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Keats’ Love for Fanny Brawne in The Eve of St. Agnes Essay

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Keats’ Love for Fanny Brawne in The Eve of St. Agnes

“For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain” –John Keats to Fanny Brawne (Bate 538).

As the colloquial phrase goes…behind every great man, lies a great woman, but in John Keats’ case, the woman is neither great nor his superior but inspires greatness in the Romantic poet. This woman calls herself Fanny Brawne. She was intellectually inferior to Keats, but her sprightly character added rich, sensuosity to his writing. John …show more content…

Some may call her interests frivolous and fashionable, but to Keats, her worldly enjoyment gave him appreciation for physical sensibility, experiencing nature and one another through smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound.

Rather than instructing interaction with physical nature, Keats breathes nature into his poetry. For example, William Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned” encourages one to leave the classroom and take a romp in fertile woodlands:

Enough of Science and of Art Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives (129)

Wordsworth’s poetry lectures on nature while Keats’ poetry playfully frolics in the meadow. “The Eve of St. Agnes” stimulates intensity and personal connection because the fragrances, flavors, and feel of the scene come alive. The night is “honeyed,” the fair virgins are “lilly white” (VI), and the air resounds with “timbrels” and “faery fancy” (VIII). Madeline admires the “languid moon” and her interests spring to life as a “full-blown rose” (528). Objects in nature represent human characteristics. Renaissance folklore inspires the lines: “While legioned faeries paced the coverlet/And pale enchantment held her sleepy-eyed” (XIX). Mystic revelry and description allows the reader to feel apart of Keats’ poem.

The quintessential sense-oriented stanza attains the intensity of emotions: And

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