Exactly how steamy is this poem?
PG-13
This poem is at once super-sexy and then totally not sexy at all. On the one hand, nothing juicy actually happens—guy sneaks into a castle to see girl, watches her sleep for a little bit, wakes her up, then runs away with her. That said, there's a ton of sexual stuff in this poem: amid the repeated references to sexual violence (Porphyro's forswearing of "ruffian passion," the explicit reference to the rape of Philomel, etc.), the entire sequence where Porphyro "melts" into the dream of Madeline has the some pretty heavy-handed sexual symbolism, and lots of readers think that Porphyro and Madeline actually have sex there. We're giving this one a PG-13 rating as a compromise: PG for what explicitly happens, R for what's implied.