This was on his excursion to Hampshire in the latter half of January. Within three weeks of his return he was at work again on a kindred theme of popular and traditional belief, _The Eve of St Mark_. The belief was that a person standing in the church porch of any town or village on the evening before St Mark's day (April 24th) might thereby gain a vision of all the inhabitants fated to die or fall grievously sick within the year. Those destined to die would be seen passing in but not returning, those who were to be in peril and recover would go in and after a while come out. The heroine of the poem, to whom this vision would appear, was to be a maiden of Canterbury named Bertha, no doubt after the first Christian queen of Kent, the Frankish wife of Ethelbert; the scene, Canterbury itself, memories of the poet's stay there in 1817 mingling apparently with impressions of his recent visit to Chichester. Keats never got on with this poem after his first three or four days' work (February 14th-17th 1819), and it remains a mere fragment, tantalizing and singular, of a hundred and twenty lines' length. Why? Perhaps merely because it was begun almost at the very hour when he became the accepted lover of Fanny Brawne. We have seen how various causes, but chiefly the obsession of that passion, paralysed his power of work for the next two months, and what were the thoughts and tasks that held him fully occupied afterwards. It has been suggested by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Keats meant to give the story a turn applicable to himself and his mistress, and that the present fragment would have served as the opening of a poem which afterwards, in sickness, he mentioned to her as being in his mind:--'I would show some one in love, as I am, with a person living in such Liberty as you do.' I can find no sure evidence, internal or external, either to refute the suggestion or confirm it. The fragment of _The Eve of St Mark_ is Keats's only attempt at narrative writing in the eight-syllabled four-stress couplet. Its pace and movement are nearer to Chaucer in _The Romaunt of the Rose_ or _The House of Fame_ than to Coleridge or Scott or any other model of Keats's own time. That he was writing with Chaucer in his mind is proved by some lines in which he tries in Rowley fashion to reproduce Chaucer's actual style and vocabulary, thus:-- Gif ye wol stonden hardie wight-- Amiddes of the blacke night-- Righte in the churche porch, pardie Ye wol behold a companie Approchen thee full dolourouse For sooth to sain from everich house Be it in city or village Wol come the Phantom and image Of ilka gent and ilka carle Who colde Deathe hath in parle And wol some day that very year Touchen with foule venime spear And sadly do them all to die-- Hem all shalt thou see verilie-- And everichon shall by thee pass All who must die that year, Alas.