John William Waterhouse, “Miranda”
For those of you in the Midwest getting pounded by cold temperatures at the moment, you can blame me. I’m currently teaching John Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes.
My British Fantasy accused me of having Prospero-type powers when I was teaching The Tempest last week. About ten minutes into the class, the sky darkened to such a degree that none of us could keep our minds on the discussion. Tornado warnings started popping up on my students’ smart phones and then a deluge was unleashed. It was quite something.
Critical thinkers that they are, my students then made a connection with the week before when heavy snow cancelled classes. At the time we were reading Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, much of which takes place in the polar north.
They therefore wanted to know what the weather would be like the following week. If Eve of St. Agnes is any indication, I replied, it’s going to be bitterly cold. And while not cold by Midwestern standards, Maryland today is still in the teens:
St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
Some of my students wear flip-flops in such conditions but the old Beadsman has them beat. He’s barefoot:
His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,
And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan,
Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees:
The sculptur’d dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
Imprison’d in black, purgatorial rails:
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries,
He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.
By the way, going by the next assignment, don’t expect spring next week either. Keats informs us that the sedge will still be withered from the lake and no birds will be singing.
But we should be getting Alice in Wonderland garden weather the week after that.
