St. Agnes

Madeline is excited and keeps herself busy in practicing for the ritual ceremony. She believes in fasting and tries to train her eyes forward or downward, focusing on the vision she will receive of the future. Her family and friends are enjoying rich food and drink but she takes away herself from the material world of her relatives and allows imagination to take hold of her while she still wakes and waits for the vision. Madeline believes that her ceremonies will generate a vision from St. Agnes, and goes to bed imagining what her vision will look like. She very well knows what she is going to do because she understands the difference between her fancy of St. Agnes and the actual vision of her desires. She is careful not to look behind or break

(57-59, 62-63)
She isn’t curious to look the beautiful gowns of her guests; rather her “divine” (57) eyes are only focuses on St. Agnes. She is already starting her future imaginative vision by ignoring the material world. She only gives attentions of her other suitors. She appears completely spellbound
She danc’d along with vague, regardless eyes

‘Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn,
Hoodwink’d with faery fancy; all amort,
Save to St. Agnes, and her lambs unshorn,
And all the bliss to be before tomorrow morn (64,

When she is praying to a saint, she also looks like a saint herself, and this builds upon the earlier suggestion that she is “all akin / To spirits of the air, and visions wide” (201-202). It is not the result of Porphyro’s belief that she is a saint but it is the result of her intentions to make herself like saint (Canuel, 2002, p. 233). Madeline’s behaviour and her faith make her like a saint to Porphyro. This portrayal shows Madeline’s purity and dreaming quality. She believes in the legend and makes her indeed a St Agnes’s maid. Moreover, her commitment to the superstition makes her a St Agnes’s idealist since she is going to lose her virginity. The undressing scene exhibits Keats’s perfect narrative skills. Keats’s poetic sensibility makes the common scene, the undressing and a sensuous show. Porphyro who is gazing her, she is unknown about it, feeling weak with desire. His intention already foreshadowed at the end of this