The Eve of St Agnes

 

Finished (again).

After a bit of dithering I decided to add figures in the stained glass sky. It needed a bit of life, I felt, and the cat on its own didn't hack it.

(It is one of young Mrs Dilke's cats, from my Winter Snows collage of Keats House, one of the ones that didn't make it into that picture but was saved in a box on my table and is now having his day elsewhere, but now with the senior Dilkes).

 

So this is "Old Mr Dilke's" house in Chichester where Keats stayed from January 18-23 1819 and where he began to seriously think about and possibly pen the first lines of The Eve of St Agnes, the idea for which had been prompted earlier that week by his mysterious female friend, the sophisticated, elegant and independent Isabella Jones, who had pointed out the significance of the upcoming date.

 

According to legend on January 20, the eve of St Agnes, young women are able to see their future husbands in a dream.

Isabella, a keen reader of Gothic tales, suggested to Keats that it would make a great theme for a poem.

So hats off to Isabella.

 

 

The figures represent Porphyro and Madeline, the protagonists of the poem. But could equally be Keats and Brawne or even Keats and Miss Jones.

 

The pavement is made of fragments of a letter written to the poet's brother in America in which he informs him that "nothing much happened" in Chichester:

"I took down some thin paper and wrote on it a little poem called St Agnes's Eve ..."

 

A throwaway line if ever I heard one.

A victim of Romanticism

Here is another miniature portrait, of a woman whose life was fatally shaped by the Romantic movement:

To Fanny nothing now remained except death

Fanny Wollstonecraft was a tragic figure, overlooked in life and death. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, half-sister to Mary Shelley, adopted daughter of William Godwin, she was herself not touched by genius, though she wished to be worthy of those geniuses who surrouded her. Conventional and unbookish, her role in the chaotic, debt-ridden Godwin household was confined to two things: running the place and peacemaking. She was most likely in love with Shelley who regarded her at best with indifference and at worst as a useful go-between and was left behind when he, Mary and their stepsister Claire ran off to France.

Unappreciated, unloved and taken for granted, poor Fanny eventually decided to end her life. Even in this she took care to cause no trouble. She took the coach to Swansea, booked herself into an inn and took an overdose of laudanum. No family member came forward to claim her body and she was buried in a communal grave. She was just 22.

No character of Jane Austen ever had to write anything as dire as a suicide note but you can't help feeling that if any had they could have done no better than Fanny's elegant and understated farewell:

I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as Francis Wollstonecraft."

Poor Fanny.

Deary me, really,  the more I read about Percy Bysshe Shelley the less I find to like about him...