John Keats’ “Lamia” — and how Google can make us silly
We’re better off reading poetry than asking a search engine to explain it to us.
Did Lamia lead her lover so many leagues
To trap him, much like Circe, with her sailor pigs,
To merely keep some man she loved from reaching home?
What Ithaca? Lycius walked those faery-brood roads alone
Until he saw her, ‘now a lady bright’ — the very form
Which Hermes crafted for her to be reborn.
Before Lycius beheld her, he wrapped his mind in mysteries
One glance discarded his philosophies.
Some say Apollonius saw through some fatal disguise
As if gods cannot transmute forms, but merely fool the eyes.
They proclaim a plot here, some tension twixt truth and love.
But do they miss the point? Bring their own conceits to prove?
To say she is a serpent is to say transformation is a lie
That a serpent is a serpent from her birth until she die.
What sort of uninvited wedding guest assassinates the bride?
A scornful, scamful charlatan whose worthless warnings will misguide.
- Tom Tordillo 2022
I’ve read John Keats’ “Lamia” a few times, but do not pretend to be an expert. Experts have spent years parsing each line, and every other line written by Keats.
Googling him, a lazy student will find the sorts of experts who are paid to parse and package the poem, reduce it to their concept of the plot, or at least, a regurgitated summary someone claimed was a plot. We’re better off just reading the poem. Project Gutenberg has it available for free.
Cliffnotes authoritatively dismisses Lamia,
Lamia, therefore, can be regarded as a warning against the all-absorbing nature of illusory, passionate love and a recognition of the claims of reason.
Cliffnotes, Summary and Analysis of Lamia
Our friends at Cliff go further: it’s not even a very interesting poem, not among Keats’ best. Blah blah blah.
Another critic (someone named Kronstadt) interprets the poem thus:
Lamia exists as a thought, a passion, made real by the mind of the person that holds her image as true, but just as any thought, it can only be sustained for as long as a person is willing to, before it vanishes or is replaced. Lamia’s existence appears to be just as capricious.
Kronstadt Revolt, John Keats’ “Lamia”, and the Power of Human Imagination
That analysis seems intended to access the poem, an act of fascination and love, rather than a commercial plan to assist students who prefer to avoid poetry rather than engage with its challenges.
I disagree with this author’s conclusion. But I respect that this author sees the poem as a work of beauty, rather than as a means to making a buck exploiting the laziness of others.
Google can lead us to other critics, each emphasizing their own personal taste, or invoking the authority of other critics before them.
We’re better off just reading the poem.
My poem responds to the various lines of critics who believe they know what Lamia is “about,” and who propose the focus to be an expression of the ‘Romantic struggle between love and scientific truth.’
Oddly, I see nothing in the poem suggesting Lamia’s transformation was illusory. Consider:
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.Keats was all-too-familiar with bodily pain. He was also familiar with numerous chemical changes, including flashing phosphorous and sparks, central features of the chemistry Keats knew in the early 19th century. Odd to imagine these things as ‘illusory.’
My eye returns again here:
For pity do not this sad heart belie—
Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.Lycius believes that if Lamia disappears, he will die? From the first sight?
Thou art a scholar, Lycius, and must know
That finer spirits cannot breathe below
In human climes, and live...Lamia believes that if she remains, she will die? From her first conversation, even after going through this transformation?
As mortals, Lycius and Lamia were certainly destined to die. In what way does that indicate ‘illusory’ characters?
Perhaps in some sort of Platonic sense, where fixation upon the immortal and the eternal forms that endure beyond our mortal durability gives us some connection to a perfections that lingers. Contemplate the perfect circle, the ideal tree, the rock that is the key to all rocks, the perfect river that defines all others, etc.
More likely, Lycius perceived (correctly) that what he once perceived as Apollonius’ wisdom was in fact a folly.
My latest reading of Lamia, I wondered at this line:
But first 'tis fit to tell how she could muse
And dream, when in the serpent prison-house,Keats suggests the ‘true’ form of a serpent was a mere ‘prison-house,’ that her transformation was a form of liberation. Hermes, as a messenger God, is widely associated with travel, motion, freedom. It makes sense that Hermes, during his lustful pursuit of some anonymous nymph, might let loose a serpent who assisted that pursuit.
If Lamia’s form was changed by the power of Hermes, then Apollonius does not ‘see through an illusion,’ but rather, seeks to cage and trap Lamia, to turn her back into what she WAS, rather than to honor what she now seeks to become.
(Aside: are there not modern Apolloniae who dismiss a ‘transition’ from one form to another — who claim, ignorantly, to speak for ‘science’ — but when they impose a ‘dead name,’ potentially hurt, or even destroy that which they refuse to accept in a transformed state?).
Did Apollonius actually protect Lycius “from every ill // of life” — by imprisoning him as well? Preventing him from connecting with anyone, leaving him alone with mysteries?
Several critics like to point out John Keats’ intense emotions toward Fanny Brawne, and thus, reduce this poem to some obsessive fixation. A cozy prison-box to lump Keats and his poetry into.
Other critics are still learning to love poetry, and unfamiliar with the myriad supple means of connecting words to modernity. Do I err in my (admittedly non-expert) opinion and interpretation? Undoubtedly. The love of the words though means that correction and interaction is playful, joyful, an exercise in hope that what language we share empowers a culture profoundly greater than any of us.
And so I say… “a serpent!” to all such philosophers, that those with cruel dismissals who would lock us all within a prison-box may vaporize. Let us look at the words themselves, and love them, for even if they are merely an illusion that changes when named, they remain powerful and part of us, sometimes enduring far longer than ever we shall.
