In the "Eve of St. Agnes", John Keats created a tale of young love not by forgetting what everyday existence is like, but by using the mean, sordid, and commonplace as a foundation upon which to build a high romance. The result is no mere fairy tale, but a poem that has a rounded fullness of mystery wherein Keats' perplexes the reader with the questionable fusion of antithetical elements. Moreover, Keat's commingles Madelines experience of her ideal world with that of her real world. Furthermore, Keats uses nature to illustrate one of many mystical powers.
             One might argue that the most mysterious aspect of the poem is the fusion of antithetical elements. Keats baffles the reader as he amalgamates Madelines ideal world with that of reality. When Madeline is awakened from her divine vision, her capacity to perceive both human life and the spiritual revelation of her transcendent dream, allows her to experience simultaneously both the mortal and the immortal. Ideally, the sensory-visionary state should correspond to the nature of heavens bourne, where the human and the ethereal, beauty and truth are one. The mortal Porphyro presented to her senses and the ideal Porphyro of her vision should fuse mystically into an immortality of passionate experience; as warmly human as the one and yet as immutable as the other. 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. 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). In her vision of immortality Porphyro's eyes were "Spiritual and clear," but now she finds them "sad," sadness being inextricable from human existence.
             The most striking feature about the climax is the peculiar confusion of wake and sleep that characterizes Madeline&apos...