











































Communication, Society and Media 
ISSN 2576-5388 (Print) ISSN 2576-5396 (Online) 

Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 
www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm 

24 
 

Review Paper 

Who is the Ultimate Dream Weaver in John Keats’s The Eve of 

St. Agnes? 
Jiayu Peng1 & Dan Cui2* 

1 Graduate Student of School of English, Jilin International Studies University, Changchun, China 
2 Postdoc of Literature of School of English, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China; Doc of 

Literature, Professor, Dean of Academy of International Language and Culture and Vice Dean of 

School of English, Jilin International Studies University, Changchun, China 
* Dan Cui, Corresponding Author 

 

Received: July 26, 2021        Accepted: August 15, 2021        Online Published: August 30, 2021 

doi:10.22158/csm.v4n3p24                       URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/csm.v4n3p24 

 

Abstract 

This article aims to interpret dreams in John Keats’s narrative The Eve of St. Agnes from different 

perspectives: the Beadsman’s, Porphyro’s, Madeline’s and John Keats’s, the poet. We will analyze their 

functions respectively, and then draw a conclusion of Keats’s purpose in structuring such a way of 

weaving dreams. After summarizing studies and theories on dream and soul from the perspective of 

psychoanalysis and scholars’ views on The Eve of St. Agnes, we will continue to illustrate the ways in 

which John Keats constructs three layers of dreams with the pertinent approaches by Freud, Fromm, 

Lacan, Rank, Žižek, etc. so as to reveal John Keats’s viewpoints on life and death, dream and reality, and 

pleasure and pain. 

Keywords 

Keats, dream weaver, Lacan, Freud, Žižek, Rank, balance 

 

1. Introduction 

The Eve of St. Agnes (1819) is an important and representative work among Keats’s five influential 

narrative poems, the four others being Endymion (1818), Isabella (1818), Hyperion (1819), and Lamia 

(1820). Many highlighting features exist in The Eve of St. Agnes, such as the beautiful imagery, the 

profound atmosphere, the mysterious legend and the intriguing dream. Among these highlights, the 

dream is an essential part to be discussed unceasingly, as it functions as the main framework throughout 

the entire narrative with strong connotations for concessive interpretation. Thus, the significance of 

dream in The Eve of St. Agnes is supposed to be taken into further consideration. 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
25 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

Fromm comments that “It was Freud who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, reaffirmed the old 

concept: dreams are both meaningful and significant; we do not dream anything that is not an important 

expression of our inner lives and all dreams can be understood provided we have the key” (Fromm, p. 

17). As dreams are an essential part of the poem, the understanding of dreams is key to understanding 

John Keats himself as a poet. 

According to Fromm, “Dreams are understood to be the hallucinatory fulfillment of irrational wishes 

and particularly sexual wishes which have originated in our early childhood and have not been fully 

transformed into reaction formations or sublimations. These wishes are expressed as being fulfilled 

when our conscious control is weakened, as is the case in sleep. However, if we would permit ourselves 

to live out the fulfillment of these irrational desires in our dreams, dreams would not be so puzzling and 

confusing. We rarely dream that we commit murder or incest or any other kind of crime, and even if we 

do so, we do not enjoy the fulfillment of these wishes in our dreams. In order to explain this 

phenomenon, Freud assumes that in our sleep life the moral censor in ourselves is half asleep, too. Thus 

thoughts and fantasies are permitted to enter into our sleep consciousness which otherwise are 

completely shut out. But the censor is only half asleep. He is sufficiently awake to make it impossible 

for the forbidden thoughts to appear clearly and unmistakably. If the function of the dream is to 

preserve our sleep, the irrational wishes that appear in the dream must be sufficiently disguised to 

deceive the censor. Like the neurotic symptoms, they are a compromise between the repressed forces of 

the id and the repressing force of censoring superego” (Fromm, p. 46, p. 47). In this paper, Angela is 

believed to function as the role of “moral censor” in Porphyro’s dream, and the detailed evidence will 

be found in 3.2 Porphyro’s Dream. 

In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats mentions “soul” five times in total, “spirit” four times, “phantom” three 

and “ghost” once. Due to this, the significance of “soul” is worth discussing. Ryan contends that “he 

never abandoned the belief that a Supreme Intelligence governed the universe and, though shaken by 

doubts, he ardently desired to believe in a spiritual principle that would survive the death of the body” 

(Ryan, p. 67). We would agree with the point of Keats’s spiritual belief, or soul belief, that soul 

survives after the death of body. Rank in his book Psychology and Soul notes that “Thus the facts of 

death and of the individual’s denial of death brought the idea of the soul into being; and, at a time when 

life was beginning to acquire a spiritual character, the problems of death and of its denial through belief 

were imbedded in an immortal body-soul which simulated and survived the ego as its Double” (Rank, p. 

14). In this paper, we aim to interpret this story as an imaginative case of murder based on the theory of 

soul belief. 

Regarding that Keats prefers adopting the imaginative dream in his works, for he once made a 

comparison in his letter to Benjamin Bailey: “The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream - he 

awoke and found it truth... Adam’s dream will do here and seems to be a conviction that Imagination 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
26 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

and its empyreal reflection is the same as human Life and its spiritual repetition” (Letters, I, 185), we 

will approach his narrative by adopting Lacanian and Freudian theories to interpret dreams in The Eve 

of St. Agnes in order to understand how John Keats illustrates his views on important issues through the 

aesthetic composition. 

 

2. Literature Review 

Being considered as one of Keats’s most successful narratives, The Eve of St. Agnes’s aesthetic features 

and mysterious, ambivalent ending have roused a number of scholars’ diverse discussions for centuries. 

Early arguments were mostly based on the role that Porphyro plays, either a hero or a villain, and with 

time going by, Madeline’s position in the poem is being highlighted, too. There are also comparisons of 

The Eve of St. Agnes among different works of different influential writers, such as John Milton’s 

Paradise Lost, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Cymbeline, and John Keats’s own work 

“La Belle Dame sans Merci”. There are indeed a wide range of topics that deserve attention, including 

gender, witchcraft, Keats’s beliefs, and dreams, to name a few. 

2.1 Studies on Gender Ambivalence 

In Keivan’s studies on gender ambivalence, the theory of Lacanian gaze is applied. “Therefore, for 

Lacan, the gaze—distinguished from the ‘male gaze’—is not a vehicle of mastery belonging to the 

subject, but a breaking down of that mastery by the objet a (the object of desire)” (Keivan, p. 212). By 

that he holds that the gaze is a mutual one: when the subject is gazing, it is being gazed by Other too. 

“Resented and humiliated by his contemporaries, Keats sought to assert his authority as a masculine 

subject through an immature struggle to repel female readers and to gain sexual (visual) mastery over 

women” (Keivan, p. 210). Keats being a self-conflict in the masculine background, he struggled 

between his feminine and masculine selves. The relationship between gender and “gaze” has been 

thoroughly explored in Keivan’s work, as he not only interprets the “male gaze” from Porphyro but 

also conversely illustrates the resistance of the object, which is gazing the subject in return: that is, 

Madeline gazes back to Porphyro. He claims that “In The Eve of St. Agnes, it is Madeline who 

embodies the m (other), the object of desire and scrutiny, or in Lacanian terms, the objet petit a” 

(Keivan, p. 213). Most importantly, Keivan’s conclusion of the inevitable reversing of subjects and 

objects in the gaze will help promote our assumption of Porphyro’s anxiety towards the Real, which 

will be analyzed in 3.3 Madeline’s dream. 

2.2 Studies on Witchcraft and Male Vulnerability 

According to Arcana, the whole story reads as a Faery ritual in which the goddess Madeline gives birth 

to Porphyro, the young god, and helps Angela to rest (Arcana, p. 51, p. 52). Furthermore, in her reading, 

the interplay between Faery and Christianity is analyzed and ends with the triumph of Faery over 

Christianity (Arcana, p. 52). From Arcana’s point of Witchcraft—the old religion of the Britons, 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
27 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

Porphyro does not take the initiative, and instead, he is conjured and enchanted by Madeline. It is 

reasonable that Madeline takes the initiative in a way, as the evidence is found in Angela’s words: “my 

lady fair the conjuror plays” (Keats, XIV: 124). However, we doubt whether Angela is being ironic, for 

she mentions “deceive” (Keats, XIV: 125) and laughs even when she is feeble: “Feebly she laugheth in 

the languid moon” (Keats, XV: 127). Her attitude towards the festival conveys a sort of contempt. 

Similarly, Arcana’s emphasis on Madeline’s power is somewhat relevant to Wolfson’s judgment over 

male vulnerability: “the very texts that show men subjecting women to the control of the male gaze 

frequently involve figures of male vulnerability” (Wolfson, p. 325). Indeed, by gazing Madeline, 

“Porphyro grew faint” (Keats, XXV: 224). Nancy Rosenfeld also argues that “The gazing Porphyro, too, 

appears to be weakened; he takes on the characteristics of an object when, kneeling passively, ‘fearing 

to move or speak’, he is temporarily feminized” (Rosenfeld, p. 54). Nevertheless, looked at from the 

view of Lacanian gaze, Keivan considers the phenomenon as a resistance of the object 

(Madeline)—“she does look and, thereupon, defies Porphyro and deprives him of his mastery” (Keivan, 

p. 215)—and by doing so, Keats “challenged the existence of fixed, stable boundaries between the 

sexes... by blurring the distinction between masculinity and femininity” (Mellor, p. 215). As a 

conclusion of Keivan, Keats’s “feminine and masculine heroes melt into each other” (Keivan, p. 219), 

which means that the antagonism of the two genders in the end turns into a compromise or a union. We 

confirm that resistance does appear in the gender dominance, whereas we are inclined to believe that 

the male dominance will be regained in the end with the awakening of Madeline, and the corresponding 

reasons will be explained in 3.3 Madeline’s dream. 

2.3 Studies on Protestant Ethic 

Concerning that Keats was an active Romantic poet, protestant values might be integrated in his 

narrative. One Chinese researcher Chen Jun illuminates how Keats attempts to impose the Protestant 

ethics in occupation, love and consumption from the perspective of the rhetorical ethic (Chen, p. 99). 

As different analytical methods lead to different understandings, we will take the foods as an example 

to make a comparison from different backgrounds of belief. In the point of Arcana which has been 

discussed above, the foods in Stanza XXX are prepared by Porphyro and are sacred to the Great Mother, 

which serve as a ritual supplement (Arcana, p. 50). It is interesting that Arcana believes the foods will 

not be consumed by Madeline, as Porphyro is the one she will eat: “He is the ‘food’ that makes the 

maiden into the mother. He enters the maiden sexually and she as mother gives birth to him” (Arcana, p. 

51). Differently, for Chen Jun, the foods are similar to any other luxuries displayed in Madeline’s room, 

that they are only appreciated visually (Chen, p. 105). The reason is that in Protestant ethic of 

consumption, luxurious consumption is irrational, which should be avoided. Likewise, the luxuries also 

imply the forbidden lust in Protestant ethic of love, for readers’ expectation of sexual scenery is 

displaced by the description of them (Chen, p. 105). Although both Arcana and Chen Jun believe that 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
28 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

eventually, nobody eats the food, the functions of the food are explained in quite dissimilar ways by 

different beliefs holders. 

2.4 Studies on Poet’s Belief 

“We do not, after all, commonly think of Keats as a ‘religious poet’” (Barth, p. 286), says J. Robert 

Barth, but he continues that “Robert Ryan’s book does, I believe, follow this middle course, taking very 

much into account both Keats’s innate skepticism and suspicion of institutional Christianity, and his 

unceasing search for a broader religious meaning in his life and in his poetry” (Barth, p. 286) after 

Ryan’s book Keats: The Religious Sense was published. However, we believe that the further search of 

Keats’s religious belief has been revealed in Li Zeng and Cui Dan’s studies. According to their analysis, 

Keats’s anxiety over the lack of creativity, self value and difficult life was overcome by holding the 

strong belief of poetry pursuit (Cui & Li, p. 167). For them, Keats’s religious belief was replaced by his 

poetry belief, and his belief was firm and pure instead of being utilitarian and mundane (Cui & Li, p. 

168, p. 170). Even when Keats’s friends around him were Christian in varying degrees, that “Haydon 

himself, pugnaciously Christian; the gentle and scholarly Benjamin Bailey, more assured and more 

tolerant in his Christianity” (Barth, p. 287), he persisted his own belief in poetry no matter how the 

friends tried to “persuade” him and no matter how hard his life was (Cui & Li, p. 167). 

2.5 Studies on Buddhism 

When the above western “beliefs” as Faery, Christianity and Protestantism have been discussed, there 

exists an eastern element in Keats’s poems, which is Hinduism, or specifically Buddhism. We 

appreciate and are inspired by Li Zeng and Long Ruicui’s analytical assertion of “Saṃsāra” in Keats’s 

belief (Li & Long, p. 117). Actually, Saṃsāra in Buddhism, states Jeff Wilson, is the “suffering-laden 

cycle of life, death and rebirth, without beginning or ending” (Wilson, 2010). To get rid of Saṃsāra, 

one needs to get Nirvana, “a concept in Indian religions that represents the ultimate state of 

soteriological release, the liberation from Saṃsāra” (Meister, p. 25). However, Li Zeng and Long 

Ruicui have discovered that although Keats recognizes the torment of Saṃsāra, different from 

Buddhism, he does not believe the existence of Nirvana, which means that for him, the cycle that 

brings death and pain is endless (Li & Long, p. 118). For Keats, the only way to release is by using 

imagination, which can make one indulge in the illusory beauty and thus forget the pain (Li & Long, p. 

118). As death, pain and imagination are also major themes in our studies, we will extend the idea to 

the poem The Eve of St. Agnes as a conclusive part on Keats’s views of life. 

2.6 Summary 

Although the studies on The Eve of St. Agnes are diverse, “dream” in most cases is focused on as a 

subordinate part since it almost acts as the essential evidence for exploring further understanding. 

When Nancy Rosenfeld takes “dream” as the focus in her paper, the emphasis though is to make a 

comparison and contrast with Adam’s dream. For Jack Stillinger, “Madeline the self-hoodwinked 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
29 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

dreamer is, I think the main concern of the poem” (Stillinger, p. 547) suggests that Madeline is the 

“dream weaver” of the whole narrative. However, some other researchers do not deny the “strategem” 

that Porphyro sets up in promoting the dream to develop further, which indicates that Porphyro is the 

very dream weaver. Also, the argument over the aid that Angela plays in the dream holds water, too. 

Therefore, it can be concluded that the question who is the ultimate dream weaver in The Eve of St. 

Agnes is still a puzzle that needs to be decoded further due to its key role in interpreting the narrative. 

In this paper, dream will be treated as the core concert and we will depict dreams within dreams from 

the perspectives of different “dream weavers”. As The Eve of St. Agnes is a long narrative, we will seek 

out the clues to prove the feasibility of dream weavers in order to uncover the relationships among the 

characters, so as to illustrate the mysterious plot and reveal the uncertainties demonstrating the 

thematic significance. After all, “stories, the argument goes, are the main way we make sense of things, 

whether in thinking of our lives as a progression leading somewhere or in telling ourselves what is 

happening in the world” (Culler, p. 83). 

 

3. Analysis and Discussion 

3.1 Beadsman’s Dream 

The beginning sets the Middle-Age renaissance for the romance. From the descriptions of the 

Beadsman, it can be inferred that he is a soul in spiritual form rather than a concrete physical existence. 

Here is the essential evidence for such an assumption. Firstly, the narrator’s tone was cast to recall his 

previous period while alive: “The joys of all his life were said and sung: / His was harsh penance on St. 

Agnes’ Eve” (Keats, III: 23-24). It also functions as the evidence that he suffers spiritually from the St. 

festival. Secondly, the Beadsman is engulfed in the atmosphere of death: “The sculptur’d dead, on each 

side, seem to freeze... Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries, / He passeth by; and his weak spirit 

fails / To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails” (Keats, II: 14-18). Those dead figures 

together with animals cast the atmosphere of death around him and the list of images vividly illustrate 

the passed-away royal and influential figure sculptures who can even sense the coldness and freeze but 

the Beadsman in contrast cannot sense it at all. Rather than perform as a fleshy human, he seems like a 

specter that lingers in the human world. Then here comes the questions: how does he die and why does 

he still linger and haunt in the human world? His descending into this world on such a holy day can 

date back to the essential reasons. 

There is the probability that the Beadsman was murdered before he becomes “the Beadsman”, as the 

old Angela exclaims: “St. Agnes! Ah! it is St. Agnes’ Eve— / Yet men will murder upon holy days” 

(Keats, XIV: 118-119). The emphasis on murder even upon “holy days” exactly shows the probability. 

Another clue is at the end of the poem: “That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, / And all his 

warrior-guests, with shade and form / Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm, / Were long 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
30 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

benightmar’d” (Keats, XLII: 372-375). Madeline’s kinsmen had nightmares, which corresponds to 

what Rank states as “the spirit of the murder victim could torment the murderer in his dream” (Rank, p. 

15). Therefore, the Beadsman was probably murdered by the knights in the castle. Moreover, it is his 

violent death that achieves his immortality so that his soul keeps on “living” after death, as Rank 

continues that “yet because the spirit of the murder victim could torment the murderer in his dream, his 

immortality was really more certain than that of persons who had died natural deaths. In a certain sense, 

then, violent death became a source of immortality, as later superstitions and the figures of Christ and 

Joan of Arc illustrate” (Rank, p. 15). 

Here in the castle, he sees the playback of all his life, on the eve of St. Agnes, the night that he dies in. 

He does not stop walking, until he sees rough ashes: “and soon among / Rough ashes sat he for his 

soul’s reprieve, / And all night kept awake, for sinners’ sake to grieve” (Keats, III: 25-27). Among ashes, 

he sits and is determined to keep awake all night. However, being unconscious, he is brought into 

dream. Here it is the first layer of dream, the dream of the Beadsman within Keats’s dream. Starting 

from Stanza IV, the environment totally changes from outside to inside when embarking on his dream: 

“That ancient Beadsman heard the prelude soft... Were glowing to receive a thousand guests: / The 

carved angels, ever eager-eyed...” (Keats, IV: 28-36). The scene inside the castle is vividly shown in the 

Beadsman’s dream. Here comes the question: How is the dream created? “It is Freud’s assumption that 

the dream is always stimulated by a present event, usually on the day or the evening before the dream 

occurs. But a dream is provoked only by such events which are related to early infantile strivings. The 

energy for the creation of the dream stems from the intensity of the infantile experience, but the dream 

would not come into existence were it not for the recent event that touched upon the earlier experience 

and made it possible for it to come to life at that particular moment” (Fromm, p. 50). Here, today, is one 

of the many eves of St. Agnes which is a recent event stimulating his dream and recalling his 

“childhood” memory. As the Beadsman is a soul of the dead, it can be inferred that his “childhood” 

belongs to the time when he was alive. His “childhood” memory is mixed with the event of the day and 

the guilt and fear he feels while wandering in this place. He therefore begins to dream.  

He is observing, and until he has another dream—the second layer of dream during his praying, the 

dream of Porphyro within the Beadsman’s dream—he does not get on to move. There a “new” subject 

appears: “across the moors, / Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire / For Madeline” (Keats, IX: 

74-76), who is the man he used to be when he was alive, and the man is still existing in his childhood 

memory. The Beadsman knows Porphyro so well that he constructs a perfect dream for Porphyro. Thus 

is the similar case in the film Inception shot by Christopher Nolan, in which the dream maker must be 

so subtle a person to architect a dream for its subject that the surroundings and people are supposed to 

be as “real” as possible. Accordingly, the Beadsman has successfully built a reasonable circumstance 

for Porphyro, who is the hatred target in the castle. When Porphyro ventures in, dangers and obstacles 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
31 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

are becoming more and more obvious: “a hundred swords... barbarian hordes... hot-blooded lords” 

(Keats, X: 83-86). Later, Angela’s utterance becomes another implication of the Beadsman as the 

dream maker’s success as she says: “Get hence! get hence! there’s dwarfish Hildebrand; / He had a 

fever late, and in the fit / He cursed thee and thine, both house and land” (Keats, XII: 100-102). From 

such preparation for the emotional echoing, even the relationship between Porphyro and Madeline’s 

family is “close to real”, that they are enemies. At this time, the Beadsman and Porphyro have entered 

what Lacan names the stage of Imaginary, in which the Beadsman is the signifier and Porphyro is the 

signified. The dream plays the role of mirror, and the Beadsman acts as a subject finding himself in the 

dream, while Porphyro is reflected back from the dream. The two layers of dream are like the two sides 

of a mirror. The Beadsman is trying to internalize the image of Porphyro in his dream and regards 

themselves as a whole. In such a blurred relationship, his dream goes on. 

3.2 Porphyro’s Dream 

As the hostile castle is the necessary place where Madeline’s chamber is located, there comes an old 

dame: “Ah, happy chance! the aged creature came” (Keats, XL: 91). The old dame who is “weak in 

body and in soul” (Keats, X: 90) does not exist in reality at all, as she only lives in Porphyro’s dream. 

The eventual termination of her life also echoes her previous death and soul’s existence. According to 

Freud’s theory of dream, it can be inferred that she is the moral censor in Porphyro’s dream, as she 

stands in the way of Porphyro’s desire and the way to Madeline’s chamber, standing for the realization 

of his desire. When Porphyro’s desire for Madeline grows strong, the moral censor is supposed to 

appear and repress it; and once the desire is repressed, the field of Imaginary has yielded ground to the 

field of Symbolic: “the pre-given structure of social and sexual roles and relations which make up the 

family and society” (Eagleton, p. 145), which means that Porphyro is now a social man. “Entry into the 

Symbolic Realm marks the transition of the primitive infant into a civilized adult human who can 

represent itself and its world through symbols, specifically through the combination of signifiers and 

signifieds that create stable signs” (Klages, p. 104). As it is mentioned in 3.1 Beadsman’s Dream, 

Porphyro was in the Imaginary representing a signifier of the Beadsman. Hence it is the appearance of 

Angela that marks the entry of the Symbolic, which brings him social features.  

Language for example, is a representation of his social features. While the coming of Angela brings 

about “words”—verbal expression, Porphyro starts to use language: “Now tell me where is Madeline” 

(Keats, XIII: 114). As “the transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic is marked by the child’s 

ability to name that image of itself, its ego-ideal, as ‘me’ or ‘I’” (Klages, p. 105), Porphyro using “me” 

marks that he starts to realize a “self”. Moreover, social conscience and social needs, for example, the 

need to meet Madeline reflecting his biological and spiritual needs, are also his social features in the 

Symbolic Realm, yet expressed in an euphemistic way in front of the moral censer: “Which none but 

secret sisterhood may see, / When they St. Agnes’ wool are weaving piously” (Keats, XIII: 116-117). 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
32 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

Meanwhile, Porphyro’s continuous begging not only emphasizes his “lack” but also implies the 

authority and power that Angela has—to permit and lead him to Madeline’s chamber. At this moment, 

he is in the world of metonymy: Angela is a metonymy of moral censor to Freud, and also, the big 

Other to Lacan.  

“Sudden a thought came like a full-brown rose” (Keats, XVI: 136): Porphyro proposes his “stratagem”. 

Significantly, the purpose for Porphyro in the Beadsman’s dream to Madeline’s chamber can be 

deduced from Angela’s responses: “A stratagem, that makes the beldame start: ‘A cruel man and 

impious thou art! / Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream / Alone with her good angels, far 

apart / From wicked men like thee. Go, go!’” (Keats, XVI: 139-143). Looking back upon Stanza XIV 

where Angela is laughing at Madeline for being deceived by good angels: “This very night: good 

angels her deceive! / But let me laugh awhile” (Keats, XIV: 125-126), Angela does not consider it 

funny anymore. Her attitude changes to be serious. Porphyro’s “stratagem” must have caused such a 

change. If deceiving is even funny for Angela, what can be more serious? We come to the assumption 

of murder.  

For now, it seems that the moral censor is “irritated”, and if Porphyro keeps showing his naked 

intention, he will wake from the dream by the judge of moral censor. In order to escape the judge from 

the moral censor, Porphyro must deceive the censor, as “if the function of the dream is to preserve our 

sleep, the irrational wishes that appear in the dream must be sufficiently disguised to deceive the 

censor” (Fromm, p. 47). Also, “Freud assumes that in our sleep life the moral censor in ourselves is half 

asleep, too” (Fromm, p. 47). Thus, it is not difficult for Angela to deal with as she is half asleep, as well 

as feeble. What Porphyro needs to do is to decorate his irrational thoughts and hide his wicked 

intentions. Therefore, afterwords, Porphyro manages to redeem the bad influence and makes further 

explanation: “I will not harm her, by all saints I swear... O may I ne’er find grace... If one of her soft 

ringlets I displace, / Or look with ruffian passion in her face: / Good Angela, believe me by these tears” 

(Keats, XVII: 145-150). Indeed, he needs not displace any piece of her hair by killing her. The method 

of his murder is romantic and gentle, and it will be found out in 3.3 Madeline’s dream. 

Successfully, Angela is dealt after Porphyro’s intensifying swears and begging. “One way in which we 

cope with desires we cannot fulfil is by ‘sublimating’ them, by which Freud means directing them 

towards a more socially valued end” (Eagleton, p. 132): “thou must needs the lady wed, / Or may I 

never leave my grave among the dead” (Keats, XX: 179-180). Marriage is socially moral, and getting 

to Madeline’s chamber without the nomination of marriage is immoral; as the moral censor, guiding a 

man to hide in a lady’s chamber is indecent, too. Therefore, the only way to avoid being blamed is 

through marriage. If the young lovers end up getting married, Angela will take no responsibility of 

doing such an indecent thing. As for the situation is: Porphyro is disguised and Angela is deceived, the 

whole struggle between Porphyro and Angela is like the struggle between self and other and the 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
33 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

struggle between id and superego. One is repressing and the other is being repressed. The 

disappearance of Angela means the disappearance of superego, as Porphyro has lost his conscience and 

morality. According to Lacan, “a person’s desire is always the desire of the Other, the desire to be the 

Other, to eliminate the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’ on the structural or phenomenological 

level” (Klages, p. 78). Along with the disappearance of old Angela, Porphyro naturally considers that 

he has successfully taken the place of center in Symbolic Order and that he will be capable to 

determine what he should do next. In Madeline’s chamber, the desire for Porphyro to possess Madeline 

is the desire to take the control, so as to become the authority to Madeline. However, when he 

approaches Madeline, another “big Other” will replace Angela. 

Porphyro is prepared, waiting and gazing: “She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray’d and 

fled” (Keats, XXII: 198). In the hunter’s game (Stillinger, p. 541), Madeline is like a ring-dove, waiting 

to be hunt. For us though, the emphasis here is the adverb “again”, which sufficiently proves that it is at 

least the second time that Porphyro has been hiding here as a “hunter”, that he has experienced it in 

reality before the dream. Here, the desire to kill and possess Madeline is getting stronger: “As though a 

rose should shut, and be a bud again” (Keats, XXVII: 243). Once Madeline is killed, her spirit will be 

reborn and be a bud again. Nevertheless, Porphyro is still waiting to move: “And listen’d to her 

breathing, if it chanced... Noiseless as fear in a wide wildness” (Keats, XXVIII: 246-250). Porphyro is 

very cautious and even fearful. When Madeline’s kinsmen are outside of the chamber, it is still 

dangerous because of Madeline herself. The reason why Porphyro fears her may be primarily attributed 

to the cause of his death: Madeline did not try to save him or even resulted in his death.  

3.3 Madeline’s Dream 

Madeline’s dream is still a dream within the dream—the third layer of dream, which means that she is 

created by Porphyro. After the entrance of Madeline’s chamber: “A casement high and triple-arch’d 

there was, / All garlanded with carven imag’ries... with blood of queens and kings” (Keats, XXIV: 

208-216), the circumstance well prepares for Madeline to dream, and also implies her status which is 

far away from Porphyro. However, unlike the previous cases, the new dreamer does not replace the 

former dreamer in Madeline’s dream. Instead, the two dreams are interwoven, and that explains why 

when Madeline is dreaming, what Porphyro is doing is still clearly shown. In the castle where people 

are in the revelry, all unsociable descriptions to Madeline show her faithfulness to the legend, and such 

faithfulness makes it “reasonable” for Porphyro to possess her, for he deems her waiting for his coming. 

However, while “supperless” (Keats, VI: 51) can be explained by a “fast” which would make sense in a 

religious ceremony, what is the reason of “Nor look behind, nor sideways” (Keats, VI: 53) which is 

also repeated when Porphyro is hiding and gazing: “But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled” 

(Keats, XXVI: 234)? Our explanation is that as it is in Porphyro’s dream, the legend and rituals to 

follow are obeying his unconsciousness. As for “supperless”, the reason is that Porphyro will prepare 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
34 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

foods for her later in the chamber, but as for “Nor look behind”, it is in case that Porphyro will be 

found. From this, it can be inferred that Porphyro in reality was found by Madeline, which has now 

brought him the trauma of the Real. “Lacan then argues in ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’ that there is an 

intimate relationship between the objet petit a (which coordinates our desire) and the Gaze (which 

threatens to undo all desire through the eruption of the Real)” (Felluga, 2011). As Madeline is the objet 

petit a in Porphyro’s gaze (Keivan, p. 213), the gaze on Madeline has opened a door for eruption of the 

Real and the trauma of the Real. For the Real, “in Lacan’s trajectory, the Real is prior to the Symbolic 

and thus poses a threat to the stability of the Symbolic Order” (Klages, p. 92); and for trauma, Žižek 

mentions in his speech in London that “In a first approach Freud imagined trauma as some kind of dense, 

raw presence of some Real which brutally intrudes into our symbolic space and curves it” (Žižek, 2003). 

At this point, the symbols in Porphyro’s Symbolic Realm get curved for their traumatic impact, thus 

making it reasonable why the articulation “not look behind” creates anxiety: it is the brutal intrusion of 

the Real, which breaks the tranquility in Porphyro’s gaze and creates “a kind of imbalance and a gap” 

(Žižek, 2003) in his symbolic space. “Lacan emphasizes ‘desire’ and ‘anxiety’ as the two important 

pre-requisites for a true gaze. In short, the gaze must be an object of the scopic drive, producing not 

only pleasure but also anxiety” (Krips, p. 93). Being the object of Porphyro’s gaze, Madeline functions 

as the objet petit a (Keivan, p. 213), and the anxiety that Madeline exerts on Porphyro is the Real that 

intrudes in his Symbolic Realm, which curves his perfect stratagem and the image of ideal Madeline. If 

Madeline looks behind, dating back to his previous “childhood memory”—the intrusion of trauma, it 

reminds him of being found and killed and will impede his fulfillment of desire in the dream. Therefore, 

the repeated “not look behind” and Porphyro’s fear—“then from the closet crept, / Noiseless as fear in a 

wide wilderness” (Keats, XXVIII: 249-250)—well demonstrate “this uncanny feeling of being gazed at 

by the object of our look affects us in the same way as castration anxiety (reminding us of the lack at 

the heart of the symbolic order)” (Felluga, 2011). However, to make up the lacks in Symbolic Order, he 

adopts the approach of “traversing the fantasy” (Žižek, 17), which will be interpreted in 3.4 Keats’s 

Dream. 

As the description to Madeline is “Hoodwink’d with faery fancy” (Keats, VIII: 70), Porphyro’s attitude 

should be positive towards faery fancy, for it is her hoodwinking that helps him with the “stratagem” 

(Keats, XVI: 139). According to Stillinger, “The full force of ‘stratagem’ comes to be felt in the 

poem—a ruse, an artifice, a trick for deceiving” (Stillinger, p. 539). Although Stillinger later in his 

essay explains that his emphasis on “stratagem” should not be the main concern: “I must now confess 

that I do not think his stratagem is the main concern of the poem” (Stillinger, p. 546), we insist that 

“stratagem” is the prerequisite of his dream and even the whole story, for it functions as a seemingly 

well-designed revenge. He wants to fulfill what he did not succeed in reality by creating the dream. In 

the real world, he wanted to possess Madeline but got killed by her kinsmen—those drunken and brutal 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
35 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

knights. Now he will take actions in his dreaming world again. Therefore, it is not only a revenge but 

also a fulfillment of desire to gain dominance over Madeline. 

“Out went the taper as she hurried in; / Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died” (Keats, XXIII: 

199-200): with the coming of Madeline, the taper goes out, which symbolizes the darkness of the room 

and the hiding Porphyro, who is a murderer on St. Agnes’ eve. “Her heart was voluble, / Paining with 

eloquence her balmy side; / As though a tongueless nightingale should swell / Her throat in vain, and 

die, heart-stifled” (Keats, XXIII: 204-207): the simile to a dying nightingale predicts that after she 

hurries in, her destiny will be deemed on the hunter (Stillinger, p. 540)’s hands. “How fast she slept” 

(Keats, XXVIII: 252). At the time when Madeline is dreaming, Porphyro is dreaming too, for their 

dreams are integrated and interwoven with each other. Porphyro is still observing though: “The 

boisterous, midnight, festive clarion, / The kettledrum, and far-heard clarinet, / Affray his ears, though 

but in dying tone:— / The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone” (Keats, XXIX: 258-261). It 

can be seen that Porphyro is precise in his stratagem, as he will not take action until everyone in the 

castle falls asleep. However, the word “again” reappears. As it has been interpreted above, it is at least 

the second time that Porphyro has heard the hall door shut with one in reality and the other in the dream. 

From here it can be further deduced that in reality Porphyro could only be found by Madeline, as other 

people in the castle had fallen asleep, which indicates that Madeline was the most “direct” cause of his 

death, because without her “notifications”, her kinsmen would not be able to notice Porphyro during 

their “noiseless” sleep.  

Eventually, Porphyro’s stratagem is put into practice when the foods are taken out. Those alien foods 

imply the potential danger: “Filling the chilly room with perfume light” (Keats, XXXI: 275). The 

perfume filling the room is poisonous, and by smelling it, Madeline will die in her sweet dream. This 

method of killing is astonishing, as it will not either wake the guests or frighten fair Madeline away. 

“And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!” (Keats, XXXI: 276): immediately after the perfume was 

filled, Porphyro starts to wake her. If he successfully murders Madeline, her soul will be reborn after 

her death. “Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake” (Keats, XXXI: 278): the word “meek” is 

Porphyro’s expectation for the new Madeline. By waking up Madeline to start her “new life”, Porphyro 

wishes her to be meek, for she did not obey one of the rules of the ceremony “Nor look behind” in 

reality. 

As Porphyro fails in waking her, he plays a ditty for her, and it does work: “she utter’d a soft moan: / 

He ceased—she panted quick—and suddenly / Her blue affrayed eyes wide open shone” (Keats, 

XXXIII: 294-296). The ditty is “magic” in waking her, because it talks about her. By playing “La belle 

dame sans mercy”, Porphyro means to satirize her. Dating back to when Angela met with Porphyro, the 

first sentence she said was “Mercy, Porphyro! hie thee from this place: / They are all here tonight, the 

whole bloodthirsty race!” (Keats, XI: 98-99). Here the word “mercy” as an antonym of “sans mercy” is 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
36 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

to highlight Madeline without mercy. In his dream, he regards himself as mercy which is opposite to 

Madeline who is without mercy. It is another fulfillment of irrational wishes. Moreover, “the whole 

bloodthirsty race” refers to Madeline’s whole family, which should include Madeline. By describing 

her as a bloodthirsty race without mercy, Porphyro does not show any sense of guilt on his stratagem.  

Madeline has brought him death on the eve of St. Agnes. So heartless she is that he considers her as “la 

belle dame sans mercy”. Soon, she wakes with a painful change and begins to weep. The change is that 

she wakes to find herself dead and sees Porphyro “Who knelt, with joined hands and piteous eye, / 

Fearing to move or speak”. She now wakes as a soul, finding Porphyro kneeling in front of her. “Ah, 

Porphyro!” (Keats, XXXV: 307): by the waking of Madeline, Porphyro wakes, too. By now, Porphyro 

has successfully disguised the stratagem of killing in deceiving Angela and witnessed the waking of 

Madeline as a soul. “We rarely dream that we commit murder or incest or any other kind of crime, and 

even if we do so, we do not enjoy the fulfillment of these wishes in our dreams” (Fromm, p. 47). 

Indeed, the perfect success of stratagem worries Porphyro, and therefore, he wakes kneeling, seeming 

to make a confession. “How chang’d thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!” (Keats, XXXV: 311): the 

one she sees at present is the Beadsman, as Porphyro has been waken from worry and guilt. Unlike 

young Porphyro, the Beadsman looks “ancient” (Keats, IV: 28), and relating to the place where he fell 

asleep and started to dream, the atmosphere was drear in cold winter, which corresponds to the 

description from Madeline “drear”. Freud’s opinion towards “anxiety dream” goes as “We may wish 

something but know that the gratification of the wish will make other people hate us and bring about 

punishment by society. Naturally, the fulfillment of this wish would produce anxiety” (Fromm, p. 124). 

Even when the stratagem has gained its success, anxiety still exits, and different from the anxiety 

brought by trauma, this perfect kind of success has brought him an extreme kind of anxiety. By the 

waking of them both, the dream has returned back to its first layer—the Beadsman’s dream, together 

with him winning “a peerless bride” (Keats, XIX: 167). Through Madeline’s begging, it can be seen 

that she totally loses control of any authority: “For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go” 

(Keats, XXXV: 315), “for my heart is lost in thine... A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing” 

(Keats, XXXVII: 331-333). Such vulnerable words are all from the Beadsman’s repressed wishes in his 

dream as he expects her to fully rely on him. The words make him feel just after killing, as if 

comparing with the responsibility he now holds for Madeline, that the killing he performs is 

insignificant. His response for those words goes as: “Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest” 

(Keats, XXXVIII: 340), which is saying: “though I have owned you, I will not harm you”. The 

masculine comfort though shows his love for Madeline. In this case, the whole story of revenge turns to 

a loving ending.  

After the lovers’ compromise, they manage to leave the human world. “Let us away, my love, with 

happy speed; / There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see” (Keats, XXXIX: 347-348): as they are souls, or 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
37 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

spirits, they are not restricted in their human bodies anymore; thus they can flee with a happy speed, 

and no one alive in the castle will hear them move. “In all the house was heard no human sound” 

(Keats, XL: 356): they cannot make any human sound as they have been inhuman. In Stanza XLI, the 

words “phantom” and “glide” are repeated, which again emphasizes their lack of human existence and 

the form of soul or spirit. In this sense, the story can be concluded as “Porphyro as liberation of 

Madeline” (Stillinger, p. 147): her soul has gained new freedom that allows her to escape from the 

castle with forbidden love and with no sound. 

3.4 Keats’s Dream 

As the initial dream weaver, all the dreams above belong to Keats’s dream. In brief, Keats creates the 

Beadsman in his dreamy writing, the Beadsman creates Porphyro in his dream, and Porphyro creates 

Madeline in his dream. As it has been analyzed in the Beadsman’s dream, the dream is created for its 

dreamer only in a specific circumstance which “suits” the dreamer. For the dream of the Beadsman, the 

circumstance is religious and drear, which suits to the Beadsman who is harsh penance to grieve; for 

the dream of Porphyro, the circumstance suits its dreamer for its dangers; and for the dream of 

Madeline, who is living in a castle, it is due to the splendid decorations in her room described in 

detailed.  

At the end of the story, “The Beadsman, after thousand aves told, / For aye unsought for slept among 

his ashes cold” (Keats, XLII: 377-378). At the moment, the viewpoint from the lovers has switched to 

Keats’s. For Keats, the Beadsman is still dreaming and does not seem to wake. Rank has claimed the 

reason why we sleep tight in our dream: “The same also holds for many patently sexual dreams which 

symbolize life even according to psychoanalysis, and it certainly holds for the dream itself as a proof of 

the bodily soul. With the body-soul, man took his first significant step into a supernatural world, 

because it assured him not only that he still lived while he slept, but that he could sleep peacefully 

without dying” (Rank, p. 139). It is the immortality in dream that preserves the sleep, and that also 

explains why we wake from anxiety dream. Different from Freud’s point that “The anxiety dream is no 

exception to the general rule that the latent content of a dream is the fulfillment of an irrational wish” 

(Fromm, p. 124), Rank discovered that “Anxiety dreams interrupted sleep when it came too near to 

death and threatened the feeling of immortality. Both types of dream served to deny death; the one, by 

positively evoking the dreamer’s own bodily soul and the souls of dead or absent persons; and in the 

other, negatively, by rescuing the dreamer from deathlike sleep. Thus dreaming itself became a denial 

of death, because it always proved that one still survived and had not fallen into one’s final sleep” 

(Rank, p. 116). To sum up, it is the denial of death that wakes us from anxiety dreams. Thus, with 

Rank’s view on dream, the story ending with the Beadsman dreaming in his ashes cold where he fell 

asleep in demonstrates that the lovers are not dead at least, and perhaps they get to the warm south. The 

assumption based on its ending through the Beadsman’s dreaming here can be understood as 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
38 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

“authenticity of dreams” (Stillinger, p. 147) from the perspective of Imagination in Stillinger’s reading, 

as the dreaming world reflects in the reality an authentic state. Thus, we maintain skepticism towards 

those critics “(e. g., Amy Lowell, John Keats, Boston, 1925, II, p. 175; Herbert G. Wright, “Has Keats’s 

‘Eve of St Agnes’ a Tragic Ending? ,” MLR, XL, 1945, pp. 90-94; Bernice Slote, Keats and the 

Dramatic Principle, Lincoln, Neb., 1958, p. 35f.) who have suggested that the lovers face reality, 

perhaps even perish, in the storm” (Stillinger, p. 550).  

Nevertheless, Keats is not trying to avoid reality by depicting the Beadsman never waking. Instead, he 

is trying to find a balance or comfort in mundane reality. We would say that the Beadsman may be 

traversing the fantasy. In the realm of Symbolic Order, “where we agree to follow the rule of the 

Phallus... we acknowledge that we are not the center... and thus acknowledge our ‘lack’” (Klages, p. 

59). By traversing the fantasy, the boundary between “reality” and imaginary is redefined. In other 

words, the Beadsman has to accept his “fantasy”, as the lack in Symbolic Order reveals his lack in 

“reality” and accordingly is urging him to seek for the fantasy of the Real. Žižek points out that “To 

‘traverse the fantasy’ therefore, paradoxically, means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy - namely, 

with the fantasy which structures the excess that resists our immersion in daily reality” (Žižek, p. 17). 

Therefore, if anyone argues that the Beadsman never waking from the dream is the avoidance of reality, 

we would refute that with: instead of avoiding it, he is trying to find a balance, as Žižek clarifies that “a 

fantasy... providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to endure the abyss of the Other’s desire” 

(Žižek, p. 18). For the Beadsman, the trauma of his childhood always exists in the Real, that is, the 

realm that he can never enter. By dreaming, traversing the fantasy and committing a murder in 

Symbolic Order, he actually is trying to heal the trauma of the Real.  

For Keats’s purpose in the poem The Eve of St. Agnes, it is said by Stillinger that “It serves to introduce 

a preoccupation of all the major poems of this year: that an individual ought not to lose touch with the 

realities of this world” (Stillinger, p. 550, p. 551). We acknowledge its correctness and would make a 

supplement: an individual ought not to lose touch with imagination and dream while accepting the 

reality. In summary, while the Beadsman’s dream functions as a compensation for his cruel reality, 

Madeline’s awakening functions in an opposite way. She wakes and weeps for being deceived, but still, 

she embraces her reality as having been murdered and flees into the storm with Porphyro to make a 

new living. Although being hoodwinked by her dream, she is not a negative character, for she accepts 

the reality fast. As it has been discussed above, the power of women was evidently shown in the text; 

however, at the end of the story, Porphyro as a male character regains his dominant position. The 

change is distinct before and after Porphyro’s stratagem, and it eventually ends with Madeline being 

vulnerable and subjective and following Porphyro to his warm south. Although women are powerful in 

their way, usually in a sexual way—the gazing Porphyro grew faint - their destinies still depend on men. 

After all, “he does not want ladies to read his poetry: that he writes for men” (Letters, II, 163). From 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
39 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

this perspective, the understanding of the story can be regarded as “patriarchal domination of women” 

or “Keats’s disparagement of women” (Stillinger, p. 149). 

Therefore, by integrating all layers of dreams, Keats tries to portray a state of balance between life and 

death, dream and reality, and pleasure and pain. The bringing out of “aching pleasure” (Stillinger, p. 

551) from Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” is more than suitable to comment on the character the 

Beadsman in The Eve of St. Agnes. Although in Saṃsāra he suffers from endless replacing of life and 

death, dream and reality, and even reality and fantasy, in his dreaming world, he wins a peerless bride 

and sets out to the warm south with his love. He seeks pleasure outside of reality but still cannot escape 

from the Real, which is why it is arching. Certainly, it has to be admitted that pain and pleasure are 

inseparable. Without the experience of pain, one may not cherish pleasure, and without the moment of 

pleasure, life may be overwhelmed by endless pain. “If the major concern in these poems is the conflict 

between actuality and the ideal, the result is not a rejection of the actual, but rather a facing-up to it that 

amounts, in the total view, to affirmation” (Stillinger, p. 555). We do not deny the fact that Keats 

embraces actuality, though in our opinion, Keats does not create a conflict between actuality and the 

ideal, as Keats’s use of “ambiguity of idealism and reality” (Stillinger, p. 148) has created a harmony 

between the dreaming world and the real world. On February 23, 1821, Keats died, at the age of 

twenty-five. He had requested that his tombstone read only “Here lies one whose name was written in 

water” (Li, p. 115, p. 116). He attempts to bring the reality into dreams, and meanwhile, just as water 

trickles down and merges into its surrounding, he attempts to make dreams flow in reality. 

 

4. Conclusion 

The essay has focused on “dream” narrative in Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes (1819). With the sequence 

developing in the poem, we have analyzed different dreamers’ dreams and discussed their respective 

functions and purposes from the psychoanalytical perspective. The dream weavers including the 

Beadsman, Porphyro and Madeline, have contributed their portions in weaving Keats’s dream. Unlike 

the film Inception, Keats does not try to “plant” any idea in his readers, yet he expects his readers to 

follow the clues he has designed by sensing and imagining, which is why the ending remains quite 

ambiguous. It urges readers to ponder over the relationship between reality and dreaming world, so as 

to reflect on the meaning of life. No matter how mundane our life is, there is always a “warm south” 

waiting for those with hopes and dreams and those who are brave to embrace reality. Thus, we would 

consider the story as a tragicomedy. 

 

 

 

 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
40 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

References 

Arcana, J. (1987). Midwinter Night’s Dream: “The Eve of St. Agnes” as Sacred Ritual in the Old 

Religion of the Britons. Journal of Ritual Studies, 1(2), 43-57. 

Barth, J. R. (2006). Keats’s Way of Salvation. Studies in Romanticism, 45(2), 285-297. 

https://doi.org/10.2307/25602047 

Chen, J. (2018). The Landscape of Protestant Ethic: A Critique of Rhetoric Ethic in John Keats’s The 

Eve of St. Agnes. China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House, 3, 99-109. 

Cui, D., & Li, Z. (2019). On John Keats’ Poetry Belief in Bright Star and Romanticism Trend in the Late 

Regency Period. China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House, 166-170. 

Culler, J. (1997). Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (p. 83). New York: Oxford University 

Press. 

Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary Theory: An Introduction (p. 132, p. 145). Minnesota: University of 

Minnesota Press. 

Felluga, D. F. (2011). Modules on Lacan: On the Gaze. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 

Fromm, E. S. (2013). The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy 

Tales, and Myths (p. 17, p. 46, p. 47, p. 50, p. 124). New York: Open Road Integrated Media. 

Keats, J. (1982). In J. Stillinger (Ed.), John Keats: Complete Poems. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 

Keats, J. (1958). In H. E. Rollins (Ed.), The Letters of John Keats (2 vols., I, p. 185, II, p. 163). 

Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 

Keivan, S. (2020). The Lacanian Gaze in John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes”: A Romance of Resistance. 

Anafora: Journal of Literary Studies, 7(1), 209-223. https://doi.org/10.29162/ANAFORA.v7i1.10 

Klages, M. (2016). Key Terms in Literary Theory (p. 59, p. 78, p. 92, p. 104, p. 105). Beijing, China: 

Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. 

Krips, H. (2010). The Politics of Gaze: Foucault, Lacan, Žižek. Culture Unbound, 2, 91-102. 

https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.102691 

Li, Z. (2007). A Concise History of English Literature (p. 115, p. 116). ChangChun, China: Northeast 

Normal University Press. 

Li, Z., & Long, R. C. (2012). An Analysis of Keats’s Oriental Mysticism. Journal of Sichuan Normal 

University, 39(2), 115-121. 

Meister, C. (2009). Introducing Philosophy of Religion (p. 25). Abingdon: Routledge. 

https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203880029 

Mellor, A. K. (2001). Keats and the Complexities of Gender. In S. J. Wolfson (Ed.), The Cambridge 

Companion to Keats (p. 215). Cambridge: UP. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521651263.014 

Rank, O. (1950). Psychology and the Soul (p. 14, p. 15, p. 116, p. 139). Philadelphia: University of 

Pennsylvania Press. 



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm               Communication, Society and Media                Vol. 4, No. 3, 2021 

 

 
41 

Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

 

Rosenfeld, N. (2000). “Eve’s Dream Will Do Here”: Miltonic Dreaming in Keats’s “The Eve of St. 

Agnes”. Keats-Shelley Journal, 49, 47-66. 

Ryan, R. M. (1976). Keats: The Religious Sense (p. 67). Princeton: UP. 

Stillinger, J. (1961). The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Scepticism in “The Eve of St. Agnes”. Studies in 

Philology, 58(3), 533-555. 

Stillinger, J. (1999). Reading The Eve of St. Agnes The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (p. 

147, p. 148, p. 149). New York: Oxford University Press. 

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195130225.001.0001 

Wilson, J. (2010). Samsara and Rebirth in Buddhism. Oxford University Press. Retrieved May 2, 2021, 

from 

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195393521/obo-9780195393521-

0141.xml 

Wolfson, S. J. (1990). Feminizing Keats. In H. Almeida (Ed.), Critical Essay on John Keats (p. 325). 

Boston: G. K. Hall. 

Žižek, S. (2003). The Reality of the Virtual. London: 11 December. 

Žižek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (p. 17, p. 18). London: Verso. 

 

Note(s) 

Note 1. This article represents the periodical research result of Project of Chinese Scholarship Council 

on “Keats’s Poetry Writing and Anxiety of Identity” (No: 201608220138); of Project of Jilin Province 

Social Science Fund on “A Study on English Romantic Poets’ Interactivity and Keats’s Poetic 

Composition” (No: 2019B162); of Project of Social Science Research of Education Department of Jilin 

Province on “Anxiety of Influence - Keats’s Inheritance and Transcendence of English Renaissance 

Poets” (No: JJKH20201301SK); of Key Project of Social Science Research of Higher Education 

Institution of Jilin Province “Under the Background of ‘Cultural Cultivation’ on the Study of Online 

Curriculum Construction and Innovative Teaching Practice of English Literature Course” (No: 

JGJX2020C99). 


