By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ is a narrative poem by John Keats (1795-1821) told using the Spenserian stanza, the nine-line verse form Edmund Spenser developed for his vast sixteenth-century epic, The Faerie Queene. On a cold night in a medieval castle, a young lover breaks into his sweetheart’s chamber, hides in her closet, and then persuades her semi-conscious self to run away with him.
The Eve of St. Agnes
St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
      The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
      The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
      And silent was the flock in woolly fold: