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University International INFORMATION TO USERS This reproduction was made from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. While the most advanced technology has been used to photograph and reproduce this document, the quality of the reproduction is heavily dependent upon the quality of the material submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help clarify markings or notations which may appear on this reproduction. 1.The sign or “target” for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is “ Missing Page(s)” . If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) o r section, they are spliced into the film along w ith adjacent pages. This may have necessitated c u ttin g through an image and duplicating adjacent pages to assure complete co n tin u ity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a round black mark, it is an indication of either blurred copy because of movement during exposure, duplicate copy, or copyrighted materials that should not have been filmed. For blurred pages, a good image o f the page can be found in the adjacent frame. I f copyrighted materials were deleted, a target note w ill appear listing the pages in the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., is part of the material being photographed, a definite method of “ sectioning” the material has been followed. It is customary to begin filming at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. If necessary, sectioning is continued again—beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete. 4. For illustrations that cannot be satisfactorily reproduced by xerographic means, photographic prints can be purchased at additional cost and inserted into your xerographic copy. These prints are available upon request from the Dissertations Customer Services Department. 5. Some pages in any docum ent may have indistinct p rin t. In all cases the best available copy has been filmed. University Micrdrilms International 300 N. Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 8323257 Little, Sylvia Elizabeth Pierce "PASSION’S PASSING BELL”: DYING INTO LIFE IN "THE EVE OF ST. AGNES,” "LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI," AND "LAMIA" Middle Tennessee State University D.A. 1983 University Microfilms International300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 Copyright 1983 by Little, Sylvia Elizabeth Pierce All Rights Reserved "PASSION'S PASSING BELL": DYING INTO LIFE IN THE EVE OF ST. AGNES, "LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI," AND LAMIA Sylvia Pierce Little A dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of Middle Tennessee State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Arts August, 1983 "PASSION'S PASSING BELL": DYING INTO LIFE IN THE EVE OF ST. AGNES, "LA BELLE DAME SANS MERC I," AND LAMIA APPROVED: Graduate Committee: Major Professor .Jl/b* fl- TnlXtAul gjSmmittee Member l A / Q a M - Committee Member He ady^^theDepartmentofEng 1 i s h 'ate School ABSTRACT "PASSION'S PASSING BELL": DYING INTO LIFE IN THE EVE OF ST. AGNES, "LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI," AND LAMIA by Sylvia Pierce Little Between January and September 1819, John Keats wrote three remarkable, intricately related love poems: The Eve of St. Agnes, "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and Lamia. As a group the poems indicate ambivalent attitudes toward love, thematic transition, and tonai shift evident in his poetry during 1819. That they register Keats's dying into life as lover and poet is the thesis of this study. Chapter One, "Three Love Poems," traces the physical and psychological conditions under which Keats wrote the poems and cites general critical interpretations. Compari­ sons and contrasts of the three poems reveal a developing* ambivalence in Keats toward the entanglements of love and art. Chapter Two, "The Poet as Lover," examines Keats's biography and letters and establishes the context for reading the poems autobiographically. The recurring images of entrapment, absorption, and dissolution in the letters suggest the ambivalence, the exquisite misery, Keats felt Sylvia Pierce Little toward loving Fanny Brawne. Each poem contains veiled references to their relationship. Chapter Three, "The Lover as Poet," analyzes each poem as a statement of poetic process, the poet's union with poetic imagination. The fates of the poet-dreamers suggest an increasingly ambiguous view of the nature of the poet and his craft. The Eve of St. Agnes, "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and Lamia record a transformation of the poetic self. Chapter Four, "The Lover as Lover," focuses upon the dreams and realities of the lovers— Porphyro and Madeline, the knight-at-arms and La Belle Dame, Lycius and Lamia, and Hermes and the nymph. The women are portrayed as angels and demons; the men, as impassioned lovers and self-deluded dreamers. The interrelationships of the lovers are analyzed and linked to Keats's emotional fluctuation in 1819. Chapter Five, "Labyrinthine Love," examines the nature of love in the poems, the paradoxes of bliss and pain, enchantment and entrapment, and the attempts to unperplex bliss and pain. Physical consummation occurs but ultimately leads to darkness, chill, or death. Chapter Six, "'Passion's Passing Bell,'" concludes that the pleasures and torments of loving Fanny Brawne created the tension for Keats's dying into life. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. THREE LOVE PO E M S ............................... 1 II. THE POET AS LO V E R ............................ 36 III. THE LOVER AS P O E T ........................... 69 IV. THE LOVER AS LOVER ......................... 98 V. LABYRINTHINE L O V E ........................... 139 VI. CONCLUSION: "PASSION'S PASSING BELL" . 160 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................ 163 ii Chapter I THREE LOVE POEMS The year 1819 is regarded as the "annus mirabilis" of John Keats's poetic life.l In the first eight months especially, Keats's genius flourished.2 Among the accom­ plishments of that golden period are three remarkable, intricately related love poems: The Eve of St. Agnes, "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and Lamia. The Eve of St. Agnes marks the beginning of Keats's great year, Keats's triumphant entry as a "trained craftsman."La Belle Dame sans Merci" marks the middle of the great year and signals for Alexander Crawford Keats's new mood, "the first utter­ ance of the new Keats, the new poetry which is hereafter to prevail, and to become d o m i n a n t . Lamia, the last 1 John Middleton Murry, Keats and Shakespeare: A Study of Keats' Poetic Life from 1816 to 1820 (1925; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), p. 94. 2 H. W. Garrod, Keats, 2nd ed. (1939; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 61. 2 M. R. Ridley, Keats' Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Development (1933; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), pp. 96-97. 4 Alexander W. Crawford, The Genius of Keats: An Interpretation (1932; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967) , p. 63. 1 2 sustained poetic effort, marks the closing of the great year, the "full culmination of Keats's mind and art."^ As a group then these three love poems indicate both thematic transition and tonal shift occurring in Keats's poetry during 1819. Furthermore, they are closely related to Keats's changing relationship with Fanny Brawne, which Middleton Murry identifies as a passage from "the ecstasy of love to the ecstasy of despair."^ That The Eve of St. Agnes, "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and Lamia register the changing attitudes of Keats toward love and poetry during 1819, his own dying into life as lover and poet, is the thesis of this study. Keats composed The Eve of St. Agnes the last week of January and the first week of February, a feat that Claude Finney considers "a spontaneous expression of genius, springing like Pallas Athena full grown from the forehead of the p o e t . Robin Mayhead similarly calls the poem a tour de force and claims that "it deserves to be reckoned among Keats's most assured performances."® Keats wrote the ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci" even more rapidly. According to 5 Crawford, p. 114. 6 Murry, p. 111. ^ Claude Lee Finney, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry (1936; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), II, 540-41. Q ° Robin Mayhead, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 47, 3 Walter Jackson Bate, Keats composed the poem on April 21 as "only a single afternoon's or an early evening's episode, though the stanzas have haunted readers and poets for a century and a half."® "La Belle Dame sans Merci" was written as part of a journal letter to Keats's brother George.-*-® Stuart Sperry labels it the first of Keats's "undoubted masterpieces" of the spring.H Even more expan­ sively, Ifor Evans calls it "the most memorable" of all Keats's short poems, "the most miraculous piece in all Keats's work."12 The composition of Lamia, although interrupted by the completion of the verse-drama Otho the Great, was also relatively quick. Keats wrote the first half of Lamia in twelve or thirteen days in early July but did not finish it until the last week or so of August.13 Although a bewildering and disputed work, the "Mona Lisa of Keat's later poetry,"!4 Lamia is, nevertheless, "a swift ® Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1963), p. 478. 1® John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), II, 95-96. All further references to Keats's letters appear in the text. 11 Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 231.
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