Mark Ford

speaker

404 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 31 Aug

Mark Ford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Close Readings · Narrative Poems: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ by John Keats · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

If Romeo and Juliet, which is obviously its most dominant precursor, is the greatest play about love, I would say that Eve of St Agnes is the greatest poem about love and about how lovers are transfigured by their shared experience or fantasy of being in love with each other.

So it's a poem about transformation as much as Romeo and Juliet is a play about transformation and how love changes you from one person to another.

Yeah, and he saw, when visiting Benjamin Hayden, he saw a reproduction of a fresco called The Triumph of Death, which actually has many of the features of the poem in it.

It's got a beadsman, it's got a little hare crouching outside the hermit's cell, it's got coffins from which corpses are kind of, you know, doing corpsey things, and it's got

Romantic courtier types who are being sort of terrorized by death or about to be menaced by death.

So the fact that the Beadsman is the portal to the poem and is also the conclusion of the poem does sort of signify the way we pass through death into romance in a way.

I mean, a subtitle for this poem could be Love and Death, couldn't it?

That you pass through the Beadsman who is telling his rosaries as a way of...

commemorating the dead.

And his own breath looks like a spirit going up to heaven, but no one has died, Keats tells us.

And so on one level, I find the poem as romantic and exciting and exhilarating as you get.

But it achieves that, as Romeo and Juliet does, through this contrast with its opposite, death and transience and mortality and

And the beadsman is very much the sort of iconic figure.

But he's also a real person.

I mean, that's what's so amazing about Keats.

The beadsman in other people's hands might become a kind of standard trope.

But he finishes his prayer and he hears music coming because there's a big grand ball, as in Romeo and Juliet.

And he hears the music.

And Keats, in a brilliant phrase, talks about how the music flatters him to tears.

He's flattered.

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