The Eve of St. Agnes is an almost flawless narrative poem, romantic in its conception and artistic in its execution.  Porphyro, a young lover, gains entrance to a hostile castle on the eve of St. Agnes to see if he cannot win his heroine, Madeline, on that enchanted evening.  The interest in the story, the mastery of poetic language, the wealth and variety of the imagery, the atmosphere of medieval days, combine to make this poem unusually attractive.  The following lines appeal to the senses of sight, odor, sound, and temperature,[25] as well as to romantic human feeling and love of the beautiful:—­

    “...like a throbbing star
      Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose;
      Into her dream he melted, as the rose
    Blendeth its odor with the violet,—­
      Solution sweet:  meantime the frost-wind blows
    Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet
  Against the window panes; St. Agnes’ moon hath set.”

The fact that Keats could write the Ode to a Nightingale in three hours is proof of genius.  This poem pleases lovers of music, of artistic expression, of nature, of romance, and of human pathos.  Such lines as these show that the strength and beauty of his verse are not entirely dependent on images of sense:—­

  “Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
     I have been half in love with easeful Death,
  Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
     To take into the air my quiet breath.”

The Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode on Melancholy, Lamia, and Isabella,—­all show the unusual charm of Keats.  He manifests the greatest strength in his unfinished fragment Hyperion, “the Goetterdaemmerung of the early Grecian gods.”  The opening lines reveal the artistic perfection of form and the effectiveness of the sensory images with which he frames the scene:—­

  “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
  Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
  Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
  Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
  Still as the silence round about his lair;
  Forest on forest hung about his head
  Like cloud on cloud.”

General Characteristics.—­Keats is the poetic apostle of the beautiful.  He specially emphasizes the beautiful in the world of the senses; but his definition of beauty grew to include more than mere physical sensations from attractive objects.  In his Ode to a Grecian Urn, he says that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and he calls to the Grecian pipes to play—­

  “Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.”

Those poets who thought that they could equal Keats by piling up a medley of sense images have been doomed to disappointment.  The transforming power of his imagination is more remarkable than the wealth of his sensations.