The Eve of St. Agnes Imagination Quotes

When you see "hoodwink'd," you probably think of it as a funky word that basically means "tricked." Here, it refers more closely to a term that was used in falconry (the practice of training falcons to hunt for you), where you'd put a hood over the falcon's head so it couldn't see and get distracted. Here, Madeline's "regardless eyes" (64) are covered over with "faery fancy," which renders her incapable of being sensible to anything other than the vision she anticipates that night. That said, you shouldn't dismiss that first meaning—that Madeline's somehow being tricked—because it's still definitely there.

So far, Keats has been talking about Madeline in pretty submissive language—she's distracted, prone, and basically acting like a space cadet while waiting for the time when she can receive a vision. Here, though, Angela calls her a "conjuror," which puts Madeline squarely in the opposite position: instead of just waiting there naked in bed, hoping that her vision shows up, Madeline's made out to be conjuring that dream forth, drawing it out with her own independent power.

When you see "dreams awake," you probably immediately translate that to "daydreaming," but it's a little more complicated here. Madeline is clearly imagining something, but oddly enough the thing she sees isn't the anticipated outcome of the ritual (that is, she's not imagining her boyfriend Porphyro appearing before her). Instead, she sees St. Agnes, Madeline's own counterpart, in Madeline's own bed. While we've already seen Madeline attempting to create Porphyro by imagining, or charming, him into existence with the ritual, these lines are really interesting because they figure Madeline imagining herself into the ritual, as St. Agnes herself. Groovy, eh?

"Perplex'd" means confused, but also comes from the Latin word ("plectere"—for weaving or tangling, which makes a lot of sense when you think about how Madeline is in a way tangled between waking and dreaming. This weird state that Madeline's in—her "wakeful swoon"—can be interpreted as a state of heightened imaginative fertility. What's funny is that, even as her imaginative powers are made more powerful, her "soul" is figured to have basically exited stage left. It's as if Madeline herself is gone, and all that's left is her imagination.

If you were wondering when the climax of the poem would come, this is it. Porphyro revives from his cold stupor of stanza 35 and, somehow, blends himself into Madeline's dream. Some critics take that climax thing pretty literally here, and think that Porphyro and Madeline are actually having sex ("Ah, 'melting,' so that's what the kids are calling it these days…"). Even if you don't want to take it literally, this movement is still pretty heavily sexual. Any way you look at it, Porphyro is in some way penetrating the iron barrier of Madeline's "wakeful swoon."