Book of Days

Tonight brings St. Agnes Eve, another old and obscure holiday, and with St. Agnes Eve we begin to set our sights toward the romance that burgeons forth each Valentine’s Day. For the old belief is that on St. Agnes Eve, young girls could expect to see visions of their future loves. I am always fascinated by these old ways of conjuring that incorporate magic spells of sorts, for they hint at the strange bedfellows the Church has kept in its history––especially with old customs that are hard to keep down. And so in this odd dance we honor St. Agnes by casting spells that most certainly have come down to us from the Old Ways––pagan earthbound religions. It is this very sort of thing that would get old Cotton Mather and his Puritan flock all worked up about just about any holiday… Christmas most especially, and, one can easily imagine, St. Agnes Eve. But we are human, after all, and these are our ways, passing customs on generation after generation from time immemorial. I think that’s a wonderful thing, and I don’t think Cotton Mather and I would agree on much of anything.

And so in Italy young girls might go to bed tonight without supper, quite voluntarily. The idea is that this will help them dream of their future husbands. Young girls in Scotland, meanwhile, will go to bed sated, but they may stay up later than usual. There, the custom is to throw grain onto the soil of a field at midnight while reciting the following spell:

Agnes sweet and Agnes fair,
Hither, hither, now repair;
Bonny Agnes, let me see
The lad who is to marry me.

My neighbor’s sister, who lives in Scotland, wrote last year to tell me that there in Scotland, Agnes is a common first name, and so is the name Senga, which happens to be Agnes spelled backwards. Perhaps there is some magic even in that. In other places, young girls will be baking cakes with the hope that their future husbands will come and turn them, or they will be walking to bed backwards with the hope that their future husbands will come to them in their dreams, or they will be eating a hard boiled egg before bed, yolk removed, the cavity filled with salt. The hope there, too, is to see their future husband. (With any luck, he’ll be carrying a pitcher of water, as well.)

The poet John Keats wrote, back in 1820, a long poem titled “The Eve of St. Agnes.” It would make fine reading for tonight. It is full of the romance and ghostly apparitions of that period of literature, and it is a poem that will take you some time to get through. Perfect for a cold wintry night like St. Agnes Eve. Here, if you can’t read the poem in its entirety, is the sixth stanza:

They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night.
If ceremonies due they did aright,
As, supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

Helen Barolini, in her book Festa, which I was lucky enough to stumble upon at a library book sale and which has become one of my favorite books, also writes about the Eve of St. Agnes. Helen’s husband was the writer Antonio Barolini, and for her, the night and its customs are more personal. What she wrote in her book about this night always moves me, and I hope she wouldn’t mind my closing today with her words, describing her fascination with St. Agnes Eve when she was a young girl, intertwined with the bittersweet perspective that comes with age and experience…  all that life brings our way––its joys, its sorrows:

Image: “The Eve of St. Agnes” by John Everett Millais. 1863, London: The Royal Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

Friends last night took Seth and me to the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach for a concert by the Budapest Festival Orchestra. I went knowing nothing about the Budapest Festival Orchestra or what would be on the program. The first two pieces were by Mozart, and they were good, certainly. The second half, though, was Felix Mendelssohn, who is more my speed. It was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it felt just about perfect to hear this now. I am still at the press every chance I get, working on my annual Copperman’s Day print, and usually listening to old obscure Christmas carols while I do so, for Copperman’s Day is the last of the odd “Goodbye to Yuletide” holidays. But even as I do so, the days are getting longer as we progress further and further from Midwinter’s longest night and toward Midsummer’s longest day. Here we are at the 21st of January, and it’s been one full month now of days lengthening since that shortest day. Each passing day adds a few minutes more daylight as the sun continues to trek further north in the sky. Sometimes we are given precisely what we need (even without realizing we needed it), and last night, Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was just that thing.

Copperman’s Day was the Monday after Epiphany but I’ll keep working on that print until it’s done. Tonight, though, it’s another obscure old holiday, St. Agnes Eve, with its own traditions. It is a night of divination of a particular sort: a night when young girls could expect to see visions of their future loves. In Scotland, the tradition is to throw grain onto the soil of a field at midnight while reciting the following words:

Agnes sweet and Agnes fair,
Hither, hither, now repair;
Bonny Agnes, let me see
The lad who is to marry me.

The spells vary far and wide. In Italy, young girls go to bed without supper in order to dream of their future husbands. (One might wonder if this is worth it. I, for one, would be more content going to bed sated while dreaming of other things than a future love.) In other places, one must walk backwards to bed or bake a cake or eat a hard boiled egg before bed, yolk removed, the cavity filled with salt. Your future husband will, they say, bring you water in a dream. But of course you’d be dreaming of water to drink if you ate all that salt in one sitting.

John Keats in 1820 wrote a long poem titled “The Eve of St. Agnes” and in it, he put to paper many of these old traditions.

They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night.

St. Agnes, like St. Valentine that follows soon after her, focuses on romance and matters of the heart, things that help melt the chill of winter. Like a surprise performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, St. Agnes warms the heart and the night.

Image: Saint Agnes, from the Basilica of Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura in Rome.