PART I
1Upon a time, before the faery broods
2Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods,
3Before King Oberon's bright diadem,
4Sceptre, and mantle, clasp'd with dewy gem,
5Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns
6From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip'd lawns,
7The ever-smitten Hermes empty left
8His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft:
9From high Olympus had he stolen light,
10On this side of Jove's clouds, to escape the sight
11Of his great summoner, and made retreat
12Into a forest on the shores of Crete.
13For somewhere in that sacred island dwelt
14A nymph, to whom all hoofed Satyrs knelt;
15At whose white feet the languid Tritons poured
16Pearls, while on land they wither'd and adored.
17Fast by the springs where she to bathe was wont,
18And in those meads where sometime she might haunt,
19Were strewn rich gifts, unknown to any Muse,
20Though Fancy's casket were unlock'd to choose.
21Ah, what a world of love was at her feet!
22So Hermes thought, and a celestial heat
23Burnt from his winged heels to either ear,
24That from a whiteness, as the lily clear,
25Blush'd into roses 'mid his golden hair,
26Fallen in jealous curls about his shoulders bare.
27From vale to vale, from wood to wood, he flew,
28Breathing upon the flowers his passion new,
29And wound with many a river to its head,
30To find where this sweet nymph prepar'd her secret bed:
31In vain; the sweet nymph might nowhere be found,
32And so he rested, on the lonely ground,
33Pensive, and full of painful jealousies
34Of the Wood-Gods, and even the very trees.
35There as he stood, he heard a mournful voice,
36Such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys
37All pain but pity: thus the lone voice spake:
38"When from this wreathed tomb shall I awake!
39When move in a sweet body fit for life,
40And love, and pleasure, and the ruddy strife
41Of hearts and lips! Ah, miserable me!"
42The God, dove-footed, glided silently
43Round bush and tree, soft-brushing, in his speed,
44The taller grasses and full-flowering weed,
45Until he found a palpitating snake,
46Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.
47She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
48Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
49Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
50Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd;
51And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
52Dissolv'd, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
53Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries—
54So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,
55She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,
56Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
57Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
58Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne's tiar:
59Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
60She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete:
61And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
62But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?
63As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air.
64Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake
65Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love's sake,
66And thus; while Hermes on his pinions lay,
67Like a stoop'd falcon ere he takes his prey.
68"Fair Hermes, crown'd with feathers, fluttering light,
69I had a splendid dream of thee last night:
70I saw thee sitting, on a throne of gold,
71Among the Gods, upon Olympus old,
72The only sad one; for thou didst not hear
73The soft, lute-finger'd Muses chaunting clear,
74Nor even Apollo when he sang alone,
75Deaf to his throbbing throat's long, long melodious moan.
76I dreamt I saw thee, robed in purple flakes,
77Break amorous through the clouds, as morning breaks,
78And, swiftly as a bright Phoebean dart,
79Strike for the Cretan isle; and here thou art!
80Too gentle Hermes, hast thou found the maid?"
81Whereat the star of Lethe not delay'd
82His rosy eloquence, and thus inquired:
83"Thou smooth-lipp'd serpent, surely high inspired!
84Thou beauteous wreath, with melancholy eyes,
85Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise,
86Telling me only where my nymph is fled,—
87Where she doth breathe!" "Bright planet, thou hast said,"
88Return'd the snake, "but seal with oaths, fair God!"
89"I swear," said Hermes, "by my serpent rod,
90And by thine eyes, and by thy starry crown!"
91Light flew his earnest words, among the blossoms blown.
92Then thus again the brilliance feminine:
93"Too frail of heart! for this lost nymph of thine,
94Free as the air, invisibly, she strays
95About these thornless wilds; her pleasant days
96She tastes unseen; unseen her nimble feet
97Leave traces in the grass and flowers sweet;
98From weary tendrils, and bow'd branches green,
99She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen:
100And by my power is her beauty veil'd
101To keep it unaffronted, unassail'd
102By the love-glances of unlovely eyes,
103Of Satyrs, Fauns, and blear'd Silenus' sighs.
104Pale grew her immortality, for woe
105Of all these lovers, and she grieved so
106I took compassion on her, bade her steep
107Her hair in weïrd syrops, that would keep
108Her loveliness invisible, yet free
109To wander as she loves, in liberty.
110Thou shalt behold her, Hermes, thou alone,
111If thou wilt, as thou swearest, grant my boon!"
112Then, once again, the charmed God began
113An oath, and through the serpent's ears it ran
114Warm, tremulous, devout, psalterian.
115Ravish'd, she lifted her Circean head,
116Blush'd a live damask, and swift-lisping said,
117"I was a woman, let me have once more
118A woman's shape, and charming as before.
119I love a youth of Corinth—O the bliss!
120Give me my woman's form, and place me where he is.
121Stoop, Hermes, let me breathe upon thy brow,
122And thou shalt see thy sweet nymph even now."
123The God on half-shut feathers sank serene,
124She breath'd upon his eyes, and swift was seen
125Of both the guarded nymph near-smiling on the green.
126It was no dream; or say a dream it was,
127Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass
128Their pleasures in a long immortal dream.
129One warm, flush'd moment, hovering, it might seem
130Dash'd by the wood-nymph's beauty, so he burn'd;
131Then, lighting on the printless verdure, turn'd
132To the swoon'd serpent, and with languid arm,
133Delicate, put to proof the lythe Caducean charm.
134So done, upon the nymph his eyes he bent,
135Full of adoring tears and blandishment,
136And towards her stept: she, like a moon in wane,
137Faded before him, cower'd, nor could restrain
138Her fearful sobs, self-folding like a flower
139That faints into itself at evening hour:
140But the God fostering her chilled hand,
141She felt the warmth, her eyelids open'd bland,
142And, like new flowers at morning song of bees,
143Bloom'd, and gave up her honey to the lees.
144Into the green-recessed woods they flew;
145Nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do.
146Left to herself, the serpent now began
147To change; her elfin blood in madness ran,
148Her mouth foam'd, and the grass, therewith besprent,
149Wither'd at dew so sweet and virulent;
150Her eyes in torture fix'd, and anguish drear,
151Hot, glaz'd, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
152Flash'd phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear.
153The colours all inflam'd throughout her train,
154She writh'd about, convuls'd with scarlet pain:
155A deep volcanian yellow took the place
156Of all her milder-mooned body's grace;
157And, as the lava ravishes the mead,
158Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede;
159Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars,
160Eclips'd her crescents, and lick'd up her stars:
161So that, in moments few, she was undrest
162Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst,
163And rubious-argent: of all these bereft,
164Nothing but pain and ugliness were left.
165Still shone her crown; that vanish'd, also she
166Melted and disappear'd as suddenly;
167And in the air, her new voice luting soft,
168Cried, "Lycius! gentle Lycius!"—Borne aloft
169With the bright mists about the mountains hoar
170These words dissolv'd: Crete's forests heard no more.
171Whither fled Lamia, now a lady bright,
172A full-born beauty new and exquisite?
173She fled into that valley they pass o'er
174Who go to Corinth from Cenchreas' shore;
175And rested at the foot of those wild hills,
176The rugged founts of the Peraean rills,
177And of that other ridge whose barren back
178Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack,
179South-westward to Cleone. There she stood
180About a young bird's flutter from a wood,
181Fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread,
182By a clear pool, wherein she passioned
183To see herself escap'd from so sore ills,
184While her robes flaunted with the daffodils.
185Ah, happy Lycius!—for she was a maid
186More beautiful than ever twisted braid,
187Or sigh'd, or blush'd, or on spring-flowered lea
188Spread a green kirtle to the minstrelsy:
189A virgin purest lipp'd, yet in the lore
190Of love deep learned to the red heart's core:
191Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain
192To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain;
193Define their pettish limits, and estrange
194Their points of contact, and swift counterchange;
195Intrigue with the specious chaos, and dispart
196Its most ambiguous atoms with sure art;
197As though in Cupid's college she had spent
198Sweet days a lovely graduate, still unshent,
199And kept his rosy terms in idle languishment.
200Why this fair creature chose so fairily
201By the wayside to linger, we shall see;
202But first 'tis fit to tell how she could muse
203And dream, when in the serpent prison-house,
204Of all she list, strange or magnificent:
205How, ever, where she will'd, her spirit went;
206Whether to faint Elysium, or where
207Down through tress-lifting waves the Nereids fair
208Wind into Thetis' bower by many a pearly stair;
209Or where God Bacchus drains his cups divine,
210Stretch'd out, at ease, beneath a glutinous pine;
211Or where in Pluto's gardens palatine
212Mulciber's columns gleam in far piazzian line.
213And sometimes into cities she would send
214Her dream, with feast and rioting to blend;
215And once, while among mortals dreaming thus,
216She saw the young Corinthian Lycius
217Charioting foremost in the envious race,
218Like a young Jove with calm uneager face,
219And fell into a swooning love of him.
220Now on the moth-time of that evening dim
221He would return that way, as well she knew,
222To Corinth from the shore; for freshly blew
223The eastern soft wind, and his galley now
224Grated the quaystones with her brazen prow
225In port Cenchreas, from Egina isle
226Fresh anchor'd; whither he had been awhile
227To sacrifice to Jove, whose temple there
228Waits with high marble doors for blood and incense rare.
229Jove heard his vows, and better'd his desire;
230For by some freakful chance he made retire
231From his companions, and set forth to walk,
232Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk:
233Over the solitary hills he fared,
234Thoughtless at first, but ere eve's star appeared
235His phantasy was lost, where reason fades,
236In the calm'd twilight of Platonic shades.
237Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near—
238Close to her passing, in indifference drear,
239His silent sandals swept the mossy green;
240So neighbour'd to him, and yet so unseen
241She stood: he pass'd, shut up in mysteries,
242His mind wrapp'd like his mantle, while her eyes
243Follow'd his steps, and her neck regal white
244Turn'd—syllabling thus, "Ah, Lycius bright,
245And will you leave me on the hills alone?
246Lycius, look back! and be some pity shown."
247He did; not with cold wonder fearingly,
248But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice;
249For so delicious were the words she sung,
250It seem'd he had lov'd them a whole summer long:
251And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up,
252Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup,
253And still the cup was full,—while he, afraid
254Lest she should vanish ere his lip had paid
255Due adoration, thus began to adore;
256Her soft look growing coy, she saw his chain so sure:
257"Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, Goddess, see
258Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee!
259For pity do not this sad heart belie—
260Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.
261Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay!
262To thy far wishes will thy streams obey:
263Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain,
264Alone they can drink up the morning rain:
265Though a descended Pleiad, will not one
266Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune
267Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?
268So sweetly to these ravish'd ears of mine
269Came thy sweet greeting, that if thou shouldst fade
270Thy memory will waste me to a shade—
271For pity do not melt!"—"If I should stay,"
272Said Lamia, "here, upon this floor of clay,
273And pain my steps upon these flowers too rough,
274What canst thou say or do of charm enough
275To dull the nice remembrance of my home?
276Thou canst not ask me with thee here to roam
277Over these hills and vales, where no joy is,—
278Empty of immortality and bliss!
279Thou art a scholar, Lycius, and must know
280That finer spirits cannot breathe below
281In human climes, and live: Alas! poor youth,
282What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe
283My essence? What serener palaces,
284Where I may all my many senses please,
285And by mysterious sleights a hundred thirsts appease?
286It cannot be—Adieu!" So said, she rose
287Tiptoe with white arms spread. He, sick to lose
288The amorous promise of her lone complain,
289Swoon'd, murmuring of love, and pale with pain.
290The cruel lady, without any show
291Of sorrow for her tender favourite's woe,
292But rather, if her eyes could brighter be,
293With brighter eyes and slow amenity,
294Put her new lips to his, and gave afresh
295The life she had so tangled in her mesh:
296And as he from one trance was wakening
297Into another, she began to sing,
298Happy in beauty, life, and love, and every thing,
299A song of love, too sweet for earthly lyres,
300While, like held breath, the stars drew in their panting fires
301And then she whisper'd in such trembling tone,
302As those who, safe together met alone
303For the first time through many anguish'd days,
304Use other speech than looks; bidding him raise
305His drooping head, and clear his soul of doubt,
306For that she was a woman, and without
307Any more subtle fluid in her veins
308Than throbbing blood, and that the self-same pains
309Inhabited her frail-strung heart as his.
310And next she wonder'd how his eyes could miss
311Her face so long in Corinth, where, she said,
312She dwelt but half retir'd, and there had led
313Days happy as the gold coin could invent
314Without the aid of love; yet in content
315Till she saw him, as once she pass'd him by,
316Where 'gainst a column he leant thoughtfully
317At Venus' temple porch, 'mid baskets heap'd
318Of amorous herbs and flowers, newly reap'd
319Late on that eve, as 'twas the night before
320The Adonian feast; whereof she saw no more,
321But wept alone those days, for why should she adore?
322Lycius from death awoke into amaze,
323To see her still, and singing so sweet lays;
324Then from amaze into delight he fell
325To hear her whisper woman's lore so well;
326And every word she spake entic'd him on
327To unperplex'd delight and pleasure known.
328Let the mad poets say whate'er they please
329Of the sweets of Fairies, Peris, Goddesses,
330There is not such a treat among them all,
331Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall,
332As a real woman, lineal indeed
333From Pyrrha's pebbles or old Adam's seed.
334Thus gentle Lamia judg'd, and judg'd aright,
335That Lycius could not love in half a fright,
336So threw the goddess off, and won his heart
337More pleasantly by playing woman's part,
338With no more awe than what her beauty gave,
339That, while it smote, still guaranteed to save.
340Lycius to all made eloquent reply,
341Marrying to every word a twinborn sigh;
342And last, pointing to Corinth, ask'd her sweet,
343If 'twas too far that night for her soft feet.
344The way was short, for Lamia's eagerness
345Made, by a spell, the triple league decrease
346To a few paces; not at all surmised
347By blinded Lycius, so in her comprized.
348They pass'd the city gates, he knew not how
349So noiseless, and he never thought to know.
350As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all,
351Throughout her palaces imperial,
352And all her populous streets and temples lewd,
353Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd,
354To the wide-spreaded night above her towers.
355Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours,
356Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white,
357Companion'd or alone; while many a light
358Flared, here and there, from wealthy festivals,
359And threw their moving shadows on the walls,
360Or found them cluster'd in the corniced shade
361Of some arch'd temple door, or dusky colonnade.
362Muffling his face, of greeting friends in fear,
363Her fingers he press'd hard, as one came near
364With curl'd gray beard, sharp eyes, and smooth bald crown,
365Slow-stepp'd, and robed in philosophic gown:
366Lycius shrank closer, as they met and past,
367Into his mantle, adding wings to haste,
368While hurried Lamia trembled: "Ah," said he,
369"Why do you shudder, love, so ruefully?
370Why does your tender palm dissolve in dew?"—
371"I'm wearied," said fair Lamia: "tell me who
372Is that old man? I cannot bring to mind
373His features—Lycius! wherefore did you blind
374Yourself from his quick eyes?" Lycius replied,
375"'Tis Apollonius sage, my trusty guide
376And good instructor; but to-night he seems
377The ghost of folly haunting my sweet dreams."
378While yet he spake they had arrived before
379A pillar'd porch, with lofty portal door,
380Where hung a silver lamp, whose phosphor glow
381Reflected in the slabbed steps below,
382Mild as a star in water; for so new,
383And so unsullied was the marble hue,
384So through the crystal polish, liquid fine,
385Ran the dark veins, that none but feet divine
386Could e'er have touch'd there. Sounds Aeolian
387Breath'd from the hinges, as the ample span
388Of the wide doors disclos'd a place unknown
389Some time to any, but those two alone,
390And a few Persian mutes, who that same year
391Were seen about the markets: none knew where
392They could inhabit; the most curious
393Were foil'd, who watch'd to trace them to their house:
394And but the flitter-winged verse must tell,
395For truth's sake, what woe afterwards befel,
396'Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus,
397Shut from the busy world of more incredulous.
PART II
398Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
399Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust;
400Love in a palace is perhaps at last
401More grievous torment than a hermit's fast—
402That is a doubtful tale from faery land,
403Hard for the non-elect to understand.
404Had Lycius liv'd to hand his story down,
405He might have given the moral a fresh frown,
406Or clench'd it quite: but too short was their bliss
407To breed distrust and hate, that make the soft voice hiss.
408Besides, there, nightly, with terrific glare,
409Love, jealous grown of so complete a pair,
410Hover'd and buzz'd his wings, with fearful roar,
411Above the lintel of their chamber door,
412And down the passage cast a glow upon the floor.
413For all this came a ruin: side by side
414They were enthroned, in the even tide,
415Upon a couch, near to a curtaining
416Whose airy texture, from a golden string,
417Floated into the room, and let appear
418Unveil'd the summer heaven, blue and clear,
419Betwixt two marble shafts:—there they reposed,
420Where use had made it sweet, with eyelids closed,
421Saving a tythe which love still open kept,
422That they might see each other while they almost slept;
423When from the slope side of a suburb hill,
424Deafening the swallow's twitter, came a thrill
425Of trumpets—Lycius started—the sounds fled,
426But left a thought, a buzzing in his head.
427For the first time, since first he harbour'd in
428That purple-lined palace of sweet sin,
429His spirit pass'd beyond its golden bourn
430Into the noisy world almost forsworn.
431The lady, ever watchful, penetrant,
432Saw this with pain, so arguing a want
433Of something more, more than her empery
434Of joys; and she began to moan and sigh
435Because he mused beyond her, knowing well
436That but a moment's thought is passion's passing bell.
437"Why do you sigh, fair creature?" whisper'd he:
438"Why do you think?" return'd she tenderly:
439"You have deserted me—where am I now?
440Not in your heart while care weighs on your brow:
441No, no, you have dismiss'd me; and I go
442From your breast houseless: ay, it must be so."
443He answer'd, bending to her open eyes,
444Where he was mirror'd small in paradise,
445"My silver planet, both of eve and morn!
446Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn,
447While I am striving how to fill my heart
448With deeper crimson, and a double smart?
449How to entangle, trammel up and snare
450Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there
451Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?
452Ay, a sweet kiss—you see your mighty woes.
453My thoughts! shall I unveil them? Listen then!
454What mortal hath a prize, that other men
455May be confounded and abash'd withal,
456But lets it sometimes pace abroad majestical,
457And triumph, as in thee I should rejoice
458Amid the hoarse alarm of Corinth's voice.
459Let my foes choke, and my friends shout afar,
460While through the thronged streets your bridal car
461Wheels round its dazzling spokes." The lady's cheek
462Trembled; she nothing said, but, pale and meek,
463Arose and knelt before him, wept a rain
464Of sorrows at his words; at last with pain
465Beseeching him, the while his hand she wrung,
466To change his purpose. He thereat was stung,
467Perverse, with stronger fancy to reclaim
468Her wild and timid nature to his aim:
469Besides, for all his love, in self despite,
470Against his better self, he took delight
471Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new.
472His passion, cruel grown, took on a hue
473Fierce and sanguineous as 'twas possible
474In one whose brow had no dark veins to swell.
475Fine was the mitigated fury, like
476Apollo's presence when in act to strike
477The serpent—Ha, the serpent! certes, she
478Was none. She burnt, she lov'd the tyranny,
479And, all subdued, consented to the hour
480When to the bridal he should lead his paramour.
481Whispering in midnight silence, said the youth,
482"Sure some sweet name thou hast, though, by my truth,
483I have not ask'd it, ever thinking thee
484Not mortal, but of heavenly progeny,
485As still I do. Hast any mortal name,
486Fit appellation for this dazzling frame?
487Or friends or kinsfolk on the citied earth,
488To share our marriage feast and nuptial mirth?"
489"I have no friends," said Lamia, "no, not one;
490My presence in wide Corinth hardly known:
491My parents' bones are in their dusty urns
492Sepulchred, where no kindled incense burns,
493Seeing all their luckless race are dead, save me,
494And I neglect the holy rite for thee.
495Even as you list invite your many guests;
496But if, as now it seems, your vision rests
497With any pleasure on me, do not bid
498Old Apollonius—from him keep me hid."
499Lycius, perplex'd at words so blind and blank,
500Made close inquiry; from whose touch she shrank,
501Feigning a sleep; and he to the dull shade
502Of deep sleep in a moment was betray'd.
503It was the custom then to bring away
504The bride from home at blushing shut of day,
505Veil'd, in a chariot, heralded along
506By strewn flowers, torches, and a marriage song,
507With other pageants: but this fair unknown
508Had not a friend. So being left alone,
509(Lycius was gone to summon all his kin)
510And knowing surely she could never win
511His foolish heart from its mad pompousness,
512She set herself, high-thoughted, how to dress
513The misery in fit magnificence.
514She did so, but 'tis doubtful how and whence
515Came, and who were her subtle servitors.
516About the halls, and to and from the doors,
517There was a noise of wings, till in short space
518The glowing banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace.
519A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone
520Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan
521Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.
522Fresh carved cedar, mimicking a glade
523Of palm and plantain, met from either side,
524High in the midst, in honour of the bride:
525Two palms and then two plantains, and so on,
526From either side their stems branch'd one to one
527All down the aisled place; and beneath all
528There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall.
529So canopied, lay an untasted feast
530Teeming with odours. Lamia, regal drest,
531Silently paced about, and as she went,
532In pale contented sort of discontent,
533Mission'd her viewless servants to enrich
534The fretted splendour of each nook and niche.
535Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first,
536Came jasper pannels; then, anon, there burst
537Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees,
538And with the larger wove in small intricacies.
539Approving all, she faded at self-will,
540And shut the chamber up, close, hush'd and still,
541Complete and ready for the revels rude,
542When dreadful guests would come to spoil her solitude.
543The day appear'd, and all the gossip rout.
544O senseless Lycius! Madman! wherefore flout
545The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister'd hours,
546And show to common eyes these secret bowers?
547The herd approach'd; each guest, with busy brain,
548Arriving at the portal, gaz'd amain,
549And enter'd marveling: for they knew the street,
550Remember'd it from childhood all complete
551Without a gap, yet ne'er before had seen
552That royal porch, that high-built fair demesne;
553So in they hurried all, maz'd, curious and keen:
554Save one, who look'd thereon with eye severe,
555And with calm-planted steps walk'd in austere;
556'Twas Apollonius: something too he laugh'd,
557As though some knotty problem, that had daft
558His patient thought, had now begun to thaw,
559And solve and melt—'twas just as he foresaw.
560He met within the murmurous vestibule
561His young disciple. "'Tis no common rule,
562Lycius," said he, "for uninvited guest
563To force himself upon you, and infest
564With an unbidden presence the bright throng
565Of younger friends; yet must I do this wrong,
566And you forgive me." Lycius blush'd, and led
567The old man through the inner doors broad-spread;
568With reconciling words and courteous mien
569Turning into sweet milk the sophist's spleen.
570Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room,
571Fill'd with pervading brilliance and perfume:
572Before each lucid pannel fuming stood
573A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood,
574Each by a sacred tripod held aloft,
575Whose slender feet wide-swerv'd upon the soft
576Wool-woofed carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke
577From fifty censers their light voyage took
578To the high roof, still mimick'd as they rose
579Along the mirror'd walls by twin-clouds odorous.
580Twelve sphered tables, by silk seats insphered,
581High as the level of a man's breast rear'd
582On libbard's paws, upheld the heavy gold
583Of cups and goblets, and the store thrice told
584Of Ceres' horn, and, in huge vessels, wine
585Come from the gloomy tun with merry shine.
586Thus loaded with a feast the tables stood,
587Each shrining in the midst the image of a God.
588When in an antichamber every guest
589Had felt the cold full sponge to pleasure press'd,
590By minist'ring slaves, upon his hands and feet,
591And fragrant oils with ceremony meet
592Pour'd on his hair, they all mov'd to the feast
593In white robes, and themselves in order placed
594Around the silken couches, wondering
595Whence all this mighty cost and blaze of wealth could spring.
596Soft went the music the soft air along,
597While fluent Greek a vowel'd undersong
598Kept up among the guests discoursing low
599At first, for scarcely was the wine at flow;
600But when the happy vintage touch'd their brains,
601Louder they talk, and louder come the strains
602Of powerful instruments—the gorgeous dyes,
603The space, the splendour of the draperies,
604The roof of awful richness, nectarous cheer,
605Beautiful slaves, and Lamia's self, appear,
606Now, when the wine has done its rosy deed,
607And every soul from human trammels freed,
608No more so strange; for merry wine, sweet wine,
609Will make Elysian shades not too fair, too divine.
610Soon was God Bacchus at meridian height;
611Flush'd were their cheeks, and bright eyes double bright:
612Garlands of every green, and every scent
613From vales deflower'd, or forest-trees branch rent,
614In baskets of bright osier'd gold were brought
615High as the handles heap'd, to suit the thought
616Of every guest; that each, as he did please,
617Might fancy-fit his brows, silk-pillow'd at his ease.
618What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
619What for the sage, old Apollonius?
620Upon her aching forehead be there hung
621The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue;
622And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
623The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
624Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
625Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
626War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
627At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
628There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
629We know her woof, her texture; she is given
630In the dull catalogue of common things.
631Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
632Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
633Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
634Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
635The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
636By her glad Lycius sitting, in chief place,
637Scarce saw in all the room another face,
638Till, checking his love trance, a cup he took
639Full brimm'd, and opposite sent forth a look
640'Cross the broad table, to beseech a glance
641From his old teacher's wrinkled countenance,
642And pledge him. The bald-head philosopher
643Had fix'd his eye, without a twinkle or stir
644Full on the alarmed beauty of the bride,
645Brow-beating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride.
646Lycius then press'd her hand, with devout touch,
647As pale it lay upon the rosy couch:
648'Twas icy, and the cold ran through his veins;
649Then sudden it grew hot, and all the pains
650Of an unnatural heat shot to his heart.
651"Lamia, what means this? Wherefore dost thou start?
652Know'st thou that man?" Poor Lamia answer'd not.
653He gaz'd into her eyes, and not a jot
654Own'd they the lovelorn piteous appeal:
655More, more he gaz'd: his human senses reel:
656Some hungry spell that loveliness absorbs;
657There was no recognition in those orbs.
658"Lamia!" he cried—and no soft-toned reply.
659The many heard, and the loud revelry
660Grew hush; the stately music no more breathes;
661The myrtle sicken'd in a thousand wreaths.
662By faint degrees, voice, lute, and pleasure ceased;
663A deadly silence step by step increased,
664Until it seem'd a horrid presence there,
665And not a man but felt the terror in his hair.
666"Lamia!" he shriek'd; and nothing but the shriek
667With its sad echo did the silence break.
668"Begone, foul dream!" he cried, gazing again
669In the bride's face, where now no azure vein
670Wander'd on fair-spaced temples; no soft bloom
671Misted the cheek; no passion to illume
672The deep-recessed vision—all was blight;
673Lamia, no longer fair, there sat a deadly white.
674"Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man!
675Turn them aside, wretch! or the righteous ban
676Of all the Gods, whose dreadful images
677Here represent their shadowy presences,
678May pierce them on the sudden with the thorn
679Of painful blindness; leaving thee forlorn,
680In trembling dotage to the feeblest fright
681Of conscience, for their long offended might,
682For all thine impious proud-heart sophistries,
683Unlawful magic, and enticing lies.
684Corinthians! look upon that gray-beard wretch!
685Mark how, possess'd, his lashless eyelids stretch
686Around his demon eyes! Corinthians, see!
687My sweet bride withers at their potency."
688"Fool!" said the sophist, in an under-tone
689Gruff with contempt; which a death-nighing moan
690From Lycius answer'd, as heart-struck and lost,
691He sank supine beside the aching ghost.
692"Fool! Fool!" repeated he, while his eyes still
693Relented not, nor mov'd; "from every ill
694Of life have I preserv'd thee to this day,
695And shall I see thee made a serpent's prey?"
696Then Lamia breath'd death breath; the sophist's eye,
697Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly,
698Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well
699As her weak hand could any meaning tell,
700Motion'd him to be silent; vainly so,
701He look'd and look'd again a level—No!
702"A Serpent!" echoed he; no sooner said,
703Than with a frightful scream she vanished:
704And Lycius' arms were empty of delight,
705As were his limbs of life, from that same night.
706On the high couch he lay!—his friends came round
707Supported him—no pulse, or breath they found,
708And, in its marriage robe, the heavy body wound.
"Lamia" is the English Romantic poet John Keats's lush, eerie tale of enchantment defeated by merciless rationality. Set in the world of ancient Greco-Roman myth, the poem tells the story of the serpent-spirit Lamia, who talks the god Hermes into transforming her into a beautiful woman so she can pursue her beloved, a handsome young man named Lycius. The couple is blissfully happy for a time—but their joy can't last. Icy reason, in the form of the philosopher Apollonius, at last punctures their shared dream. Often remembered as a Romantic screed against "cold philosophy," this poem is in fact a nuanced and ambivalent portrait of the beauties and dangers of the imagination—especially the imaginative visions of lovers. Keats published this poem in his 1820 collection Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.
PART I
The poem begins in the classical world: not real-life ancient Greece, but mythic Greece, when gods and forest spirits still ruled the woods, before they were driven away by the "faery broods" of English folklore. In this long-ago, far-away place, the speaker says, the god Hermes—the mischievous Greek messenger god, also known as Mercury—hears of a nymph so beautiful that the whole world seems to be in love with her. At once developing a passion for her himself, he goes looking for her in Crete, where she's rumored to live.
Search though he might, however, Hermes can't find his lady. Wandering dejectedly through the woods, he happens to hear the sound of a woman crying, mourning that she's trapped in a body unfit for love. But no, it isn't a woman: it's a strange serpent, a creature patterned in shimmering, changing rainbow colors, spotted and freckled and gleaming. But no, it isn't just a serpent, either: it has a woman's eyes and a woman's mouth. This is the spirit known as Lamia.
Lamia hails Hermes and tells him that she had a beautiful dream of him the night before: a dream that revealed that lovesickness has deprived him of all pleasure in his life among the gods—and that he'd turn up here today. Impressed by her prophetic dream, Hermes asks her to reveal where the nymph might be hiding. Lamia tells him that she gave the nymph the power of invisibility so that she could evade all the unworthy lovers who'd been tormenting her. But she's willing to reveal the nymph to Hermes if Hermes will do her a favor and turn her back into a woman—as she claims she once was. For Lamia herself has fallen in love with a beautiful young Corinthian man, and she needs a mortal body to court him.
Hermes agrees to this exchange. Lamia unveils the nymph to him, and after a moment of fear and surprise, it turns out the nymph is happy to see him. God and nymph withdraw into the woods to get acquainted.
Lamia, meanwhile, undergoes a painful transformation: writhing and foaming at the mouth, she turns from serpent-spirit into a beautiful mortal woman. In her new body, she makes her way to Corinth, where her beloved Lycius lives.
She does, however, take a moment along the way to look at her reflection in a pond and appreciate just how beautiful she has become. The speaker concurs that she's stunning—and observes that not only is she gorgeous, but she also has a strange, innate knowledge of the ways of love.
When Lamia was still a serpent, the speaker explains, she had the magical power to travel in her dreams to anywhere she liked, from Mount Olympus itself (where she saw Hermes) to Corinth (where she fell in love with the gorgeous Lycius as she watched him win a chariot race). That's how she knows where she'll find him: out for a solitary walk in the hills after making a sacrifice to Jove (a.k.a. Zeus or Jupiter), the king of the gods. She goes to seek him there.
At first, Lycius walks right past Lamia, lost in thought. But when she calls out to him, he turns around and falls immediately and deeply in love with her. He begs her to stay with him forever, hailing her as a goddess or a spirit. But—teasing him—she says that, if she were a spirit, she couldn't live in the mortal world forever, and makes as if to go. When Lycius falls at her feet, she (delighted with her power over him) gives him a kiss, then begins singing a song of joy—and tells him not to worry, she's a mortal woman, and she's surprised he's never run into her before. She's lived a solitary, wealthy life in Corinth, she claims, and was perfectly happy until she spotted Lycius hanging around outside the temple of Venus (the love goddess) and fell in love with him. Lycius is delighted.
The speaker interjects, declaring: say what you want about the beauty of nymphs and goddesses, a real live human woman is better than any such spirit. That's why, the speaker explains, Lamia presented herself as a regular mortal instead of a goddess: both because plain old female beauty is lovely enough on its own, and because Lycius would be too awestruck by a spirit to fully love her.
The overjoyed Lycius and Lamia make their way back to Corinth—a long hike that Lamia uses her powers to magically shorten, a feat the lovestruck Lycius doesn't even notice. It's evening, and the city is bustling and lively. As they make their way through the crowded streets, the couple passes an old man whom Lycius seems to want to hide from. Lamia, nervous, questions him, and Lycius explains that this is his tutor, the philosopher Apollonius. Tonight, for some reason, Lycius feels as if Apollonius is the very last person he wants to see, and shivers at the sight of him.
The couple arrives at the door of a glorious palace—one created by Lamia's magic. No one can see it but they. As they go inside, the speaker warns that tender-hearted readers might prefer that the story ended there. But this poem must tell the whole truth, even though the ending of this love story will be a sad one.
PART II
The speaker begins Part 2 with the reflection that love isn't as durable or transcendent as it's made out to be. For people in poverty, love is "cinders, ashes, dust"—the ghost of what it could be. However, love in a palace isn't a picnic either: it can mean "grievous torment," terrible suffering. This, the speaker declares, is the wisdom of a fairy-tale, hard to comprehend if you haven't been chosen to enter the enchanted world. Lycius might have been able to tell you a thing or two about this wisdom, the speaker says—if he'd lived.
The poem now moves to inside Lamia and Lycius's magical palace, where the two have been enjoying a love so passionate and complete that Cupid himself buzzes outside the door like a horsefly, perhaps guarding them, perhaps envying them. The couple are drowsing in bed on a summer evening. But Lycius starts to get restless: his mind is clearly somewhere else. Lamia, noticing his distraction, begins to lament that he doesn't love her anymore. (And indeed, the speaker remarks, a mere moment's thought can genuinely destroy a passion.) Lycius protests that he loves her more than ever—and in fact that he's been thinking about how he can bind the two of them even more closely together.
He wants, he says, to get married—and to throw a huge wedding feast to show off his new bride. Lamia trembles at the very idea and begs him to reconsider. But this only makes Lycius more stubborn: in fact, he even rather enjoys her obvious unease and doubles down. Lamia, also sort of enjoying his bossiness, agrees to marry him.
It occurs to Lycius to ask what his bride-to-be's name is, since he hasn't found it out before now: still believing her to be not a mortal woman but a spirit, he says, he hasn't wondered whether she has an earthly name. Lamia evades the question, merely replying that all her friends and family are dead. She agrees that Lycius can have his giant wedding party, but begs him for one favor: don't invite Apollonius. Lycius asks her why not, but she evades that question too, pretending to fall asleep; after a moment Lycius falls asleep for real.
On the day of the wedding, Lycius goes off to summon his guests while Lamia—still frightened and worried—consoles herself by making the enchanted palace beautiful. Summoning the unseen help of spirits, she conjures up a banquet hall adorned with rare and expensive woods and perfumes and lamps, and she lays out a magnificent feast. As she closes the door to this new and glorious room behind her, she isn't looking forward to the disruptive arrival of her guests.
Lycius, meanwhile, brings home a gaggle of buddies—a choice the speaker shakes their head over, wondering why Lycius would expose his secret and absolute happiness to the light of ordinary day. Everyone enters the palace marveling: they've all known the street it's on since childhood, but they don't remember seeing this astonishing building before! But the philosopher Apollonius is in the party (in spite of Lamia's one request), and judging by his grimly amused expression, he has a pretty good idea of what was going on. He greets Lycius (who, true to his promise, didn't invite him) and says that Lycius will just have to put up with him being there; the blushing and apologetic Lycius invites him in.
Perfumed by incense, full of banquet tables that stand on magnificent leopard-paw feet, loaded with food and wine, the banquet hall into which Lycius invites the wedding guests looks, sounds, and smells magnificent. The guests, marveling at Lycius's mysterious newfound wealth, at last settle in and start to enjoy themselves, getting drunk to the sound of beautiful music. By the time Lamia herself enters the room, they're ready to accept the whole situation: wine, the speaker observes, has the power to make the strangest and most magical things seem natural and fitting.
The guests begin to weave themselves flower crowns, and the speaker takes a moment to consider the right kinds of crowns for our three main characters. Lamia, he says, should have a crown of leaves with painkilling properties, to help soothe her poor, worried, aching head. Lycius should wear a crown taken from the wine god Bacchus's pine staff—in other words, a crown of drunkenness, to suit his obliviousness. The philosopher Apollonius, meanwhile, should have a prickly, pointy crown of thistles and speargrass to symbolize his piercing vision.
For, the speaker remarks, doesn’t all magic vanish at the smallest touch of chilly reason? Once upon a time, they say, the rainbow was awe-inspiring and mysterious; these days, we know exactly what produces rainbows, and that makes them less magical. Hard reason maims and destroys all enchantments. And soon, Apollonius's logic will destroy Lamia.
Lycius hardly looks away from his new bride's face all night. But at last he turns to toast Apollonius, who also hasn't looked away from Lamia, but stares at her with a fixed and piercing gaze. When Lycius turns to Lamia again, he finds her frozen and unresponsive, and he cries out in alarm; the whole party falls silent around them. Lycius shrieks at Apollonius to stop staring at Lamia, saying that the old man's gaze is killing her. Apollonius only calls him a fool, and tells him that he's doing him a favor: this is no lovely woman, but a serpent. At the sound of the word, Lamia feels as if she's been pierced through, and with a frail gesture tries to make Apollonius stop. But the old man only repeats his pronouncement: serpent.
Lamia screams and vanishes. Lycius, in shock and horror, falls dead on the spot. His friends wrap him up in his robes, making a shroud of his wedding garments.
In "Lamia," imagination, dreams, and fantasies have awe-inspiring and paradoxical powers. The poem tells the tale of a serpent-spirit named Lamia, who falls in love with a handsome young man named Lycius and transforms into a beautiful mortal woman to pursue him. The happy couple feel as if they're living in their wildest dream—but alas, this proves to be all too true. Through the symbolic figure of Lamia in all her shifty beauty, the poem suggests that the imagination is at once gorgeous and dangerous, life-giving and destructive.
Right from the beginning, Lamia herself is a rich and complicated symbol of the imagination. In her original serpent form, she's hypnotically beautiful, shining with all the colors of the rainbow and spattered with silvery stars. In fact, she looks like a work of art, a brilliant tapestry. And as a woman, she's the ideal lover, a gorgeous lady well-versed in the arts of love. Her flickering, shimmering, idealized beauty mirrors the effervescent world of dreams, fantasies, and art. The loveliest thing one can imagine, she's an image of the kind of perfection that can only exist in the imagination.
And that's where the trouble comes in. Like a dream, Lamia is as tricksy as she is lovely. She never tells Lycius about her snaky past, and indeed actively deceives him, telling him she's just a simple rich lady who's lived a quiet life in his native Corinth. Lycius, overwhelmed by love, can't see that Lamia is misleading him: he doesn't question her story, or even notice when she magically shortens a journey and conjures up an enchanted palace. The imagination can paint beautiful pictures, in other words, but it is not and cannot be reality. There's a real danger that one might get so lost in a lovely dream that one loses contact with the real world.
That's not the only danger here, though: the real world threatens the imagination right back. So long as Lycius and Lamia are wrapped up in each other, hidden away in a private love nest, they can be blissfully happy. But the moment Lycius wants to show Lamia off in public is the moment their love begins to crack. At last, Lycius's hardheaded old tutor Apollonius literally sees through Lamia, telling Lycius that she was nothing more than a serpent all along (and destroying both lovers in the process). Exposing a fantasy to the cold light of day, then, may mean losing it forever; one can't carry dreams into the real world and expect them to survive. And losing a dream may mean losing everything one has to live for.
The poem thus paints a complex, ambivalent portrait of the imagination. On the one hand, imagination makes life worth living: without a sense of magic, dream, or fantasy, the world feels cold and dead. On the other, the imagination can be so seductive that it can spirit you away from the real world—and break your heart when you're forced to return to that world.
Romantic love, "Lamia" suggests, is utterly overwhelming—and in its power lies both its pleasure and its danger. "Lamia" is full of characters blindsided by sudden passions. The god Hermes falls for a nymph simply because he's heard she's beautiful; the serpent-woman Lamia falls in love with the handsome young scholar Lycius after glimpsing him in a dream-vision; Lycius falls in love with Lamia when she merely clears her throat in his direction. In each of these cases, love overthrows all the lover's other hopes, dreams, and plans.
In fact, it transforms the lover, more or less literally. Sometimes the change is a relatively subtle change of appetite. For example, consumed by lust, Hermes can no longer take pleasure in anything but his nymph and is unmoved even by the hauntingly gorgeous song of the god Apollo. Sometimes, however, the change is more profound. For example, Lamia can no longer endure living in her serpent body (since she can't be Lycius's lover as a snake) and must undergo an agonizing transformation into a human woman. And Lycius can no longer go on as a "calm, uneager" young man, the competent and self-controlled master of his own fate: as soon as Lamia turns up, he's a different guy, collapsing, weeping, totally overthrown.
Passion, the poem thus suggests, is both delicious and disturbing. Once a person is in love's throes, nothing else in the world matters to them. On the one hand, that's a joy: what a delight to have found what feels like the greatest possible pleasure, the most desirable treasure in the world! On the other hand, that's a terror. Love is a thief, robbing those who fall into its grips of whatever other delights or ambitions they might have known. And love is an enchanter, transforming lovers into totally different people—people who can no longer live without their loves.
Readers who know a bit about Keats's life might be tempted to see him working out some of his own problems here. At the time he was writing "Lamia," Keats had fallen deeply in love with his neighbor, a young woman named Fanny Brawne—and was so overwhelmed by his feelings that he essentially ran away from her, withdrawing to the Isle of Wight (an island off the southern coast of England) for a summer. Retreat didn't help very much: he spent those months alternating between busy scribbling and fits of jealousy and passion. Being a lover, he feared, was so all-consuming an experience that it might make it impossible to be a poet.
Passionate love, in "Lamia," is dangerous because it's overwhelmingly powerful. But it's also dangerous because of its relationship to fantasy and illusion. To fall in love, for this poem's characters, is to feel as if fantasy and reality have become one and the same: passion feels like a dream come true. Alas, no human dream can last forever. Intense romantic passion, this poem suggests, is at once beautiful and tragically illusory.
The poem begins with the story of the god Hermes falling in love with a nymph. When the two of them finally get together, the poem's speaker watches them rather enviously as they head off into the woods. Hermes is getting exactly what he hoped for and dreamed of—and, lucky for him, "real are the dreams of gods." The gods, in other words, live in a fantasy: there's no separation between their wildest dreams of passion and their actual experience of passion. Hermes and his nymph will never grow "pale, as mortal lovers do": that is, the metaphorical hot "blush" of their passion will never fade, their shared fantasy will never end.
But mortal lovers, as the speaker points out, have no such luck. When the transfigured serpent spirit Lamia and the young scholar Lycius fall in love, they (like Hermes) both feel as if their dreams have all come true. Lamia literally first sees Lycius in a dream, and Lycius greets Lamia with as much awe as he'd greet a goddess. Each, in other words, embodies the other's fantasy of the perfect lover.
No matter how delicious, however, their fantasy can't last forever. Even under the best conditions, the speaker warns, love eventually becomes "grievous torment": "distrust and hate" creep into the most blissful of relationships, disillusioning lovers of their belief that they've found their ideal. In this story, that disillusionment happens in an even more dramatic and literal way when the philosopher Apollonius looks straight through Lamia, telling Lycius that she was no more than a serpent all along. This revelation makes Lamia vanish—and Lamia's disappearance shocks Lycius so terribly that he falls down dead.
The simultaneous beauty and danger of passion, then, is that it brings a fantasy to earth. It's utterly glorious to feel as if one has found one's dream lover—but that dream can't last forever. And for this poem's lovers, losing the fantasy of passion deals a mortal blow.
"Lamia" ends in a dramatic standoff between two symbolic figures: the beautiful snake-maiden Lamia, representing the world of imagination and fantasy, and the merciless philosopher Apollonius, representing hard cold rationality. Apollonius's fixed stare burns through all of Lamia's magic and beauty. And this, the poem's speaker laments, is exactly what untempered reason always does. The kind of rationalist worldview that can't allow for the magical and the unexplained, the poem suggests, is a destructive and reductive force, killing what it can't understand.
In one of the most famous passages of the poem, the speaker reflects: "Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?" By "philosophy," the speaker doesn't mean the general pursuit of wisdom, but a more specifically materialist, empiricist, or rationalist way of thinking: a school of thought that claims everything in the world can and will be explained, one time or another. (The term gets used in the same way in Hamlet, when Hamlet, speaking of the possibility that a ghost might be walking the battlements, declares: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.")
Such a philosophy, the speaker maintains, robs the world of magic: it can "clip an Angel's wings," "empty the haunted air," "unweave a rainbow." In short, it can do away with any hint of the mysterious, the magical, and even the meaningful, leaving only dead matter in its wake.
That, the poem suggests, is not because reason is inherently vicious. It's simply incomplete. Certainly a rationalist is capable of looking at a rainbow and deducing that it's a phenomenon that occurs when light refracts through droplets of water. But if one believes that these scientific facts are all there is to a rainbow—that it's just another material object in "the dull catalogue of common things"—one is missing out on the full truth: that a rainbow is also deeply mysterious, awe-inspiring, magical, laden with significance and beauty that can't be explained away.
The physics of the rainbow, then, are only its "woof"—that is, the crosswise threads in a piece of weaving. Without the warp (or lengthwise threads) of imagination and mystery, those facts are dead and meaningless, like a handful of loose threads compared to a tapestry.
The poem's eventual showdown between Lamia and Apollonius thus suggests that a purely rationalist worldview might destroy or devalue many things we can't explain—from beauty to love—by refusing to see the whole picture. Reason that can't admit of magic becomes murderous, killing every mystery.
Upon a time, before the faery broods
Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods,
Before King Oberon's bright diadem,
Sceptre, and mantle, clasp'd with dewy gem,
Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns
From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip'd lawns,
The ever-smitten Hermes empty left
His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft:
From high Olympus had he stolen light,
On this side of Jove's clouds, to escape the sight
Of his great summoner, and made retreat
Into a forest on the shores of Crete.
For somewhere in that sacred island dwelt
A nymph, to whom all hoofed Satyrs knelt;
At whose white feet the languid Tritons poured
Pearls, while on land they wither'd and adored.
Fast by the springs where she to bathe was wont,
And in those meads where sometime she might haunt,
Were strewn rich gifts, unknown to any Muse,
Though Fancy's casket were unlock'd to choose.
Ah, what a world of love was at her feet!
So Hermes thought, and a celestial heat
Burnt from his winged heels to either ear,
That from a whiteness, as the lily clear,
Blush'd into roses 'mid his golden hair,
Fallen in jealous curls about his shoulders bare.
"Lamia" begins with the language of a fairy tale: "Upon a time."
Long, long ago, the speaker says, the woods were ruled not by "King Oberon" (the folkloric King of the Fairies), but by the nymphs, satyrs, fauns, and dryads of classical mythology—the strange, dangerous forest spirits who drank and danced and lusted under the trees. But then, the "faery broods" came along and took over, scaring away those older, wilder beings.
In these first lines, the speaker takes a curious position somewhere between storyteller and historian. In one sense, they're describing the timeless world of magic. In another, they're talking about epochs of legend as if they were dynasties: in the same way as the British monarchy passed from Tudors to Stuarts, the rule of the enchanted world passed from the Greek and Roman spirits to the fairies.
This oddly historical framing implies that this poem takes place not just in a world of different spirits, but of different beliefs. For in the time when nymphs and satyrs reigned, so did the Greek and Roman gods. The world the speaker describes is one in which the gods and goddesses themselves might descend from Mount Olympus (the sacred mountain that was their home) to meddle with human affairs. (One shortly will in this very poem.)
Fairies are tricksters, meddlers, tempters, enchanters—but gods, they are not. Looking back to the world of classical mythology, this speaker also looks back to a time when magic and belief were more tightly interwoven and far more powerful.
Back in this rich and perilous era, the speaker tells readers, the god Hermes once fell head over heels in love with a beautiful nymph. This was nothing unusual. Hermes (like a lot of the gods) was "ever-smitten," perpetually falling in love with someone or other. Nor was it unusual that he should descend from Mount Olympus looking to commit an "amorous theft"; as well as being the gods' messenger, Hermes was the tricksy patron of thieves. No wonder he should see the pursuit of love as a kind of burglary.
But perhaps it's a little bit more unusual that Hermes should fall prey to this passion without ever having laid eyes on this nymph himself. He falls in love not with the nymph, really, but with her reputation. All he knows is that, somewhere on the "shores of Crete" (a Greek island), there's a nymph so beautiful that the Tritons—male sea-spirits with fish tails—crawl on land to pour pearls at her feet, willing to "wither[]" away out of the water just to get a glimpse of her. In fact, all the woods of Crete are strewn with love-gifts this nymph's myriad suitors have left her.
Hearing rumors of these goings-on, Hermes finds himself inflamed. Take a closer look at Keats's imagery here:
Ah, what a world of love was at her feet!
So Hermes thought, and a celestial heat
Burnt from his winged heels to either ear,
That from a whiteness, as the lily clear,
Blush'd into roses 'mid his golden hair,
Fallen in jealous curls about his shoulders bare.
Passion, here, overtakes Hermes's entire divine body. On the one hand, this is a very elevated and "celestial" sort of seizure: he's all flower petals and gold. On the other, this is a vision of a god full-body blushing with desire, turning bright red, so overcome with his urge to have this unseen nymph for himself that his very hair becomes "jealous."
This image of a sudden, all-consuming bodily need (alongside the ominous vision of those poor languishing fish-out-of-water Tritons) introduces what will become one of the poem's central issues: the swift, dangerous power of passion. Hermes doesn't even have to see his nymph face to face to be overcome by desire for her. That sudden, unmanageable desire will lead to impetuous action and unforeseeable consequences—though not for Hermes himself.
Keats will tell the story of Hermes's passion and what became of it in heroic couplets: paired rhyming lines of iambic pentameter (that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm). Here's how that sounds in lines 13-14:
For some- | where in | that sa- | cred is- | land dwelt
A nymph, | to whom | all hoof- | ed Sa- | tyrs knelt;
(Note that, across "Lamia," many words ending in -ed take a two-syllable pronunciation: hoof-ed, charm-ed. Where Keats wants -ed words to be pronounced in one swoop, he often uses a contraction: ravish'd, blush'd.)
Keats will use this crisp, rigorous, traditional form—pioneered by Chaucer and refined by 17th- and 18th-century poets like Dryden and Pope—in an inventive and flexible way. Where the strictest heroic couplets are consistently end-stopped, Keats will use surprising enjambments (like the one in the lines quoted above). And where the Enlightenment-era poets used heroic couplets to write vicious satires or crystalline hymns to universal order, Keats will use them to tell a murky, mysterious, ambivalent tale of uncontrollable forces: dreams, magic, and passion.
From vale to vale, from wood to wood, he flew,
Breathing upon the flowers his passion new,
And wound with many a river to its head,
To find where this sweet nymph prepar'd her secret bed:
In vain; the sweet nymph might nowhere be found,
And so he rested, on the lonely ground,
Pensive, and full of painful jealousies
Of the Wood-Gods, and even the very trees.
There as he stood, he heard a mournful voice,
Such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys
All pain but pity: thus the lone voice spake:
"When from this wreathed tomb shall I awake!
When move in a sweet body fit for life,
And love, and pleasure, and the ruddy strife
Of hearts and lips! Ah, miserable me!"
The God, dove-footed, glided silently
Round bush and tree, soft-brushing, in his speed,
The taller grasses and full-flowering weed,
Until he found a palpitating snake,
Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.
Unlock all 560 words of this analysis of Lines 27-46 of “Lamia,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
Plus so much more...
Get LitCharts A+She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd;
And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolv'd, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries—
So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,
She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne's tiar:
Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete:
And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?
As Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air.
Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake
Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love's sake,
And thus; while Hermes on his pinions lay,
Like a stoop'd falcon ere he takes his prey.
"Fair Hermes, crown'd with feathers, fluttering light,
I had a splendid dream of thee last night:
I saw thee sitting, on a throne of gold,
Among the Gods, upon Olympus old,
The only sad one; for thou didst not hear
The soft, lute-finger'd Muses chaunting clear,
Nor even Apollo when he sang alone,
Deaf to his throbbing throat's long, long melodious moan.
I dreamt I saw thee, robed in purple flakes,
Break amorous through the clouds, as morning breaks,
And, swiftly as a bright Phoebean dart,
Strike for the Cretan isle; and here thou art!
Too gentle Hermes, hast thou found the maid?"
Whereat the star of Lethe not delay'd
His rosy eloquence, and thus inquired:
"Thou smooth-lipp'd serpent, surely high inspired!
Thou beauteous wreath, with melancholy eyes,
Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise,
Telling me only where my nymph is fled,—
Where she doth breathe!" "Bright planet, thou hast said,"
Return'd the snake, "but seal with oaths, fair God!"
"I swear," said Hermes, "by my serpent rod,
And by thine eyes, and by thy starry crown!"
Light flew his earnest words, among the blossoms blown.
Then thus again the brilliance feminine:
"Too frail of heart! for this lost nymph of thine,
Free as the air, invisibly, she strays
About these thornless wilds; her pleasant days
She tastes unseen; unseen her nimble feet
Leave traces in the grass and flowers sweet;
From weary tendrils, and bow'd branches green,
She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen:
And by my power is her beauty veil'd
To keep it unaffronted, unassail'd
By the love-glances of unlovely eyes,
Of Satyrs, Fauns, and blear'd Silenus' sighs.
Pale grew her immortality, for woe
Of all these lovers, and she grieved so
I took compassion on her, bade her steep
Her hair in weïrd syrops, that would keep
Her loveliness invisible, yet free
To wander as she loves, in liberty.
Thou shalt behold her, Hermes, thou alone,
If thou wilt, as thou swearest, grant my boon!"
Then, once again, the charmed God began
An oath, and through the serpent's ears it ran
Warm, tremulous, devout, psalterian.
Ravish'd, she lifted her Circean head,
Blush'd a live damask, and swift-lisping said,
"I was a woman, let me have once more
A woman's shape, and charming as before.
I love a youth of Corinth—O the bliss!
Give me my woman's form, and place me where he is.
Stoop, Hermes, let me breathe upon thy brow,
And thou shalt see thy sweet nymph even now."
The God on half-shut feathers sank serene,
She breath'd upon his eyes, and swift was seen
Of both the guarded nymph near-smiling on the green.
It was no dream; or say a dream it was,
Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass
Their pleasures in a long immortal dream.
One warm, flush'd moment, hovering, it might seem
Dash'd by the wood-nymph's beauty, so he burn'd;
Then, lighting on the printless verdure, turn'd
To the swoon'd serpent, and with languid arm,
Delicate, put to proof the lythe Caducean charm.
So done, upon the nymph his eyes he bent,
Full of adoring tears and blandishment,
And towards her stept: she, like a moon in wane,
Faded before him, cower'd, nor could restrain
Her fearful sobs, self-folding like a flower
That faints into itself at evening hour:
But the God fostering her chilled hand,
She felt the warmth, her eyelids open'd bland,
And, like new flowers at morning song of bees,
Bloom'd, and gave up her honey to the lees.
Into the green-recessed woods they flew;
Nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do.
Left to herself, the serpent now began
To change; her elfin blood in madness ran,
Her mouth foam'd, and the grass, therewith besprent,
Wither'd at dew so sweet and virulent;
Her eyes in torture fix'd, and anguish drear,
Hot, glaz'd, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
Flash'd phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear.
The colours all inflam'd throughout her train,
She writh'd about, convuls'd with scarlet pain:
A deep volcanian yellow took the place
Of all her milder-mooned body's grace;
And, as the lava ravishes the mead,
Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede;
Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars,
Eclips'd her crescents, and lick'd up her stars:
So that, in moments few, she was undrest
Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst,
And rubious-argent: of all these bereft,
Nothing but pain and ugliness were left.
Still shone her crown; that vanish'd, also she
Melted and disappear'd as suddenly;
And in the air, her new voice luting soft,
Cried, "Lycius! gentle Lycius!"—Borne aloft
With the bright mists about the mountains hoar
These words dissolv'd: Crete's forests heard no more.
Whither fled Lamia, now a lady bright,
A full-born beauty new and exquisite?
She fled into that valley they pass o'er
Who go to Corinth from Cenchreas' shore;
And rested at the foot of those wild hills,
The rugged founts of the Peraean rills,
And of that other ridge whose barren back
Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack,
South-westward to Cleone. There she stood
About a young bird's flutter from a wood,
Fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread,
By a clear pool, wherein she passioned
To see herself escap'd from so sore ills,
While her robes flaunted with the daffodils.
Ah, happy Lycius!—for she was a maid
More beautiful than ever twisted braid,
Or sigh'd, or blush'd, or on spring-flowered lea
Spread a green kirtle to the minstrelsy:
A virgin purest lipp'd, yet in the lore
Of love deep learned to the red heart's core:
Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain
To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain;
Define their pettish limits, and estrange
Their points of contact, and swift counterchange;
Intrigue with the specious chaos, and dispart
Its most ambiguous atoms with sure art;
As though in Cupid's college she had spent
Sweet days a lovely graduate, still unshent,
And kept his rosy terms in idle languishment.
Why this fair creature chose so fairily
By the wayside to linger, we shall see;
But first 'tis fit to tell how she could muse
And dream, when in the serpent prison-house,
Of all she list, strange or magnificent:
How, ever, where she will'd, her spirit went;
Whether to faint Elysium, or where
Down through tress-lifting waves the Nereids fair
Wind into Thetis' bower by many a pearly stair;
Or where God Bacchus drains his cups divine,
Stretch'd out, at ease, beneath a glutinous pine;
Or where in Pluto's gardens palatine
Mulciber's columns gleam in far piazzian line.
And sometimes into cities she would send
Her dream, with feast and rioting to blend;
And once, while among mortals dreaming thus,
She saw the young Corinthian Lycius
Charioting foremost in the envious race,
Like a young Jove with calm uneager face,
And fell into a swooning love of him.
Now on the moth-time of that evening dim
He would return that way, as well she knew,
To Corinth from the shore; for freshly blew
The eastern soft wind, and his galley now
Grated the quaystones with her brazen prow
In port Cenchreas, from Egina isle
Fresh anchor'd; whither he had been awhile
To sacrifice to Jove, whose temple there
Waits with high marble doors for blood and incense rare.
Jove heard his vows, and better'd his desire;
For by some freakful chance he made retire
From his companions, and set forth to walk,
Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk:
Over the solitary hills he fared,
Thoughtless at first, but ere eve's star appeared
His phantasy was lost, where reason fades,
In the calm'd twilight of Platonic shades.
Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near—
Close to her passing, in indifference drear,
His silent sandals swept the mossy green;
So neighbour'd to him, and yet so unseen
She stood: he pass'd, shut up in mysteries,
His mind wrapp'd like his mantle, while her eyes
Follow'd his steps, and her neck regal white
Turn'd—syllabling thus, "Ah, Lycius bright,
And will you leave me on the hills alone?
Lycius, look back! and be some pity shown."
He did; not with cold wonder fearingly,
But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice;
For so delicious were the words she sung,
It seem'd he had lov'd them a whole summer long:
And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up,
Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup,
And still the cup was full,—while he, afraid
Lest she should vanish ere his lip had paid
Due adoration, thus began to adore;
Her soft look growing coy, she saw his chain so sure:
"Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, Goddess, see
Whether my eyes can ever turn from thee!
For pity do not this sad heart belie—
Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.
Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay!
To thy far wishes will thy streams obey:
Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain,
Alone they can drink up the morning rain:
Though a descended Pleiad, will not one
Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune
Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?
So sweetly to these ravish'd ears of mine
Came thy sweet greeting, that if thou shouldst fade
Thy memory will waste me to a shade—
For pity do not melt!"
"If I should stay,"
Said Lamia, "here, upon this floor of clay,
And pain my steps upon these flowers too rough,
What canst thou say or do of charm enough
To dull the nice remembrance of my home?
Thou canst not ask me with thee here to roam
Over these hills and vales, where no joy is,—
Empty of immortality and bliss!
Thou art a scholar, Lycius, and must know
That finer spirits cannot breathe below
In human climes, and live: Alas! poor youth,
What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe
My essence? What serener palaces,
Where I may all my many senses please,
And by mysterious sleights a hundred thirsts appease?
It cannot be—Adieu!" So said, she rose
Tiptoe with white arms spread. He, sick to lose
The amorous promise of her lone complain,
Swoon'd, murmuring of love, and pale with pain.
The cruel lady, without any show
Of sorrow for her tender favourite's woe,
But rather, if her eyes could brighter be,
With brighter eyes and slow amenity,
Put her new lips to his, and gave afresh
The life she had so tangled in her mesh:
And as he from one trance was wakening
Into another, she began to sing,
Happy in beauty, life, and love, and every thing,
A song of love, too sweet for earthly lyres,
While, like held breath, the stars drew in their panting fires
And then she whisper'd in such trembling tone,
As those who, safe together met alone
For the first time through many anguish'd days,
Use other speech than looks; bidding him raise
His drooping head, and clear his soul of doubt,
For that she was a woman, and without
Any more subtle fluid in her veins
Than throbbing blood, and that the self-same pains
Inhabited her frail-strung heart as his.
And next she wonder'd how his eyes could miss
Her face so long in Corinth, where, she said,
She dwelt but half retir'd, and there had led
Days happy as the gold coin could invent
Without the aid of love; yet in content
Till she saw him, as once she pass'd him by,
Where 'gainst a column he leant thoughtfully
At Venus' temple porch, 'mid baskets heap'd
Of amorous herbs and flowers, newly reap'd
Late on that eve, as 'twas the night before
The Adonian feast; whereof she saw no more,
But wept alone those days, for why should she adore?
Lycius from death awoke into amaze,
To see her still, and singing so sweet lays;
Then from amaze into delight he fell
To hear her whisper woman's lore so well;
And every word she spake entic'd him on
To unperplex'd delight and pleasure known.
Let the mad poets say whate'er they please
Of the sweets of Fairies, Peris, Goddesses,
There is not such a treat among them all,
Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall,
As a real woman, lineal indeed
From Pyrrha's pebbles or old Adam's seed.
Thus gentle Lamia judg'd, and judg'd aright,
That Lycius could not love in half a fright,
So threw the goddess off, and won his heart
More pleasantly by playing woman's part,
With no more awe than what her beauty gave,
That, while it smote, still guaranteed to save.
Lycius to all made eloquent reply,
Marrying to every word a twinborn sigh;
And last, pointing to Corinth, ask'd her sweet,
If 'twas too far that night for her soft feet.
The way was short, for Lamia's eagerness
Made, by a spell, the triple league decrease
To a few paces; not at all surmised
By blinded Lycius, so in her comprized.
They pass'd the city gates, he knew not how
So noiseless, and he never thought to know.
As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all,
Throughout her palaces imperial,
And all her populous streets and temples lewd,
Mutter'd, like tempest in the distance brew'd,
To the wide-spreaded night above her towers.
Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours,
Shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white,
Companion'd or alone; while many a light
Flared, here and there, from wealthy festivals,
And threw their moving shadows on the walls,
Or found them cluster'd in the corniced shade
Of some arch'd temple door, or dusky colonnade.
Muffling his face, of greeting friends in fear,
Her fingers he press'd hard, as one came near
With curl'd gray beard, sharp eyes, and smooth bald crown,
Slow-stepp'd, and robed in philosophic gown:
Lycius shrank closer, as they met and past,
Into his mantle, adding wings to haste,
While hurried Lamia trembled: "Ah," said he,
"Why do you shudder, love, so ruefully?
Why does your tender palm dissolve in dew?"—
"I'm wearied," said fair Lamia: "tell me who
Is that old man? I cannot bring to mind
His features—Lycius! wherefore did you blind
Yourself from his quick eyes?" Lycius replied,
"'Tis Apollonius sage, my trusty guide
And good instructor; but to-night he seems
The ghost of folly haunting my sweet dreams."
While yet he spake they had arrived before
A pillar'd porch, with lofty portal door,
Where hung a silver lamp, whose phosphor glow
Reflected in the slabbed steps below,
Mild as a star in water; for so new,
And so unsullied was the marble hue,
So through the crystal polish, liquid fine,
Ran the dark veins, that none but feet divine
Could e'er have touch'd there. Sounds Aeolian
Breath'd from the hinges, as the ample span
Of the wide doors disclos'd a place unknown
Some time to any, but those two alone,
And a few Persian mutes, who that same year
Were seen about the markets: none knew where
They could inhabit; the most curious
Were foil'd, who watch'd to trace them to their house:
And but the flitter-winged verse must tell,
For truth's sake, what woe afterwards befel,
'Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus,
Shut from the busy world of more incredulous.
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast—
That is a doubtful tale from faery land,
Hard for the non-elect to understand.
Had Lycius liv'd to hand his story down,
He might have given the moral a fresh frown,
Or clench'd it quite: but too short was their bliss
To breed distrust and hate, that make the soft voice hiss.
Besides, there, nightly, with terrific glare,
Love, jealous grown of so complete a pair,
Hover'd and buzz'd his wings, with fearful roar,
Above the lintel of their chamber door,
And down the passage cast a glow upon the floor.
For all this came a ruin: side by side
They were enthroned, in the even tide,
Upon a couch, near to a curtaining
Whose airy texture, from a golden string,
Floated into the room, and let appear
Unveil'd the summer heaven, blue and clear,
Betwixt two marble shafts:—there they reposed,
Where use had made it sweet, with eyelids closed,
Saving a tythe which love still open kept,
That they might see each other while they almost slept;
When from the slope side of a suburb hill,
Deafening the swallow's twitter, came a thrill
Of trumpets—Lycius started—the sounds fled,
But left a thought, a buzzing in his head.
For the first time, since first he harbour'd in
That purple-lined palace of sweet sin,
His spirit pass'd beyond its golden bourn
Into the noisy world almost forsworn.
The lady, ever watchful, penetrant,
Saw this with pain, so arguing a want
Of something more, more than her empery
Of joys; and she began to moan and sigh
Because he mused beyond her, knowing well
That but a moment's thought is passion's passing bell.
"Why do you sigh, fair creature?" whisper'd he:
"Why do you think?" return'd she tenderly:
"You have deserted me—where am I now?
Not in your heart while care weighs on your brow:
No, no, you have dismiss'd me; and I go
From your breast houseless: ay, it must be so."
He answer'd, bending to her open eyes,
Where he was mirror'd small in paradise,
"My silver planet, both of eve and morn!
Why will you plead yourself so sad forlorn,
While I am striving how to fill my heart
With deeper crimson, and a double smart?
How to entangle, trammel up and snare
Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there
Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?
Ay, a sweet kiss—you see your mighty woes.
My thoughts! shall I unveil them? Listen then!
What mortal hath a prize, that other men
May be confounded and abash'd withal,
But lets it sometimes pace abroad majestical,
And triumph, as in thee I should rejoice
Amid the hoarse alarm of Corinth's voice.
Let my foes choke, and my friends shout afar,
While through the thronged streets your bridal car
Wheels round its dazzling spokes." The lady's cheek
Trembled; she nothing said, but, pale and meek,
Arose and knelt before him, wept a rain
Of sorrows at his words; at last with pain
Beseeching him, the while his hand she wrung,
To change his purpose. He thereat was stung,
Perverse, with stronger fancy to reclaim
Her wild and timid nature to his aim:
Besides, for all his love, in self despite,
Against his better self, he took delight
Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new.
His passion, cruel grown, took on a hue
Fierce and sanguineous as 'twas possible
In one whose brow had no dark veins to swell.
Fine was the mitigated fury, like
Apollo's presence when in act to strike
The serpent—Ha, the serpent! certes, she
Was none. She burnt, she lov'd the tyranny,
And, all subdued, consented to the hour
When to the bridal he should lead his paramour.
"Sure some sweet name thou hast, though, by my truth,
I have not ask'd it, ever thinking thee
Not mortal, but of heavenly progeny,
As still I do. Hast any mortal name,
Fit appellation for this dazzling frame?
Or friends or kinsfolk on the citied earth,
To share our marriage feast and nuptial mirth?"
"I have no friends," said Lamia, "no, not one;
My presence in wide Corinth hardly known:
My parents' bones are in their dusty urns
Sepulchred, where no kindled incense burns,
Seeing all their luckless race are dead, save me,
And I neglect the holy rite for thee.
Even as you list invite your many guests;
But if, as now it seems, your vision rests
With any pleasure on me, do not bid
Old Apollonius—from him keep me hid."
Lycius, perplex'd at words so blind and blank,
Made close inquiry; from whose touch she shrank,
Feigning a sleep; and he to the dull shade
Of deep sleep in a moment was betray'd.
It was the custom then to bring away
The bride from home at blushing shut of day,
Veil'd, in a chariot, heralded along
By strewn flowers, torches, and a marriage song,
With other pageants: but this fair unknown
Had not a friend. So being left alone,
(Lycius was gone to summon all his kin)
And knowing surely she could never win
His foolish heart from its mad pompousness,
She set herself, high-thoughted, how to dress
The misery in fit magnificence.
She did so, but 'tis doubtful how and whence
Came, and who were her subtle servitors.
About the halls, and to and from the doors,
There was a noise of wings, till in short space
The glowing banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace.
A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone
Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan
Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade.
Fresh carved cedar, mimicking a glade
Of palm and plantain, met from either side,
High in the midst, in honour of the bride:
Two palms and then two plantains, and so on,
From either side their stems branch'd one to one
All down the aisled place; and beneath all
There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall.
So canopied, lay an untasted feast
Teeming with odours. Lamia, regal drest,
Silently paced about, and as she went,
In pale contented sort of discontent,
Mission'd her viewless servants to enrich
The fretted splendour of each nook and niche.
Between the tree-stems, marbled plain at first,
Came jasper pannels; then, anon, there burst
Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees,
And with the larger wove in small intricacies.
Approving all, she faded at self-will,
And shut the chamber up, close, hush'd and still,
Complete and ready for the revels rude,
When dreadful guests would come to spoil her solitude.
The day appear'd, and all the gossip rout.
O senseless Lycius! Madman! wherefore flout
The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister'd hours,
And show to common eyes these secret bowers?
The herd approach'd; each guest, with busy brain,
Arriving at the portal, gaz'd amain,
And enter'd marveling: for they knew the street,
Remember'd it from childhood all complete
Without a gap, yet ne'er before had seen
That royal porch, that high-built fair demesne;
So in they hurried all, maz'd, curious and keen:
Save one, who look'd thereon with eye severe,
And with calm-planted steps walk'd in austere;
'Twas Apollonius: something too he laugh'd,
As though some knotty problem, that had daft
His patient thought, had now begun to thaw,
And solve and melt—'twas just as he foresaw.
He met within the murmurous vestibule
His young disciple. "'Tis no common rule,
Lycius," said he, "for uninvited guest
To force himself upon you, and infest
With an unbidden presence the bright throng
Of younger friends; yet must I do this wrong,
And you forgive me." Lycius blush'd, and led
The old man through the inner doors broad-spread;
With reconciling words and courteous mien
Turning into sweet milk the sophist's spleen.
Of wealthy lustre was the banquet-room,
Fill'd with pervading brilliance and perfume:
Before each lucid pannel fuming stood
A censer fed with myrrh and spiced wood,
Each by a sacred tripod held aloft,
Whose slender feet wide-swerv'd upon the soft
Wool-woofed carpets: fifty wreaths of smoke
From fifty censers their light voyage took
To the high roof, still mimick'd as they rose
Along the mirror'd walls by twin-clouds odorous.
Twelve sphered tables, by silk seats insphered,
High as the level of a man's breast rear'd
On libbard's paws, upheld the heavy gold
Of cups and goblets, and the store thrice told
Of Ceres' horn, and, in huge vessels, wine
Come from the gloomy tun with merry shine.
Thus loaded with a feast the tables stood,
Each shrining in the midst the image of a God.
When in an antichamber every guest
Had felt the cold full sponge to pleasure press'd,
By minist'ring slaves, upon his hands and feet,
And fragrant oils with ceremony meet
Pour'd on his hair, they all mov'd to the feast
In white robes, and themselves in order placed
Around the silken couches, wondering
Whence all this mighty cost and blaze of wealth could spring.
Soft went the music the soft air along,
While fluent Greek a vowel'd undersong
Kept up among the guests discoursing low
At first, for scarcely was the wine at flow;
But when the happy vintage touch'd their brains,
Louder they talk, and louder come the strains
Of powerful instruments—the gorgeous dyes,
The space, the splendour of the draperies,
The roof of awful richness, nectarous cheer,
Beautiful slaves, and Lamia's self, appear,
Now, when the wine has done its rosy deed,
And every soul from human trammels freed,
No more so strange; for merry wine, sweet wine,
Will make Elysian shades not too fair, too divine.
Soon was God Bacchus at meridian height;
Flush'd were their cheeks, and bright eyes double bright:
Garlands of every green, and every scent
From vales deflower'd, or forest-trees branch rent,
In baskets of bright osier'd gold were brought
High as the handles heap'd, to suit the thought
Of every guest; that each, as he did please,
Might fancy-fit his brows, silk-pillow'd at his ease.
What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
What for the sage, old Apollonius?
Upon her aching forehead be there hung
The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue;
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
By her glad Lycius sitting, in chief place,
Scarce saw in all the room another face,
Till, checking his love trance, a cup he took
Full brimm'd, and opposite sent forth a look
'Cross the broad table, to beseech a glance
From his old teacher's wrinkled countenance,
And pledge him. The bald-head philosopher
Had fix'd his eye, without a twinkle or stir
Full on the alarmed beauty of the bride,
Brow-beating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride.
Lycius then press'd her hand, with devout touch,
As pale it lay upon the rosy couch:
'Twas icy, and the cold ran through his veins;
Then sudden it grew hot, and all the pains
Of an unnatural heat shot to his heart.
"Lamia, what means this? Wherefore dost thou start?
Know'st thou that man?" Poor Lamia answer'd not.
He gaz'd into her eyes, and not a jot
Own'd they the lovelorn piteous appeal:
More, more he gaz'd: his human senses reel:
Some hungry spell that loveliness absorbs;
There was no recognition in those orbs.
"Lamia!" he cried—and no soft-toned reply.
The many heard, and the loud revelry
Grew hush; the stately music no more breathes;
The myrtle sicken'd in a thousand wreaths.
By faint degrees, voice, lute, and pleasure ceased;
A deadly silence step by step increased,
Until it seem'd a horrid presence there,
And not a man but felt the terror in his hair.
"Lamia!" he shriek'd; and nothing but the shriek
With its sad echo did the silence break.
"Begone, foul dream!" he cried, gazing again
In the bride's face, where now no azure vein
Wander'd on fair-spaced temples; no soft bloom
Misted the cheek; no passion to illume
The deep-recessed vision—all was blight;
Lamia, no longer fair, there sat a deadly white.
"Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man!
Turn them aside, wretch! or the righteous ban
Of all the Gods, whose dreadful images
Here represent their shadowy presences,
May pierce them on the sudden with the thorn
Of painful blindness; leaving thee forlorn,
In trembling dotage to the feeblest fright
Of conscience, for their long offended might,
For all thine impious proud-heart sophistries,
Unlawful magic, and enticing lies.
Corinthians! look upon that gray-beard wretch!
Mark how, possess'd, his lashless eyelids stretch
Around his demon eyes! Corinthians, see!
My sweet bride withers at their potency."
"Fool!" said the sophist, in an under-tone
Gruff with contempt; which a death-nighing moan
From Lycius answer'd, as heart-struck and lost,
He sank supine beside the aching ghost.
"Fool! Fool!" repeated he, while his eyes still
Relented not, nor mov'd; "from every ill
Of life have I preserv'd thee to this day,
And shall I see thee made a serpent's prey?"
Then Lamia breath'd death breath; the sophist's eye,
Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly,
Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well
As her weak hand could any meaning tell,
Motion'd him to be silent; vainly so,
He look'd and look'd again a level—No!
"A Serpent!" echoed he; no sooner said,
Than with a frightful scream she vanished:
And Lycius' arms were empty of delight,
As were his limbs of life, from that same night.
On the high couch he lay!—his friends came round
Supported him—no pulse, or breath they found,
And, in its marriage robe, the heavy body wound.
In both her serpent and her human forms, Lamia symbolizes dreams, fantasies, and the imagination, embodying the pleasures and the dangers of the irrational side of life.
Whether as snake or woman, Lamia has the power to fascinate and compel. Both her forms are gorgeous, so overwhelmingly lovely that she immediately transfixes whoever looks upon her. Both her forms, too, are deceptive. As a snake, her colors and patterns are so dazzling that it's hard to make out her real shape; as a woman, she can only survive in secrecy, as long as nobody's there to interrupt the dream.
In all of these ways, Lamia behaves like a fantasy: she's seductive, powerful, and terribly fragile all at once. The poem suggests that it's impossible to live without such fantasies. When Lamia dies at the hands of merciless reason, so does Lycius. But it also suggests that it's dangerous to try to live fully in fantasy. Lycius's life with Lamia is beautiful, but also insubstantial and doomed. The poem's portrait of Lamia as lovely and unnerving, powerful and fragile, captures a complex, ambivalent attitude toward the life of the imagination—and especially toward the kind of imagination that one needs in order to fall deeply in love.
The old philosopher Apollonius symbolizes cold, unrelenting, untempered reason. In his eyes, there's no mystery whatsoever about what Lamia is: she's a serpent and only a serpent. Such a flat, reductive way of seeing, the poem suggests, has a killing power. Lamia evaporates under Apollonius's rationalist stare—but not only Lamia. Lycius also can't survive the destruction of his beautiful dream.
By embodying pure reason as a bald, withered, cynical, merciless old scholar, Keats gestures to all that's deadening in such an approach to the world. However, Apollonius isn't a pure villain any more than Lamia is an innocent victim: while his way of seeing the world is incomplete, it also has its reality and must be reckoned with.
Wherever rainbows appear in "Lamia," they symbolize mystery and magic—everything that is grand, sublime, beyond human comprehension.
A rainbow is huge, beautiful, immaterial, shimmery, and shifty; it appears and vanishes like a dream. And as Herman Melville would note later in the 19th century, even when the rainbow is visible, it's tricksy: it's impossible to say exactly where one of its colors ends and another begins. It's something that you can perceive but not grasp. It's thus a perfect image of imaginative vision.
No wonder, then, that Lamia herself is described as "rainbow-sided" in her serpent form: she embodies dream and fantasy. And no wonder that the speaker suggests that "cold philosophy"—icy rationality—can "unweave a rainbow," reducing mystery to yet another explicable phenomenon to be tallied in the "dull catalogue of common things."
There's a wealth of Keats's characteristic bright, urgent imagery throughout "Lamia." In this poem about the seductive power of dreams and of passion, sensuous description brings a gorgeous, deceptive fairyland to life—and invites readers to consider ways in which poetry itself might be gorgeously deceptive.
A famous and telling passage of Keatsian imagery appears when Hermes first claps eyes on Lamia:
She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd;
And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolv'd, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries—
The rich language here piles one image on top of another, creating an overwhelming dazzle:
The bewildering, overpowering, shifty beauty here introduces not just Lamia's appearance but her nature. She's gorgeous to look upon—but also, beneath all that shifting, flickering, iridescent gorgeousness, hard to get a clear look at.
And that's even before readers get to one of her most striking features:
Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete:
"Bitter-sweet" is right. Pearls are a commonplace metaphor when poets (especially the Renaissance poets Keats loved) are trying to describe a lovely lady's lustrous smile. Such pearls feel rather less commonplace when they uncannily appear in the mouth of a serpent. Coming upon this detail after the dizzying beauty of the earlier imagery, readers might feel their skin crawling a little, as if what they thought was just a gorgeous snake had sat up and grinned at them.
The pure, intense power of Keats's imagery here thus combines fascination and discomfort. You can't look away from this rainbowy, flickering, shifting vision of loveliness—but nor can you sink into it without a shiver of horror. The poem's dilemma appears right here in Lamia's gordian tangle.
Compare that with the similarly famous passage in which Lamia sheds her serpent form to become a mortal woman:
Her mouth foam'd, and the grass, therewith besprent,
Wither'd at dew so sweet and virulent;
Her eyes in torture fix'd, and anguish drear,
Hot, glaz'd, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
Flash'd phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear.
Many critics have observed that the imagery here might draw on Keats's medical training. As a young apothecary-to-be, he would have observed plenty of the pain he depicts here: the foaming mouth, the fixed and burning eyes, the writhing and convulsions. The later vision of Lamia's shimmering body being consumed by "volcanian," sulfuric yellows and reds might also suggest the fearful, devouring power of a chemical reaction.
Regardless of their source, these images all point toward the fact that Lamia, to get what she wants, has to endure a horrible contact with mortal earthiness:
A deep volcanian yellow took the place
Of all her milder-mooned body's grace;
And, as the lava ravishes the mead,
Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede;
Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars,
Eclips'd her crescents, and lick'd up her stars:
Lamia must surrender her starry luster to volcanic forces: her transformation burns her up like "lava." The process of becoming human here means leaving behind the airy, celestial world: the moons and stars that decorate her serpent body are here either fierily consumed or "eclips'd."
She must also leave behind her jewel-like snaky colors:
So that, in moments few, she was undrest
Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst,
And rubious-argent: of all these bereft,
Nothing but pain and ugliness were left.
Repeating elements of his initial description of her snake form, Keats adds even more jeweled color here, including the very Keatsian coinage "rubious-argent"—that is, a shimmery reddish-silver. Keats draws that word's parts from Shakespeare (who describes a "rubious" lip in Twelfth Night) and the language of heraldry (in which "argent" means silver). Besides evoking an unearthly but instantly vivid color, then, this language links Lamia's snake-form to poetry and to medieval chivalry, emphasizing that she's a creature of an artful dream-world.
Even in looking at two short passages, we've barely scratched the surface of their potent imagery—and there's much more imagery to find throughout this poem. Readers who are approaching "Lamia" for the first time might want to keep an eye out for Keats's descriptions of Hermes's beauty, of Lamia's dreamy palace, of Apollonius's deadly stare (all highlighted here), and ask: How does this language conjure not just a vision, but an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling?
Unlock all 809 words of this analysis of Allusion in “Lamia,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
Plus so much more...
Get LitCharts A+Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
Creatures from Greek mythology:
"Lamia" tells its story over the course of 708 lines. The poem is divided into two long parts:
Keats breaks these long parts into irregular stanzas. Throughout the poem, stanza breaks often mark changes of scene or introduce philosophical asides.
The stanzas themselves can further be broken down into heroic couplets: paired rhyming lines of iambic pentameter (built from five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Some de- | mon's mis- | tress, or | the de- | mon's self"). Keats chose this form after closely studying the work of the 17th-century court poet John Dryden.
Dryden was an establishment figure (the first Poet Laureate, in fact) and a pillar of the early Enlightenment—in short, a guy whose poetry was more aligned with wing-clipping "philosophy" than Romantic imagination and anti-monarchism. He was thus an unusual model for Keats, who (like many of his fellow Romantics) saw himself more as the descendent of Renaissance poets like Shakespeare and Spenser.
But Dryden's muscular, flexible use of heroic couplets was just what Keats was looking for when he wrote this poem. In 1819, when he was writing "Lamia," Keats felt he was undergoing a kind of poetic metamorphosis, leaving behind the flightier voice of early poems like the book-length Endymion and developing toward a more firmly rooted style of his own—a development he described as being rather like a butterfly turning into a caterpillar, giving up wings to sprout "patient, sublunary legs." (By "sublunary"—"beneath the moon," in other words—he means "earthbound.")
This accounts both for his choice of Dryden as a model and for this poem's sometimes arch and ironic tone. Where the early Keats immersed himself fully in a sensuous dreamworld (sometimes to his own later embarrassment, not to mention the embarrassment of unfriendly and snobbish critics), the Keats of "Lamia" maintains a balance between the airy and the earthy. Dryden's Enlightenment-era formal rigor builds a scaffold for Keats's imagination to grow around.
This stylistic choice also makes room for Keats's narrator to make dark or witty asides, rather in the manner of Robert Burton—the Renaissance-era author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, from whom Keats borrowed this poem's plot.
Lamia is written in heroic couplets: that is, paired rhyming lines of iambic pentameter. That means that each line uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in lines 1-2:
Upon | a time, | before | the fae- | ry broods
Drove Nymph | and Sa- | tyr from | the pros- | perous woods,
"Broods" and "woods" create a slant rhyme, and "prosperous" should be read with two syllables to fit the meter ("prosp'rous"). Still, there's a clear, familiar rhythm to these lines that continues throughout the poem.
In using heroic couplets and in sprinkling them with alexandrines, Keats drew on the work of the 17th-century poet John Dryden—a poet whom Keats's friends Charles Brown noted Keats was reading carefully while he worked on "Lamia."
Dryden was an unusual source for Keats, who (like many of the Romantic poets) saw himself as a descendent of earlier, stranger, wilder Renaissance writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser—and an enemy of the neat Enlightenment rationality that figures like Dryden emblematized. In working from Dryden's style here, Keats was perhaps choosing a form to suit his themes, tempering his own lush, sensuous, imaginative poetic spirit with a rigorous, crisp, and muscular meter.
Like Dryden, Keats also introduces an occasional alexandrine for effect. An alexandrine is a line of iambic hexameter—that is, six iambs, as in line 75 (note that the first foot here is actually a trochee—the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. Iambic meters are flexible that way!):
Deaf to | his throb- | bing throat's | long long | melod- | ious moan
That line offers a neat example of why Keats might reach for an alexandrine from time to time. Leave out the "long long" there, and this would be a perfectly nice line of iambic pentameter. But Keats wants readers to really hear Apollo's "long long melodious moan," to hover over the image of a god's singing and reflect on the unearthly beauty that the lovelorn Hermes is "deaf to."
Similarly, it's hard not to pause for a good stare at the alexandrine of line 60 describing Lamia's mouth while she's still in her serpent form:
She had | a wom- | an's mouth | with all | its pearls | complete:
The long line here feels like a lingering gaze, part fascinated, part disgusted, part allured.
"Lamia" is written in rhymed couplets. That means its rhymes travel in pairs: AA BB CC, and so on.
What's more, these are heroic couplets—couplets written in iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in " Some de- | mon's mis- | tress, or | the de- | mon's self").
The 14th-century writer Geoffrey Chaucer—author of the Canterbury Tales, and one of Keats's heroes—popularized this rhyme scheme in English poetry, but it really caught fire in the 17th and 18th centuries, when writers like Alexander Pope and John Dryden began to use tighter versions of the pattern. In the strictest form, every line of a poem written in heroic couplets is a full, self-contained, end-stopped thought, meaning that the rhymes all mark an ending.
Keats isn't using that kind of intensely controlled rhyme here, but a livelier, looser version inspired by Dryden (who wasn't so pinch-lipped about the form as the later Pope). Following Dryden's example, Keats from time to time introduces a triplet, a string of three rhymes, like the passage in lines 410-412 describing Cupid lurking outside Lamia and Lycius's bedroom. The love-god, the speaker says:
Hover'd and buzz'd his wings, with fearful roar,
Above the lintel of their chamber door,
And down the passage cast a glow upon the floor.
The lingering triplet here allows readers room to savor the vivid (and funny) image of Cupid buzzing like an angry blowfly. It also keeps readers themselves outside that door for a moment, heightening the anticipation before we finally get to go in and see what Lycius and Lamia have been up to.
The poem's narrator is a storyteller with an acute eye, and they paint the story of Lamia in bright and shimmering color. Keats's famous feel for sensuous imagery makes up a big part of this speaker's character: the lines in which the speaker describes Lamia's eerie, gorgeous serpent form are famous for their richness of detail.
But while sympathetic and observant, this speaker is also a little distant, a little removed. They often interrupt the poem's narrative to insert some earthy, ironic philosophizing (about the superiority of human women to nymphs and spirits and the relationship of love to physical comforts, for instance). These moments inject dry wit into the poem's lush mystery, a mixture that suits the poem's own complex and ambivalent perspective.
This poem is often remembered as a Romantic broadside against the puncturing, disenchanting power of pure heartless reason (particularly in the famous lines in which the speaker describes the power of "cold philosophy" to "clip an Angel's wings" and "unweave a rainbow"). But the speaker's perspective is subtler and more nuanced than that. Always sympathetic to Lamia, they're also uneasy with her power to mislead—and Apollonius's eventual shattering of Lamia and Lycius's fantasy can be read simultaneously as a terrible tragedy and an unavoidable confrontation with workaday reality. Apollonius is certainly a dangerous and unpleasant figure here, but Lamia isn't an unambiguous innocent.
The one central idea that the speaker can't get away from is that love, beauty, and imagination have an overwhelming, delicious power, and that this power can be deceiving. Through a balance of lush immersion and observant distance, the speaker resists coming to any pat conclusion about what people should therefore do with overpowering, delicious, and dangerous visions—or with the disruptive, reductive power of reason. The poem's voice is more inquisitive, descriptive, and even ambivalent than it is conclusive or argumentative. With characteristic Keatsian negative capability—Keats's term for "the ability to be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"—this speaker doesn't draw a tidy moral from this story. They only look closely, to see what's there.
"Lamia" is set in the ancient Greek world, in Crete and Corinth—but also in the world of myth. The poem begins "upon a time," as a fairy tale would, and it tells a story of a time when the lives of gods, spirits, and mortals interweaved. This time, the speaker notes, was something like an earlier empire of magic: the nymphs and satyrs of classical mythology would soon be driven out of the woods by "the faery broods," the shiftier, more elusive fairies of English myth and legend.
This, the speaker implies, was a kind of decay. From its original central and powerful place in mortals' lives, the enchanted world would decline into mere folklore, and then dwindle to almost nothing. (Keats often lamented a lost world of antique magic; this was neither his first nor his last visit to the world of Greek myth.) This image of declining mythic power aligns with the poem's vision of enchantment vanishing "at the mere touch of cold philosophy": that is, of the magical and the sacred dispelled by chilly and inflexible reason, a major concern for Romantic thinkers like Keats.
Keats paints this setting with characteristically vivid and sensuous imagery, noting—to choose one example among many—every detail of Lamia's conjured banquet hall, from its "jasper pannels" to its decorative carved trees to its clouds of incense reflecting in mirrored walls. This vivid scene-setting makes the poem itself Lamia-like: in some sense, the world Keats portrays here is the world of poetry, the world of dream-visions given bodies.
John Keats (1795-1821) is often seen as an archetypal Romantic poet: a dreamy, sensuous soul who died tragically young. But Keats was also a vigorous, funny writer, a working-class kid making inroads into a literary scene dominated by aristocratic figures like Lord Byron. He died obscure and poor, never knowing that he would become one of the world's best-loved poets. But he had a quiet faith in his own genius: in an early letter, he once declared, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."
Keats wrote "Lamia" during a run of astonishing poetic brilliance—a period of only about a year during which he would produce some of the greatest poems in English—and published it in the last collection of his lifetime, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). He hoped that this gripping yarn might bring him a much-needed influx of cash; it didn't. Like much of Keats's work, "Lamia" was only fully appreciated years after his death, when its description of Lamia's iridescent snakiness and its broadside against "cold philosophy" were celebrated as examples of pure distilled Romanticism.
Keats met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics, but never got too close to any of them. As a young writer, for instance, he was inspired by William Wordsworth, the grandfather of English Romanticism—but was dismayed to find him pompous and conservative in person. ("Mr. Wordsworth," Wordsworth's wife Mary reprimanded the enthusiastic young Keats, "is never interrupted.") He had just one conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which seems to have felt more like a whirlwind than a friendly chat). And while Percy Shelley admired Keats's work, Keats never quite fell in with him and his elite clique; Byron, Shelley's close friend, was actively contemptuous of Keats. Keats's real circle was instead built from earthier London artists like Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Benjamin Haydon.
In spite of being something of an outsider in his time, Keats has indeed landed "among the English Poets" since his death. Ever since Victorian writers like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning rediscovered him, he's been one of the most beloved and influential of poets.
Keats wanted to explore a new voice in "Lamia," using a more grounded style than he had in his sensuous early work. After the lavish, swooning sweetness of his long poem Endymion and the absurd dark comedy of his "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil," he was looking for a poetic form that would be, to borrow his own word, less "smokable": that is, sturdier and more serious, harder to pick apart, harder to laugh at. (Critics had not been impressed with Keats's early work, snobbishly dismissing his poetry as self-indulgent, fantastical "Cockney poetry.") "Lamia" was intended to be both a money-making crowd-pleaser and a firm, judicious statement of his own poetic powers.
As he worked on "Lamia," Keats was also grappling with complicated feelings about having fallen deeply in love with the literal girl next door: a young woman called Fanny Brawne whose family rented the other half of the house where he lived with his friend Charles Brown.
Though head over heels for Fanny, Keats also felt more than a little uncomfortable about how completely his love absorbed him, as well as worried that a penniless poet wouldn't make a very appealing prospective husband (at least in Fanny's family's eyes). This poem's portrait of love as deeply alluring—and thus potentially distracting and deceitful—captures the young poet's anxieties as well as his maturing artistry.
An Artistic Interpretation — Take a look at one of the many works of art that would respond to "Lamia" and its wild imagery: an eerie bust by the sculptor Sir George Frampton. (Notice how a few tasteful opals evoke Lamia's dazzling colors in an otherwise black-and-white artwork!)
The Keats-Shelley Museum — Visit the website of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association to learn more about Keats's life and work.
A Brief Biography — Learn more about Keats via the British Library.
A First Edition — See images of the important collection in which this poem was first published (Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems)—and learn about the book's important place in Romantic lore.
Portraits of Keats — See some images of Keats via London's National Portrait Gallery.