On the eve of St Agnes a girl could learn by divination who her husband would be. She might pull pins one by one from a row and stick them in her sleeve while saying a paternoster, or knit her left garter round her right stocking with a rhyme asking to see the man she would marry in his everyday clothes. Then she lay on her back with her hands under her head and waited for him to come in a dream and kiss her. Keats built The Eve of St Agnes on the belief.
St Agnes’ Eve
20 January
Lore and belief
It was thought possible for a girl, on the eve of St Agnes, to obtain, by divination, a knowledge of her future husband.
From Chambers's Book of Days, vol. 1, p. 140. Read the original
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