Narrative Poem
Loosely speaking, a narrative poem is just a poem that tells a story using normal story-telling devices—meaning, unlike lots of other poems, narrative poems are going to have things like characters and a plot.
That said, "The Eve of St. Agnes"isn't your run-of-the-mill narrative poem because, frankly, there isn't a whole lot of story. Let's be real: the entire plot of this poem could have been wrapped up in about 40 lines (or less), but instead Keats writes almost ten times that. And that's before you even think about the meter, where it gets even weirder. We have more on that in…
Spenserian Stanzas
This entire poem is written in Spenserian stanzas, a meter invented by everybody's favorite sixteenth-century Writer Who Wasn't Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser. The basics of the Spenserian stanza are:
1) Nine lines total
2) The first eight are in iambic pentameter, which is a common meter where a line consists of five iambs. An iamb is a unit (a "foot," actually) that contains two syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed. An iamb sounds like "daDUM." This means that the first line of "The Eve of St. Agnes" sounds like this:
St. Agnes' eve a bitter chill it was.
3) The ninth and final line is an alexandrine, which is exactly like iambic pentameter except that it's got one extra iamb.
Why Keats, Why?
So why did Keats root around in the past for a meter that, even when it was invented more than a century before by Spenser himself, was designed to sound old-fashioned?
Writing in Spenserian stanzas has a few effects. The first and most obvious is that Keats is consciously drawing on this very old-school poetic form that helps him create the poem's overall romantic, medieval feel. Along with the castle, the bloodhounds, the tapestries, and the age-old family feuds, the meter itself helps to create the gothic setting. (Check out "Setting" for more.)
Another effect of Spenserian stanzas is that your finished product ends up being a collection of nine-line blocks, which makes the poem kind of… drag. Nine lines, in the world of poetry, is a fair amount of real estate, and when you're writing in a series of long, discrete units, you can't exactly jump from topic to topic. End result? "The Eve of St. Agnes" feels slow; it's long on detail (You wanna talk about a window? Gotta talk about it for nine lines.) and short on action. In addition, that final alexandrine kind of falls with a thunk at the end of every stanza, slowing the poem down even more: the pace of each stanza is like "da-da-da-da-THUD."
What's up with this snail's pace? For one, we think it adds to the dreamy sense of the poem overall. While this is a narrative poem, it's also one that frequently blurs the line between reality and imagination. The form slows us down as readers, inviting us to contemplate rather than speeding us on to the next plot point (which aren't too many in number to begin with). In that way, the poem's slow and dreamy layout support one of its main questions: where do dreams end and waking life begin?