The Text of "The Eve of St.
Agnes"
by
Jack Stillinger
The first edition of H. W. Garrod's The Poetical Works of
John
Keats (Oxford, 1939) was published with some 135 errors and
omissions[1] in the apparatus
criticus to "The Eve of St. Agnes." About twenty substantive
variants
were left unrecorded, and there were some forty misprints and mistakes in
transcription, thirty-five instances of wrong or incomplete sigla, and forty
other errors in description of the various manuscripts underlying the printed
text. While it might be supposed that some of these would have been
corrected in the recent second edition (1958), the fact is that not a single
remedial change was introduced. But there is a more worrisome matter
concerning the soundness of the text itself—not only Garrod's but all
printed texts of Keats's poem—a matter that depends not so much on
a
rechecking of the manuscripts (for the facts surrounding the text have for
some time been available) as on an editor's judgment. At least
since the publication of Amy Lowell's biography (1925) it has been known
that Keats's publishers enforced changes in the language of the poem; but
so far no editor has attempted to repair Keats's text or in any way depart
from the version first printed, in the Lamia volume of
1820.
Keats first drafted the poem during the last two weeks of January
(and perhaps also the first week or so of February) 1819. His original
manuscript (Garrod's H, now in the Harvard Keats
Collection)
was twice copied by Richard Woodhouse, legal and literary adviser to
Keats's publishers, in the
transcripts designated by Garrod as
W
1 and
W
2 (both are at Harvard). The evidence for
the order of
these independent copies is ambiguous, but
W
1, showing
a few more errors and more blank spaces where Keats's manuscript could
not be read, would seem to be the earlier;
W
2 is dated by
Woodhouse 20 April 1819. Early in September Keats revised the poem and
had it "copied fair."
[2] His fair copy,
presumably the one sent to the publishers, is now lost, but in the following
January, perhaps on the 15th (see
Letters, II, 243), George
Keats copied it in the transcript known as
E (British
Museum),
and sometime before or afterward—probably both
[3] — Woodhouse read it and
entered
corrections and variant readings (designated
w by Garrod)
between the lines and opposite the text of
W
2. "The
agreement . . . of
E and
w," writes Garrod
(2nd
edn., p. xli),
disregarding the question of variants between them, and actually intending
to include the agreement of
E with the other manuscripts as
well, "represents Keats' fair copy. . . . Any divergence of
1820
from
Ew must be interpreted as a change made in proof
either
by Keats himself or by his publishers." Not counting copyist's errors, there
are more than forty such substantive "divergences"; it is a nice question, in
each instance, whether Keats or his publishers were responsible.
Concerning a few of them, however, I think it is time we reached a
decision. On 12 September 1819 Keats read the revised form of the poem
to Woodhouse, who gave the following report to the publisher John Taylor
in a well-known letter of September 19 (Letters, II, 162-163):
He [Keats] had the Eve of S
t A. copied fair: He has
made trifling
alterations, inserted an additional stanza early in the poem to make the
legend more intelligible, and correspondent with what
afterwards takes place, particularly with respect to the supper & the
playing on the Lute.—he retains the name of Porphyro—has
altered the
last 3 lines to leave on the reader a sense of pettish disgust, by bringing Old
Angela in (only) dead stiff & ugly. . . . There was another alteration,
which I abused for "a full hour by the
Temple clock." You
know if a thing has a decent side, I generally look no further—As the
Poem was orig
y written,
we innocent ones
(ladies &
myself) might very well have supposed that Porphyro, when acquainted
with Madeline's love for him, & when "he arose, Etherial
flush
d
&c &c (turn to it) set himself at once to persuade her to go off
with
him, & succeeded & went over the "Dartmoor black" (now
changed
for some other
place) to be married, in right honest chaste & sober wise. But, as it is
now altered,
as soon as M. has confessed her love, P. winds by degrees his arm round
her, presses breast to breast, and acts all the acts of a bonâ fide
husband, while she fancies she is only playing the part of a Wife in a
dream. This alteration is of about 3 stanzas; and tho' there are no improper
expressions but all is left to inference, and tho' profanely speaking, the
Interest on the reader's imagination is greatly heightened, yet I do
apprehend it will render the poem unfit for ladies, & indeed scarcely
to
be mentioned to them among the "things that are."
Of the three revisions here specified (apart from the change of the
hero's name), only one should cause us difficulty, the alteration of the last
three lines. In all extant versions, from the first draft on, Angela is brought
in (in a sense) "dead stiff & ugly," and always accompanied by the
Beadsman, whose death is a similarly grotesque affair. In
HW
1
W
2 and
the 1820 text, "meagre face
deform" describes Angela; through a change in punctuation the
corresponding phrase in Ew ("with face deform") is made to
apply to the Beadsman. But in no extant version is Angela "only"
introduced. One could suppose a lost ending, but I rather think that
Woodhouse, who heard the revised version but obviously had not yet read
it, and who, furthermore, had been given plenty to think about by one of
the earlier alterations that he describes, simply misunderstood the revised
ending. In any event, the alteration (of whatever nature) has no place in the
final text of the poem:
beneath the variant ending (w) in
W
2
Woodhouse wrote "Altered 1820." and two words in shorthand that are best
read as "before March."[4]
Presumably, before March 1820, when he was preparing his poems for
publication, Keats restored the original conclusion of the poem.
The other two alterations are a simpler matter. The "additional
stanza" inserted "early in the poem" is of course that given in the
Ew transcripts between the present stanzas VI and VII:[5]
'Twas said her future lord would there appear
Offering, as sacrifice—all in the dream—
Delicious food, even to her lips brought near,
Viands, and wine, and fruit, and sugar'd cream,
To touch her palate with the fine extreme
Of relish: then soft music heard, and then
More pleasures[6] follow'd in a
dizzy stream
Palpable almost: then to wake again
Warm in the virgin morn, no weeping Magdalen.
The alteration that Woodhouse "abused for 'a full hour by the
Temple clock'" was a revision of the present lines 314-322
to read:
[7]
See, while she speaks his arms encroaching slow,
Have zoned her, heart to heart,—loud, loud the dark winds
blow!
For on the midnight came a tempest fell;
More sooth, for that his quick rejoinder flows
Into her burning ear: and still the spell
Unbroken guards her in serene repose.
With her wild dream he mingled, as a rose
Marrieth its odour to a violet.
Still, still she dreams, louder the frost wind blows.
Because Woodhouse calls it an "alteration . . . of about 3 stanzas," Lowell,
Garrod, and others have felt that the revised version to which he objected
has been lost. But the lines just quoted fit all the other details of
Woodhouse's description ("winds by degrees his arm round her, presses
breast to breast, and acts all the acts of a bonâ fide husband, while she
fancies she is only playing the part of a Wife in a dream. . . . there are no
improper expressions but all is left to inference"). Woodhouse wrote
"
about 3 stanzas"; the revised lines affect two stanzas. If we
again recall that Woodhouse had heard, not read, the poem when he wrote
to Taylor, and also consider that the revised text, by setting off a train of
uncomfortable thoughts in his mind, quite possibly would have seemed
longer than it really was, it should become clear that the
Ew
lines we now possess are those that Woodhouse condemned as making the
poem "unfit for ladies."
In his reply to Woodhouse of September 25 (Letters,
II,
183), Taylor confessed that the account of this last revision excited in him
"the Strongest Sentiments of Disapprobation," and he added: "Therefore my
dear Richd if he [Keats] will not so far concede to my
Wishes as to
leave the passage as it originally stood, I must be content to admire his
Poems with some other Imprint." Clearly the publishers forced the
restoration of the original lines 314-322, and it is almost as certain that they
forced the rejection of the additional stanza inserted between VI and VII.
Once the possibility of sexual references had been opened, the lines
describing "More pleasures . . . in a dizzy stream," "virgin morn," and
"weeping Magdalen" (very
likely an allusion to the deserted unwed mother of Book VI of
The
Excursion, who is called "a weeping Magdalene" and "a rueful
Magdalene" in lines 814, 987) would similarly have rendered the poem, by
the publishers' standard, "unfit for ladies."
Just as clearly, the revised lines and the additional stanza should be
restored to the text of the poem. In a critical article[8] I have suggested ways in which
these
passages heighten the irony of Madeline's self-deception and clarify Keats's
condemnation of "dreaming" (Madeline's engrossment in superstitious ritual
to the point of losing touch with reality). More to the point here is Keats's
recoverable intention in the matter of text. On the one hand, we know that
he vigorously opposed Woodhouse's objections: "He says," Woodhouse
noted in the same report to Taylor (Letters, II, 163), "he does
not want ladies to read his poetry: that he writes for men—&
that if
in the former poem [i.e., the original version of the consummation] there
was an opening for doubt what took place, it was his fault for not writing
clearly & comprehensibly—that he shd despise
a man who would
be such an eunuch in sentiment as to leave a maid, with
that Character about her, in such a situation: & shod
despise himself
to write about it &c &c &c— and all this sort of
Keats-like
rhodomontade." On the other hand, to balance this, we have only
Woodhouse's cryptic note in W
2 that "K.
left it to his
Publishers to adopt which [alterations] they pleased, & to revise the
Whole." One can imagine with what willingness (and in what tone of voice)
Keats surrendered that privilege.
Since an editor must always act according to principles, the problem
facing an editor of Keats's poem is what, if he includes the
Ew
revisions so far discussed, he should do about the rest of the late manuscript
readings that were rejected in 1820. A single example will serve to
illustrate. In all extant transcripts the poem is called "Saint Agnes'
[or Agnes] Eve" (Garrod's first textual note is wrong), which
was always Keats's form of the title in his letters (see Letters,
II, 58, 62, 139, 157, 174, 234, 294; so also Charles Brown, II, 276).
Woodhouse and Taylor use forms of the title "The Eve of St. Agnes"
(Letters, II, 162, 182), which appeared at the beginning of
the
poem, in the running heads, and on the title page and a half-title in the
1820 volume. Can we assume, then, that Keats's publishers altered the
title? There is a strong possibility that they did alter it. Can we assume, if
they did, that Keats disapproved of the change? No—because we
know that he read proofs of the poem, and that in at least two instances (see
Letters, II, 294-295) he insisted that his manuscript readings
be
restored. We can, I think, assume that he had a free hand wherever the
publishers did not object specifically on moral or religious grounds.[9]
To only three other readings could the publishers have objected on
such grounds. (1) At line 98, for "Mercy, Porphyro!" the manuscripts
(some of them without the comma) read "Mercy, Jesu!"—which,
aside
from being metrically preferable, lends force to Angela's suspicions
(detailed in stanza XIV) that the Porphyro confronting her may be an evil
spirit. (2) At line 143, again in Angela's speech, for "Go, go!" the
manuscripts (with minor variations) read "O Christ!"—a natural
enough
reaction just after the "cruel . . . impious . . . wicked" Porphyro has
proposed his "stratagem." (3) At lines 145-147, for
"I will not harm her, by all saints I swear,"
Quoth Porphyro: "O may I ne'er find grace
"When my weak voice shall whisper its last prayer,
the manuscripts (with minor variations) read
"I will not harm her, by the great Saint Paul—"
Swear'th Porphyro—"O may I neer find grace
"When my weak voice shall unto heaven call
—which, owing to Paul's association with chastity, embodies an
ironic
oath especially appropriate to Porphyro's plot against Madeline, but would
have aroused the same disapproval from the publishers as the sexual
overtones of the additional stanza between VI and VII.
The nearly forty other late manuscript readings that were ignored or
rejected in 1820 have nothing in them offensive from a moral or religious
point of view. The alterations are primarily stylistic, and in every instance
we cannot be sure that Keats himself did not make the change in proof, or
at least concur in the change if it was made by someone else. It is this
circumstance that prevents us from always accepting the Ew
agreement as Keats's final text: he could have been
responsible
for every single one of the stylistic alterations, from the title on.
Employing the principle that a proper text of the poem will embody
the latest readings intended by the poet, including those that there is good
reason to think were rejected by the publishers against the poet's wishes,
future editors of Keats's poem, whether making a scholarly text or putting
together selections for an anthology, should restore the Ew
version of lines 314-322 and the additional stanza between VI and
VII—this last even though it will result in the subsequent
renumbering of
stanzas and lines through most of the poem. Editors may wish to restore the
manuscript readings at lines 98, 143, and 145-147; at present, while I
myself favor them, these seem a matter of individual option. Otherwise
(saving for the need to tidy up the apparatus criticus in the
next
Oxford edition) the text we now have will serve.
Keats at one time thought enough of "The Eve of St. Agnes" to
request that it appear first among the poems in the 1820 volume
(Letters, II, 276). It seems less than fair not to accord it the
best text possible; certainly the only slightly more innocent version we have
always had, whether or not fit for ladies, has been often enough
misunderstood.
Notes