Examine The Significance Of The Interpenetration Of Reality And Dreams In Romantic-era Literature.

Keats's 'The Eve of St Agnes' and Coleridge's 'Christabel' both depict poetic worlds of Gothic sensuality and ghostly ethereality, centring on the blurred distinction between dream and reality to produce poetry that attains a degree of timelessness and transcendence. As James Wilson has argued, 'to sustain its beauty, art must transcend its mortal creator to enter an eternal, non-material realm' and this preoccupation manifests itself in the dreamlike aesthetics of both texts. In 'St Agnes', Keats fuses the material and abstract, inverting the states of life and lifelessness, and infusing his imagery with a sense of timeless suspension to depict dream as a state of heightened consciousness and intensified sensation, in which the mortal and ordinary becomes heavenly and transcendental. Coleridge, too, produces a world of dreamlike transcendence in 'Christabel', but does so through the depiction of distorted reality, establishing an ominous atmosphere of dark supernaturalism. Whereas in 'St Agnes' dream represents the heavenly, in 'Christabel' dream enshrouds the text in an atmosphere of pervasive uncertainty, becoming a dangerous state of vulnerable exposition to the corruptive forces of the hellishly phantasmal. Ultimately though, as both textual worlds transcend the constraints of reality in the display of a dreamlike aesthetic, they 'sustain [their] beauty' as art and, correspondingly, the messages they convey about life and the human imagination attain a degree of universal, timeless relevance.

Fundamentally intrinsic to Keats's 'St Agnes' is the conversion of the abstract to the real in its literalising of the symbolic meaning of the St Agnes Eve legend. The text thus, as R. H. Fogle has suggested, is 'in the highest degree romantic', but is paradoxically still 'erected four-square and solid upon a foundation of materials from the real world' , and James Wilson has attributed this ability to fuse the concrete and the visionary uniquely to 'art'. One of the most arresting examples in 'St Agnes' of this fusion within art is the majestic 'casement high and triple-arch'd' in Madeline's chamber; material, yet still possessing a wraithlike ethereality, which Keats presents as an emblematic model of the relationship between dreaming and reality.

All garlanded with carven imag'ries... ...And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth's deep damask'd wings (208-212).

Jack Stillinger has observed a sense of stasis in this dream imagery, describing it as appearing 'stopped forever at a point' like the portrayal of the motionless art in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', and this Keatsian alignment of dream and art with transcendence is contained strikingly in the casement image. Its protracted, lengthy descri ption spreads across two stanzas, intensifying the already drowsy slowness of the Spenserian stanza to the extent that the image appears held momentarily in a vision of motionless stasis. Deepening this sense of transcendence, the casement is also imaged as visionary rather than visual, as Keats leaves its illustration deliberately, tantalisingly incomplete in order to captivate the reader's imagination. The casement windows are depicted as a breathtaking kaleidoscope of vibrant 'stains' and 'dyes', but with no mention of specifically which hues constitute this adornment, while the patterning, likened to that of the 'deep damask'd' wings of the tiger-moth, creates an impression of rich, ornate complexity, but with no sense of precise patterns or shapes. So vague is this depiction that it offers little more than an outline on a poetic canvas, inviting the reader to imaginatively paint the most 'opulent', richly coloured, and sublimely beautiful design conceivable. In this illustrative incompletion, Keats highlights the image's visionary incomprehensibility as the 'diamonded' panes exceed poetic representation in their unimaginable beauty. The cold 'wintry moon' rays of external reality undergo a prismatic transformation upon passing through these magnificent panes, into the visionary, richly multicoloured 'warm gules' (216-217) as they enter the chamber space of dreamlike phantasmagoria, filled with 'spirits of the air, and visions wide' (201). In the bewitching stasis of the image, this conversion of light appears in a state of eternal equilibrium; the transcendence approaching heavenliness in Madeline's celestial transformation into a 'saint[ly]', 'splendid angel, newly drest...for heaven', as these 'warm gules' touch her 'fair breast' (217-223). The emblematic, ethereal panes thus take on a deeply symbolic significance, representing the transformative point at which the cold, base materials of reality are translated imaginatively into the sensually intensified, transcendentally beautiful world of dream, demonstrating what is, for Keats, the truly divine power of dreaming and the imagination.

Parallel to this figurative materialisation of the abstract in the poem's imagery, the interweaving images of life and lifelessness throughout the poem, as Gary Farnell has observed, signify the 'heightening of consciousness' in dream. This inversion of life and death is most evident in Madeline's first sight of Porphyro; a moment in which his attempt to awaken her is ultimately his death and rebirth into the world of her dream. Madeline's physiognomy in her expressively shining, 'blue affrayed eyes wide open' and 'quick' panting (294-295), suggests a sudden, extraordinarily alert consciousness, but while this initially appears to display an abrupt awakening into reality, she never fully leaves her dream, 'still beh[olding]...the vision of her sleep' (297-298). In this dream-effectuated heightened consciousness she appears in stark contrast to Porphyro who, paradoxically, is still grounded in reality but, awestruck and sunken '[u]pon his knees', he shows little more sign of consciousness than 'pale...smooth-sculptured stone' (296). In this 'stone[-like]' appearance, he resembles the 'ach[ingly]' half-alive 'sculptur'd dead' (14-18) in the chapel, or the motionless 'carved angels' imbued with an odd vitality in their ever eager-eyed' watchfulness, adorning the guest-filled 'level chambers' (32-35). As these images resonate from the opening scenes of the poem in Porphyro's statuesque appearance, he is pushed from mere unconscious entrancement into a state of quasi-death like the statues he resembles, drifting from reality into momentary lifeless suspension. As he 's[inks]' (296) from animation into motionlessness and Madeline's formerly lifeless, sleeping body is injected with 'sudde[n]' (135) and alert movement, this transfer of vitality from body to body signals the poem's movement from the reality in which Porphyro is awake into Madeline dream-world in which she is conscious to an intensified degree. In the disappointingly 'pallid, chill, and drear' (310) appearance of Porphyro as he enters this world an outsider of reality, Keats highlights, by contrast, the sensuous vitality of the dream aesthetic displayed as he is reborn into Madeline's dream world.

Ethereal, flush'd, and like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose; Into her dream he melted, as the rose Blendeth its odour with the violet (317-320).

In this climactic moment Keats places 'like' before 'throbbing' to achieve a brief, suspenseful refrain followed by a wave of resounding syntactical momentum in the word 'throbbing', emphatically pronouncing Porphyro's sudden, surreally heightened animation as the colour and sensation return to him and to the poem. The intense beauty and richly evocative imagery of this stanza, which Wilson has fittingly described as 'timeless...aesthetic perfection', highlights the strong link that Keats maintains between life and dream, and death and reality. In the enchantingly vivid image of ethereal radiance in which Porphyro is transformed into the divine 'star' 'throbbing' with vitality, Keats reaffirms his affiliation of dream and imagination with the heavenly. In this tumultuous sensory climax of the poem, the visionary imagery is still unfalteringly grounded in the physical as Porphyro 'melt[s]' into Madeline's dream, blending his 'odour' with hers, and turning this transient dream-world into an endless fantasy and the new reality; the movement from reality to dream becoming, for Keats, a kind of ironic sensory awakening.

'Christabel', however, centres on a disorientating sense of bizarre surrealism and the frightening supernatural rather than illustrative beauty or sensual richness, Coleridge's poeticism effecting unease where Keats's imaginatively captivated and aesthetically pleased. Andrea Henderson, in her suggestion that Christabel 'seems suspended' in the 'abstract space within which the poem operates', supports this distancing of the poetic world from concrete reality and moves it towards a realm of the visionary and unreal, and this is established strikingly in the poem's opening setting. Plunging his reader straight into the bleak, stark 'middle of the night', Coleridge immediately creates an intense sense of unease as 'the owls' incongruously take on the 'awaken[ing]' role of the 'crowing cock', whose crow concurrently becomes uncharacteristically 'drows[y]'; the gingerly faltering narration contributing to this atmosphere of anxiety in its tone of reluctant uncertainty. At the same time the 'night' setting, paradoxically 'chilly, but not dark', is roofed with a 'thin gray cloud' (15-16) which drains the poetic canvas of all colour and vibrancy so that this inverse textual world, in stark contrast to Keats's, appears almost in dark, hazy colour negatives. In the introduction of Christabel to the text; the protagonist and heroine of dream, she instantly becomes the centre of this foggily unearthly setting. Led by romantic 'dreams all yesternight', as she kneels alone 'beneath the huge oak tree' in a serene, trancelike state of 'silen[t] praye[r]' (27-36), the material elements dissolve around her and the poetic world becomes a flickeringly insubstantial, abstract dream setting of which she becomes the essence and creator. As Anya Taylor has suggested, the text represents a 'tumult of uncertainty', and because of this figurative construction of the remote, secluded poetic world as one of dream, from this point nothing in the text can be certain. Coleridge's opening is thus vital in the staging of Geraldine's appearance as, amidst the dream-setting already established, this 'damsel', enigmatically both 'shadowy' and 'bright' (58-60), becomes an incarnation of the atmosphere of paradoxical phantasmagoria contained in this wild, pagan setting. Patricia M. Adair has argued that Coleridge uses the figure of Geraldine to represent the 'terrifying activity of the unconscious mind...the evil that comes in sleep when the will is powerless' and this is evident in Coleridge's first depiction of her, as the dark, sinister tone underlying the setting up to this point comes dazzlingly to the surface in her embodiment.

That shadowy in the moonlight shone: The neck that made that white robe wan... ...Her blue-veined feet unsandaled were; And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair. (60-65)

As in the iconic image of Madeline knelt before the casement in 'St Agnes', light is central in this depiction of Geraldine, but it is not comfortingly soft, 'warm gules' that illuminate her but piercingly 'bright' rays which seem oddly to emanate, not from the 'shadowy...moonlight', but from the dazzling surface of her own skin. There is an intensity in her beauty which makes her appear not only mesmerising, but actively 'frightful' (66). What Coleridge most strikingly depicts here is a twisting of the stereotypically beautiful into the monstrous and horrific by the harshness of this excessive beauty; the skin of her neck so starkly pale that it makes 'white' appear 'wan', and the gems in her hair, rather than sparkling pleasantly, are 'wildly glittering'. The unnaturalness of this glaring luminosity is intensified in the alien prominence of the 'blue-vein[s]' shining almost grotesquely through the skin of her feet. This growing sense of her blindingly harsh, glittering aestheticism resonates hypnotically in the final word of the stanza ending '[b]eautiful exceedingly' (68), upon which the syntax hangs in a moment of awestruck resignation to the impossibility of her textual representation. Like Keats's casement panes, Geraldine, is rooted firmly in the visionary as, despite her human form, she corruptively appears in Christabel's serene, woodland dream-world as an utterly captivating apparition of strange, excessive aestheticism surpassing poetic representation. Unlike the heavenly beautiful and transcendent casement image however, Geraldine appears closer to hell in her 'wild' and 'frightful' aspect; a manifestation of evil within this world of the dreaming unconscious. Coleridge also depicts dreaming in Bracy the bard's dream-narrative as a state of heightened, almost prophetic consciousness, as it is in the rebirth of Porphyro into Madeline's intensified dream-world in 'St Agnes'. Bracy's dream represents a moment of clarity, bringing to the surface the sense of foreboding underlying Geraldine's character throughout the poem in a moment of piercing, visionary revelation which, like Keats's allegorical casement imagery, is linked intrinsically to art by its origination in the mind of the bard; the poem's one true artist. Whereas in 'St Agnes', Keats's ornate, prismatic casement panes of dream emanate a heavenly radiance, however, in 'Christabel' it is a deepened sense of evil that is created in the bard's prophetic dream. In his unravelling descri ption of the woodland setting, the dove's distress and the subsequent investigation of this disturbance, Coleridge gradually crafts a chillingly allegorical mirror image of Christabel's discovery of Geraldine; now represented as a 'bright green snake/[c]oiled' constrictively around the 'wings and neck' of the dove' (550-551).

Green as the herbs on which it couched, Close by the dove's its head it crouched; And with the dove it heaves and stirs, Swelling its neck as she swelled hers. (552-556)

The biting sibilance of the 'ch' and 's' sounds which hiss throughout this stark textual illustration onomatopoeically emphasize the vicious, predatory nature of the image, oddly erotic in its sensually evocative language as the intertwined bodies of the dove and snake, 'heav[ing]' and '[s]well[ing]' synchronously, seem locked in a violently passionate half-embrace, half-struggle. The Biblical connotations of these symbolic creatures however, along with the dove's passive confusion, '[f]luttering, and uttering fearful moan' (537), highlight the ultimately predator-victim nature of this struggle. It becomes clear therefore that Christabel's name, an indication of her innate 'Christ[-like]' nature, is viciously poisoned from the moment it hissed sibilantly on Geraldine's predatory, 'snake[like]' tongue. As her eye 'shr[inks] in her head...to a serpent's eye' (585-586), it seems that the mere recounting of this dream releases the evil it contains piercingly into reality to manifest itself disturbingly and vividly in Geraldine's aspect. Representing, as she does, the evil that can corrupt the unconscious mind in sleep, it is the devil within human nature that she depicts.

Ultimately both 'Christabel' and 'St Agnes' centre on the blend of dream and reality, creating textual worlds of hypnotically visionary, deeply symbolic surrealism. Keats's visionary casement image of ethereally static, complex beauty depicts the intensification of cold reality in visionary, sensually heavenly dream. In 'St Agnes', dream also becomes the ultimate, conscious reality as Porphyro undergoes his symbolic death and 'mel[ts]' into Madeline's intensified dream-world. Whereas Coleridge's dream-world initially appears contrastingly blurry, disorientating and far from heavenly, corruptively penetrated by the 'wildly glittering', malevolent force embodied in Geraldine, it is more similar to 'St Agnes' than it would first seem. In 'Christabel', too, dream becomes a prophetic heightening of consciousness and unveiling of reality, for just as the bard's dream exposes the true nature of Geraldine, her embodiment and appearance in the poetic dream-world reveals the true evil underlying human nature. Each text reads, itself, as an artistic form of consciousness and, for both Keats and Coleridge, the realm of the poems; that of dream, art, and the visionary, transcends that of life and reality. It is here, where the transient, limited material base of reality is imaginatively translated, that we can expect to find deeply hidden truth, clarity, and an intensified sense of the world, whether that be heavenly or hellish. In the artistic transcendence of these poetic dream-worlds, a degree of timeless, universal relevance is secured in the messages they convey. Coleridge depicts the innate, dangerous powers of the human imagination, while Keats celebrates the sublime, creative powers of the same, demonstrating that for him, to dream is better than to live.

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