The Eve of St. Agnes

“The Eve of St. Agnes” is a narrative poem consisting of 42 stanzas of nine lines each, for a total of 378 lines. It follows a rigid Spenserian form—each stanza contains eight lines written in iambic pentameter, with the final ninth line written in iambic hexameter (also known as an “alexandrine line”). This means each of the first eight lines will have 10 syllables, while the final line has 12. The rhyme scheme of this form is ABABBCBCC.

This poetry form is originally attributed to Edmund Spenser, most famous for his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenserian stanzas experienced a literary resurgence during Keats’s time and were explored by poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and others. The rigidity and antiquity of this poetry form fits the old-world setting of the poem, making it feel like it was written earlier than it was; however, critics of Keats argued that the form is a difficult choice for narrative poems because the final alexandrine line slows down the pacing of the story. Although the slow, meandering