"St Agnes' Eve---Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass..."
I recall my high school English teacher describing these lines, from John Keats' poem "The Eve of Saint Agnes," as the coldest words in the English language. Keats (1795 - 1821), a renowned poet of the Romantic period, based this poem on the January 20th eve of the feast of Saint Agnes and the superstition that a girl could see her future husband in a dream if she performed certain rites on that night. To check out more of John Keats' works, come to the Milwaukee Public Library.
