One of the things that struck me about the poem is the ample use of personification that is prevalent within it. Chambers are described as "ready with their pride...glowing to receive a thousand guests" (32), statues are "eager eyed" (34), sleep oppresses soothed limbs (237), and delicates "stand in the retired quiet of the night" (273). By describing the objects in the poem in this manner, Keats creates a world that lives and breathes as much as the characters that inhabit it. This living world contributes to the dreamlike imagery the poem inspires. Like Madeline and the other revivers, for the reader the lines between fantasy and reality become blurred. While this certainly gives the poem its aesthetic appeal, I would like to know if the personification of objects had a deeper meaning.
Another point of interest for me was the character Angela. As the only person willing to assist Porphyro, she is an integral part of the story. By sneaking him into Madeline's room and giving him information about the delicacies located within, she was the catalyst which set the future events in motion. However, despite her importance to the poem she is a character shrouded in mystery. It is never made clear how she knows Porphyro or why she chose to help him even though he is so despised by the rest of her kin. One could argue that she is merely a tool to advanced the poem; the means by which Porphyro would be able to navigate a castle which he had never been in before. However, I believe that she has a deeper meaning. Why else would Keats be sure to mention that she "died palsy-twitch'd, with meager face deformed"(376)? I would very much like to discover what her significance is within the greater context of the poem.
I agree that the personification of objects creates the dream-like quality of the poem. Have our discussions of personification helped you answer the question you posed in the post? As we’ve discussed, personification can work in different ways, empowering objects and disempowering subjects, but also allowing for empathy between human and object world. A question that our discussions have provoked is also relevant to Keats: what is the significance of personifying statues and stones vs. birds and plant? The effect of personification varies according to the kind of object to which it is applied—and this has a bearing on what the implication of personification is for the human subjects of Keats’ poem: what does it mean to develop empathy with a tomb, as the Beadsman does? Or to receive animation from stained glass, as Madeline does? The question you posed about Angela is also excellent: she is certainly a tool, but what is her relation to the object economies that Garofalo isolates in the poem? She is not competing for commodities nor delaying the fulfillment of desire—indeed she is very much attuned to a world of events (Porphyro’s murder, or Madeline’s violation in lines 140-4), and she casts herself as a “poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing” (155). It would appear she, as a thing, enables object economies but does not participate in them—implying that an outside mediator is necessary for the object economy to function. What then does her death at the end signify?
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