The Eve of St. Agnes
On the bitterest night of the year, in a castle loud with revelry, a girl performs the rites that are supposed to show a maiden her future husband in sleep, while the young man of the enemy house crosses the hall under the eyes of her kinsmen. An old servant hides him in a closet with a heap of candied apple, quince and plum, and he watches her undress by a casement of triple-arched stained glass. Keats wrote it in a fortnight at Chichester in January 1819, and it stands as the most sensuous of his longer narratives.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ Romeo and Juliet
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Plot structure
Quest object (Greimas)
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Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 58% · 10 shared
- 53% · 12 shared
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- 47% · 8 shared