Eve Of St. Agnes

. One can ascertain the storm is indicative of natures approval of the elopement of Madeline and Porphyro. “Hark! ‘tis as elfin-storm faery land, of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed: Arise- arise! the mourning is at hand - The bloated wassailers will never heed - Let us away, my love, with happy speed; There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see - Drowned all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead: Awake! arise! my love and fearless be, For o’er the southern moors I have a home for thee” (343, 351). However, the difference between the mortal Porphyro and the visionary Porphyro is too great to allow the two to coalesce into a human-ethereal identity. Madeline’s dream does not take place in the ordinary course of mortal events, but is occasioned by the mystical power of St. If dreams are imaginative visions of a future reality, St. The mystical power of nature is represented by the storm. These qualities are displayed in their most exquisite form in the vision scene which quite naturally remains in the uppermost in the mind. Consequently, the sight of mortality was to Madeline “a painful change, the nigh expell’d the bliss of her dream so pure and deep” (300-301). Agnes it is the fusion of antithetical elements, the mixture of ideal world and real world experiences, and the mystical power of nature that most prevalently attracts ones attention. It is a “hallow’d hour” (66), an extraordinary condition that, being outside the normal framework of experience, permits the imagination to rise to supernatural heights and correspondingly to penetrate most deeply into the beauty-truth that is to come. As the star-crossed lovers abscond from a medieval castle in Italy, a storm befalls upon the land. Agnes’ dreams are “the sweetest of the year” (63).