"As though a rose
should shut"
Up to this point in the
poem, each of the characters seems caught up in the
illusion that "an
ultimate or complete form of enjoyment" 23 is available if
only the proper rituals can
be performed or if victory can be attained in a
struggle for the goods. In
the poem, though, both forms of enjoyment, indulgence
in luxury objects made
valuable against a backdrop of violent
competition, and enjoyment
of delay and self-denial, produce the disturbing
effect that people fail to
relate to one another and become enclosed in
fantasies that make human
relations impossible.
When Madeline goes to sleep,
expecting to be visited by her fantasy, she
is drawn into a deathlike
state; she is "Blissfully haven'd both from joy and
pain; / Clasp'd like a
missal where swart Paynims pray; / Blinded alike
from sunshine and from rain,
/ As though a rose should shut, and be a bud
again" (240-43). Her
sleep embalms her in "poppied warmth" (237) where
she can feel nothing. She
appears as a precious object ("missal") in a place
of danger where she may be
destroyed ("where swart Paynims pray"), but
kept "clasp'd" to
prevent theft, she regresses from rose back to bud, as if returning
to a womblike state, out of
experience into an innocence that can
only be like death. Like St.
Agnes, she is protected from the enjoyment of
others, a perpetual virgin
"clasp'd like a missal." This state is common in
Keats's poetry; it is the
condition his speaker briefly experiences in the ode
when listening to the
nightingale. Madeline is threatened here with becoming
a mere self-sufficient
object, perfectly self-enclosed, or in Cleanth
Brooks's memorable phrase,
"a poem in stone." She falls away from life
and experience in order to
become corpselike in "azure-lidded sleep, / In
blanched linen, smooth, and
lavender'd" (261-62). This form of enjoyment
cuts one off from others,
creates a solipsistic, deathlike state in which the
world becomes reduced to one
enjoying subject cut off from other subjects.
A similar fate befalls
Porphyro. While Madeline sleeps, he enters her
dream with his song "La
belle dame sans mercy," the medieval "ditty"
from "Provence"
producing the "vision of her sleep" (299) and the "blisses
of her dream so pure and
deep" (301). While she does not engage with
him, he can play the lover
seducing the beloved with a feast she will not
eat and a song she does not
conspicuously appear to hear. When Madeline
awakens, however, Porphyro
fails to return her gaze, becoming mute
and unseeing. Madeline finds
that Porphyro has become "pale as smooth-
[pp. 364] sculptured stone" (397).
The lover who has filled space with luxury objects
in order to win the most
precious object, fails to respond when confronted
by Madeline herself, a
subject who returns the gaze. The illusion that full
enjoyment exists and must be
heroically attained in a struggle against cruel
forces, or that it can be achieved
through submission to religious, superstitious,
or mystical ritual in the
attempt to propitiate the Other, only leads to
subjects who cannot see one
another. Both Madeline and Porphyro become
embalmed in their fantasies
and are unable to respond to their beloved.
Here, the lovers maintain a
relationship only to their fantasy of each
other rather than with
another subject. For Porphyro, the thing becomes
desirable in a system of
competition which keeps him focused on the
agonistic rituals of
chivalric love. The object of desire becomes desirable
because the Other makes it
valuable. The lover relates not to the object but
to a system that endows
certain objects with value making them the prize
of competition. Meanwhile,
Madeline is focused on her own fantasy presided
over by a deity of love who
promises ultimate fulfillment. Like
Porphyro, Madeline is caught
up in the hierarchies of power and meaning
in her aristocratic world.
When she sleeps, caught up in the enchantment
of St. Agnes Eve, "It
seem'd he never, never could redeem / From such a
stedfast spell his lady's eyes"
(286-87). The lovers' fantasies are similar in
that both imagine a love
mediated by spiritual powers, by traditions, superstitions,
literary conventions, in
short, the Other as that agent of enjoyment
that promises but withholds
the subject's satisfaction.
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