"The Eve of St. Agnes"

It is a work of almost pure fantasy, redolent of an imagination so luxurious that it seems to transcend the straitened circumstances and conservatism of the early Irish Free State. It is, both literally and in terms of its joyous defiance of oppressive realities, gloriously escapist. The windows smaller, more domestic scale brought out Clarke’s astonishing ability to draw the most finicky and precise detail out of a very difficult medium. His process involved precise etching on to layers of glass, which were then fitted into a cumbersome lead armature.  Keats’s poem is vibrant in its invocation of colors, especially reds, purples and blues, and indeed of moonlight filtered through a stained-glass window, and Clarke was clearly drawn to its visual energy. Keats’s tale of elopement is made all the more powerful through the contrasts between the jewel-like comforts of the palace where the heroine sleeps and the frozen wastes outside, to which she and her lover must flee. Clarke’s glittering blues and jagged, pointed forms confirm that their elopement will have a cold and tragic end.