What I found perhaps most interesting in Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes was the marriage of religious tradition and pagan ritual (and, apparently without condemnation of the latter) within the poem. This is perhaps best manifested in the complimentary roles of the beadsman and the witch Angela; the beadsman evinces a ritual of rosaries, prayer and the Virgin Mary, while vocabulary regarding Angela is furnished in elves, Faeries, and Demons. The irony of these two figures cooperating in order to further the love(?) of Porphyro and Madeline is incredible.
This blending of pagan and secular imagery with the religious sphere climaxes in stanza 31, in which Porphyro expresses his physical urges (hardly pious) through religious vernacular: "seraph", "though art my Heaven, and I thine eremite". These factors are employed, I think, in order to promote the ideals of medieval, romantic love.
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