(2:33 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

John Keats and Radiohead

I had planned for some time to re-read John Keats' "Eve of St. Agnes" the night before the actual memorial of St. Agnes, which takes place today. I was too busy fiddling with the template and worrying about graduate school last night to do so, though I did mention Keats in one of my posts.

This afternoon, I read the poem in its entirety and was struck by the way it resonated with one of my favorite Radiohead songs, "Exit Music (For a Film)". On reading the lyrics and the commentary at green plastic radiohead, possibly the best Radiohead site on the web, I saw that my synapse did not fire completely at random. The song was written in response to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (in this case the recent movie version), and it represented Thom Yorke's attempt to picture a situation in which disaster didn't strike; as he says: "I saw the Zeffirelli version [of Romeo and Juliet] when I was 13 and I cried my eyes out, because I couldn't understand why, the morning after they shagged, they didn't just run away. The song is written for two people who should run away before all the bad stuff starts." Keats is also working with the Romeo and Juliet theme, and he also pictures a way it might have gone differently.

So yes, I am really going to write a brief comparison/contrast of a Radiohead song and a Keats poem. Grant me this indulgence -- it is, after all, the memorial of St. Agnes (virgin and martyr).

First, here's a summary of Keats (you can read the whole thing, linked above, if you so desire). On the Eve of St. Agnes, so the story goes, a chaste young woman will be granted a vision of her future husband, provided she performs the proper rituals. Madeline, a chaste young woman, is eager to receive this vision, and Porphyro, a supplicant who is not well-liked in Madeline's house, sees there an opportunity to win her heart. He is friends with Angela, an elderly woman who lives in Madeline's house and believes the two should marry, and he arranges with her to be let into Madeline's room later that night. He hides there as Madeline undresses and performs the various rituals, and then he sets the scene for her "vision" of him as her future husband. She awakes to see him standing over the bed and welcomes the vision, proclaiming her love for Porphyro. He announces that it is no dream, and proposes that they escape and get married. She agrees -- "And they are gone: ay ages long ago / These lovers fled away into the storm" (stanza 42).

Clearly this is a very elegant plan on the part of Porphyro, but it is also risky. He hears his every movement amplified, and when he and Madeline leave, he has to sneak past a sleeping guard and a "wakeful bloodhound" (stanza 41), who lets them pass unremarked because he smells a member of the household (perhaps implying that the two are "meant for each other"). The poem ends on a note of death -- both Angela and a holy old man mentioned in the first stanza die, symbolizing the fact that the world of the poem is now completely closed off to the lovers who have left it. They flee "into the storm," and there is no indication that the storm ever abates -- there is no "happily ever after," even though Porphyro has made arrangements for a home. Keats is a Romantic, but not a romantic -- he realizes that a love formed in such a stormy setting will remain stormy, that the acute tension evoked throughout the poem will remain an acute tension.

Now to Radiohead. The song starts in the middle of the scene laid out in "Eve of St. Agnes"; the lover awakens his beloved, and they escape quietly. There is a similar tension, with the lover saying, "Pack and get dressed / Before your father hears us / Before all hell breaks loose." As they escape, the lover has to encourage his beloved not to "lose [her] nerve," and he sounds a note of quiet desperation -- their escape is an escape from their existential loneliness, into which the lover could plummet again at any moment. Once they are outside, it is cold (as it is in "The Eve of St. Agnes," which obviously takes place during the winter), and they need a song to keep them warm. The music echoes the mood of each stanza of the lyrics, with the first two being straight acoustic, the third ("Breath, keep breathing...") containing an eery organ sound, and the fourth ("Sing us a song...") evoking a desolate, wind-blown landscape.

At this point, the song begins to explode as the lover taunts the social order he is leaving behind: "And you can laugh your spineless laugh / We hope your rules and wisdom choke you." It is only on the strength of this spite that their relationship can sustain itself, as he shifts immediately to saying, "And now we are one in everlasting peace," nearly screaming it in notes only Thom Yorke can hit, with the instrumentation at its climax. Sexual union is clearly in mind at this point. The song ends with the plaintiff whine, "We hope that you choke, that you choke," repeated several times, the last time nearly a capella, with a cracking voice.

The difference between the two works seems to be the surface-level sophistication of the two lovers. Porphyro brilliantly exploits social convention in order to find the opening for his escape with Madeline, whereas Yorke's lover appears to have chosen "any old time" to make his escape. It is noteworthy, however, that Porphyro is exploiting the "primitive" Catholic customs, that he has to rely on the favor of an old, forgotten woman, and that the "prestige" social order is basically drunk and asleep after a night of feasting (the guard at the door is passed out from drinking too much). Perhaps Keats is suggesting that in the post-Enlightenment world, where Catholic superstition is banished, no more such openings exist -- thus the lover in "Exit Music" is the truth of Porphyro, the logical development of the frustrated lover who suddenly succeeds. Porphyro is only able to succeed when the social order is asleep at the wheel, and his success has a certain elegance and charm that render it poetically valid, but what happens when the social order no longer has any binding force? What if, instead of escaping a shameful loss of station or a sickening betrayal of family pride, the lovers risk nothing but a fit of rage or perhaps a thorough beating, as seems to be the case in "Exit Music"? Where is romance then? Can the rebelliousness of love be anything but adolescent naivete?

Both John Keats and Thom Yorke achieve some distance from their trembling adolescent protagonists, and both acknowledge, albeit in different ways, that there is no stable foundation for love, that even the utterly self-assured love begun as an escape or a rebellion must eventually be established on other, more uncertain terms. The escape of love is always "into the storm," no matter what visions we might have of being "one in everlasting peace" or finding a quiet home "o'er the southern moors."

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