearing 133–36; for voyeurism in St. Agnes, see Bennett 102; Scott 95; Stillinger 546; Levinson 122.

  8. 8.

    Morey explains that Chaucer’s allusion to “the vertue of corones tweyne” (2.1735) refers to the feast of St. Agnes.

  9. 9.

    Stuart Sperry describes the poem as a drama of wish fulfillment (202).

  10. 10.

    John Middleton Murray 109–10; Claude Lee Finney 2: 538; Levinson reads the poem as a recompense for a life of disappointment (103).

  11. 11.

    As Gittings and Primeau argue, the emotional torment of Troilus in books 4–5 is evident in Keats’s later poems about jealousy and betrayal.

  12. 12.

    Derek Brewer describes Troilus’s “delicate and complex manhood” (238).

  13. 13.

    See Mieszkowski and Carruthers (13); for modern readers that regard Troilus as emasculated, see Mieszkowski’s overview (45).

  14. 14.

    For Keats’s engagement with courtly love, see Thomson (348) and Fay (109–22).

  15. 15.

    The passages include TC 1.290–94, 1.361–64, 1.411, 1.446–48, 1.538–39, 3.1511–33 (see Lau, “Keats’s Markings” 45–46).

  16. 16.

    As with most of his representations of the classical past, Chaucer relies upon the material culture of medieval Christianity to furnish descriptions of pagan religiosity (Stanbury, Visual Object 15, 110).

  17. 17.

    Indeed, Chaucer uses the term “stremes” to refer to the immersive effects of stained-glass light (The Book of the Duchess 338).

  18. 18.

    Significantly, these are lines marked by Keats (Lau, “Keats’s Markings” 45).

  19. 19.

    He marks those passages describing the impact of Troilus’s first sighting of Criseyde; specifically TC 1.411, 1.446–48, 1.448.90, 1.544–46, 1.572–74 (see Lau, “Keats’s Markings” 45)

  20. 20.

    For the power inscribed in the gazing male, see Mulvey’s classic article; for Keats’s challenge to this paradigm, see Wolfson 15.

  21. 21.

    Homans points out that the rhetorical question in effect traps Fanny to give a certain answer (351).

  22. 22.

    The erotic power of these items becomes apparent when Porphyro finds himself transfixed by the sight of Madeline’s discarded clothes: “Porphyro gazed upon her empty dress” (245).

  23. 23.

    This duality is evident in other feminine figures of Keats’s poetry; see Waldoff 55 and Arsenau 229.

  24. 24.

    For Keats’s resentment of the power of women, see Homans 360; for Keats’s ambivalence about his love for Fanny, see Wright 93.

  25. 25.

    Sperry 207; Scott reads Porphyro as a passive figure who is “hung like a pendant in Madeline’s vision as if into a picture or a frieze” (93).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

    Sarah Powrie

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  1. Sarah Powrie
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Correspondence to Sarah Powrie .

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  1. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA

    Beth Lau

  2. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Greg Kucich

  3. University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, USA

    Daniel Johnson

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Powrie, S. (2022). Keats Reading Chaucer: Troilus and Arrested Time in The Eve of St. Agnes. In: Lau, B., Kucich, G., Johnson, D. (eds) Keats’s Reading / Reading Keats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79530-6_7

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