Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Harry Potter”

by · January 20, 2025

by Dr. Beatrice Groves

Today is the Eve of St. Agnes – a day most famous in the literary world as the setting for John Keats’s poem of the same name. St. Agnes was a Roman virgin martyr, a friend to and protector of maidens, but (rather oddly, given the saint’s own miraculously preserved virginity) folklore grew up that if a young woman fasted and performed certain rites on St. Agnes’ Eve, she would dream of her future husband. As Keats writes:

They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honeyed middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright;
As, supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white,
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire. (ll.46-54)

The Eve of St. Agnes is one of Keats’s most famous poems and (like many thousands of people) I studied it at school. I’ve long suspected that J.K. Rowling may also have done so and that this poem, and other of Keats’s poems, has influenced Harry Potter. I have noted one piece of evidence pointing to this before – that the name of King Porfirio in The Ickabog appears to be modelled on Porphyro (the hero of The Eve of St. Agnes). Porfirio and Porphyro not only have very similar names but also a somewhat similar attitude to women. The gentle rebuff offered to Porfirio by Lady Eslanda at the end of The Ickabog (that he must stop treating women as objects of exchange for food) could certainly be similarly levelled at Keats’s Porphyro.

More fundamentally, however, the luscious medievalism of Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes seems a possible inspiration for the medievalism of Hogwarts. The Eve of St. Agnes is soaked in a love of the Middle Ages, and Keats was inspired to write it by a visit to Chichester, with its stunning 12th-century cathedral and beautiful network of medieval lanes and buildings. When Porphyro walks “through a lowly archèd way, / Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume” (ll.109-110), the architecture may have been inspired by the buildings beside the cathedral – in particular Canon Lane with its medieval gatehouses at either end, which is dotted with medieval buildings (including one with a low vaulted ceiling!).

But while Keats’s sources for the architecture of this poem are truly medieval, his literary sources for the medieval flavor of the poem were often more recent. Hogwarts, likewise, while inspired by real medieval castles in its Great Hall, giant oak doors, and dungeons, is also deeply influenced by Gothic literary sources. Keats draws directly on Gothic novels, such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and the depictions of Hogwarts as a “big Gothic thing” are likewise drawn directly both from Gothic novels and their parody in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, whose heroine is obsessed by The Mysteries of Udolpho (see Literary Allusion in Harry Potter). Harry Potter, like Keats, is drawn to the Gothic reworking of the medieval, as well as to the medieval itself.

Keats’s poem is also inspired by medieval time as well as medieval space. Its medieval setting lies not just in its knights, castle walls thick with tapestries, and candlelit feasts (all, likewise, found at Hogwarts) but also its precise placing within the liturgical year. After the Reformation, saints’ days – such as St. Agnes’ feast day – were no longer officially celebrated. Keats’s poem, however, has its protagonists’ lives unfolding in synchrony within the traditional Christian year. In Hogwarts, likewise, life follows the ancient rhythms of the liturgical year. Hogwarts celebrates Christmas with traditional feasting and swags of greenery, and the twelve Christmas trees in the Great Hall echo the liturgical celebration of the twelve days of Christmas.

Likewise, All-Hallows is traditionally a time for forging connections between the living and the dead – a time “to reassure the living of their place within a vast community of souls” as Eleanor Parker has written. Harry, likewise, communes with the dead on All-Hallows Eve. He attends a deathday party on Halloween of his second year, and in his third year the Halloween feast culminates “with an entertainment provided by the Hogwarts ghosts. They popped out of the walls and tables to do a spot of formation gliding; Nearly Headless Nick, the Gryffindor ghost, had a great success with a re-enactment of his own botched beheading” (POA 159).

Another medieval aspect shared by both The Eve of St. Agnes and Harry Potter is a strong interest in heraldry. Heraldry – a pictorial guide to familial and institutional history – is an important aspect of Harry Potter. It is present in the wizarding world from the Hogwarts coat of arms inscribed on the title page of each Harry Potter novel, the Black family tree in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and the Lestrange family tree in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald to the tiny, but crucial, detail of Marvolo Gaunt’s erroneous belief that the Deathly Hallows symbol is his ancestral coat of arms.

In The Eve of St. Agnes, heraldic symbolism is annealed in glass in a lusciously descriptive moment that has stayed with me ever since I first read it as a teenager – and it was this moment which first made me think about Keats in connection with Harry Potter. In Madeline’s room there is a heraldic stained glass window which transfers its deep-dyed beauty onto her skin as she kneels beneath it:

A casement high and triple-arched there was,
All garlanded with carven imageries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings;
And in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together pressed,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint.
She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed,
Save wings, for Heaven. Porphyro grew faint;
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. (ll.208-225)

The opulent imagery of this passage imagines Madeline illuminated by the stained glass as the moonlight transfers its jewel-bright colors onto her paleness. And it was this, as well as the sanctity of the moment – the stained glass and her cross, the references to saints, angels and heaven – that made me wonder if its imagery had lodged, likewise, in Rowling’s brain. For a similar transfer of warm color onto cool paleness occurs in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the only explicitly holy setting of Harry Potter: the church of Godric’s Hollow. The stained glass windows of this church glow “jewel bright across the square,” and the light from its “brilliant windows” brighten the snow: “a blanket of pale blue that was flecked with dazzling red, gold, and green wherever the reflections from the stained glass hit the snow” (DH 323–5).

This church streams with light and both its light and its music reach out to Harry and Hermione, reminding them that they inhabit a holy time as well as a holy place – it is only when they hear “a carol start up inside the little church” that Hermione realizes that it is Christmas Eve (DH 323). The jeweled colors of these stained glass windows and the way in which they transmit that beauty to the world outside are an important part of the numinous aura of this scene. And the importance of Godric’s Hollow’s church and its stained glass is further underlined by the choice to make it the location of the denouement of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The stained glass of the medieval church makes a startling return when this play’s crucial finale plays out on the spot “where the light from the church’s Rose Window hits the floor” (CC part 2, 4.10).

A sense that Rowling might have been drawing on a memory of The Eve of St. Agnes in this moment in Godric’s Hollow’s churchyard alerted me to look for other echoes of Keats in Harry Potter. My book Literary Allusion in Harry Potter argues that Keats’s imagination of his writing being read “when this warm scribe my hand is in the grave” influences Harry’s imagining of his mother’s warm, writing hand when he reads her letter in Deathly Hallows. I have also argued for the influence of Keats’s poem Lamia on the depiction of Nagini in Lana A. Whited’s recent scholarly and wide-ranging collection The Ivory Tower, Harry Potter, and Beyond: More Essays on the Works of J.K. Rowling (and in my Bathilda’s Notebook blog).

But I have been a little cautious of building too much on these echoes as Rowling has never made an explicit reference to Keats in either her writing or interviews (nothing like the hat-tip to Jane Austen in the naming of Mrs. Norris, for example). This has made it more difficult to argue for Keats allusions than those of her acknowledged influences such as Shakespeare, Collette, or Dickens. But Keats is an absolute stalwart of the English literature curriculum in the UK: I have long suspected that Rowling studied him as part of her English A-level course – and, recently, I finally found the proof! Rowling has indeed long read and loved Keats; she studied him at A-Level, and hence he has been part of her literary consciousness for all her writing life.

This evidence was posted by the Keats-Shelley House Museum on Twitter in 2017 but, as far as I am aware, has not previously been noticed by anyone in the Harry Potter fandom:

 

 

Rowling signed her name on 31/7/15 and wrote, “Here on my 50th birthday with the schoolfriend who studied Keats with me at 17.” Underneath Rowling’s entry, her husband has likewise signed his name – and written “Very enlightening” – as has her friend Sean Harris. Sean Harris is a name well-known to Harry Potter fans as the original owner of the turquoise Ford Anglia, the “Getaway Driver and Foul-Weather Friend” dedicatee of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Harris has written: “Visiting my hero, Keats with JKR after a lifetime of quoting him.” Both Neil Murray and Sean Harris’s comments can be read as referring to Rowling as well as themselves. Reading between the lines, I think that both Sean and Rowling have spent a lifetime of quoting Keats since studying him together at A-level, and Neil was “enlightened” on this trip as to why they hero-worship him.

Keats has, therefore, been percolating in Rowling’s brain for over forty years and – as those who have done English A-level will know – it is rare for a reader (Harry Potter fans, of course, excepted) to spend longer with a text than their A-level texts. This confirmation of Rowling’s deep knowledge of Keats is a delightful find and makes me more confident of the links to The Eve of St. Agnes, The Fall of Hyperion, and Lamia argued for above. A-level students also always study Keats’s odes – might “Ode on Melancholy,” likewise, be the first place where Rowling met the wolfsbane that was to play such an important role in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? (“No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist / Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine” [ll.1-2])

Might Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy’s middle name borrow more from Keats’s poems Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion than the Greek myths on which they draw? In another parallel, the unusual description of ghosts as walking “palely” in Nearly Headless Nick’s description – “Wizards can leave an imprint of themselves upon the earth, to walk palely where their living selves once trod” (OOTP 861) – could be inflected by the haunting use of this adverb in Keats’s famous poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” In this poem, a knight-at-arms, ghost-like, choses to “sojourn here, / Alone and palely loitering” – a shadow of his former self. It seems likely that the palely loitering knightly ghosts of Hogwarts were inspired in part by the ghostly knights of “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

I suspect that if we were to track down Rowling’s A-level syllabus, we’d find that “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Lamia, and The Eve of St. Agnes were all part of the course. (Tracking this down, incidentally, is one of my long-term aims – and it is proving surprisingly difficult! If you or someone you know took English A-level in the 1980s and studied The Winter’s Tale, King Lear, and Keats – the three texts we now know she studied – I’d be very interested to hear from you – especially if you remember what your exam board was or the rest of the syllabus you studied!).

And perhaps The Eve of St. Agnes – studied by Rowling at school – unconsciously influenced her writing of her own school motto. She chose for Hogwarts, of course, a motto about never tickling sleeping dragons – a motto into which she put a lot of thought. And one source for it may have been a memory of the end of The Eve of St. Agnes. As Keats’s lovers disappear out into the bitter chill of St. Agnes’ Eve, they pass safely but fearfully into the darkness: “For there were sleeping dragons all around” (l.353).

Wishing you all a joyous St. Agnes’ Eve, and a dream-filled sleep“in lap of legends old” (l.135) safe from sleeping dragons, tickled or otherwise.

 

The crest of Hogwarts has the four House mascots on it