Seamus Perry
speaker
386 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Seamus Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
On that day in 1819, Keats, a Londoner, was in Chichester, and clearly inspired by the coincidence, he started writing a narrative poem about the Eve of St.
Agnes on or around the 20th.
And he returned to the poem later in the autumn, revising it with a view to publishing it in his new volume, which was to be entitled Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St.
Agnes and Other Poems, his greatest volume.
The legend of St.
Agnes' Eve is that if a young woman observes certain rites at bedtime on that day, then in her dreams, she will see the man that she is going to marry.
Why should Keats be so drawn by such an odd piece of folklore?
Well, one reason might be that he was always compelled by the relationship between dreams and truth, because he was compelled by the whole idea of imagination, not as something that just makes things up, but as something that might somehow tell truth.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, says the Grecian urn.
He had written what is now a famous letter
that the imagination may be compared to Adam's dream.
He awoke and found it truth.
And he's alluding there to Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Adam wakes twice in book eight to find that his dream has come true.
Inspired by God, he dreams of Eve.
And then he says, I waked to find her or forever to deplore her loss, such as I saw her in my dream, adorned with what all earth or heaven could bestow to make her amiable.
And this is a sort of replay of his discovery of paradise itself, which he has also foreseen in a dream.
I waked and found before mine eyes all real as the dream had lively shadowed.
So waking up and finding that your dream has come true is the whole point of the legend of St.
Agnes Eve.
And it's something which I think we will find as we discuss it.
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