The Eve of St. Agnes, founded on a popular mediaeval legend, not being a tragedy like Isabella, cannot be expected to rival it in depth and intensity; but in every other poetic quality it equals, where it does not surpass, the former poem.
To be specially noted is the skilful use which Keats here makes of contrast—between the cruel cold without and the warm love within; the palsied age of the Bedesman and Angela, and the eager youth of Porphyro and Madeline; the noise and revel and the hush of Madeline's bedroom, and, as Mr. Colvin has pointed out, in the moonlight which, chill and sepulchral when it strikes elsewhere, to Madeline is as a halo of glory, an angelic light.
A mysterious charm is given to the poem by the way in which Keats endows inanimate things with a sort of half-conscious life. The knights and ladies of stone arouse the bedesman's shuddering sympathy when he thinks of the cold they must be enduring; 'the carven angels' 'star'd' 'eager-eyed' from the roof of the chapel, and the scutcheon in Madeline's window 'blush'd with blood of queens and kings'.
Keats's characteristic method of description—the way in which, by his masterly choice of significant detail, he gives us the whole feeling of the situation, is here seen in its perfection. In stanza 1 each line is a picture and each picture contributes to the whole effect of painful chill. The silence of the sheep, the old man's breath visible in the frosty air,—these are things which many people would not notice, but it is such little things that make the whole scene real to us.
There is another method of description, quite as beautiful in its way, which Coleridge adopted with magic effect in Christabel. This is to use the power of suggestion, to say very little, but that little of a kind to awaken the reader's imagination and make him complete the picture. For example, we are told of Christabel—
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness.
Compare this with stanza [xxvi] of The Eve of St. Agnes.
That Keats was a master of both ways of obtaining a romantic effect is shown by his La Belle Dame Sans Merci, considered by some people his masterpiece, where the rich detail of The Eve of St. Agnes is replaced by reserve and suggestion.
As the poem was not included in the volume published in 1820, it is given here.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci.