Reading ‘Lamia’ by John Keats

Part One

What do you know about Keats?

I’m guessing, even if you don’t know your classics, he’s one of those names you’ve encountered, like Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, T.S Eliot, Sylvia Plath. In the same way people know vaguely that Plath committed suicide and Byron was a shagger, most adults would be able to say that Keats was a romantic poet who died young (in 1821, aged just 25). Perhaps you’ve been to the Spanish Steps in Rome where he spent his last days, hoping the climate would help his tuberculosis, or to his gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery with its words: ‘Here lies One whose name was writ in water’ (so sure was he that his work would be forgotten that many of his friends blamed his death on the critics, with Hunt accusing Quarterly Review’s attack on the poem ‘Endymion’).

If you know Keats a little better – say, you have listened to Sasha Dugdale’s radio documentary ‘John Keats: Life and After-life’ (which I would highly recommend) or watched Jane Campion’s gorgeous film Bright Star (where he is played by Ben Whishaw) – you might know that he was a Londoner, sometimes referred to disparagingly as a ‘cockney’ poet; that he was a medical student at Guy’s Hospital and received an apothecary’s license, before giving it up for poetry; and that during his annus mirabilis, in which he wrote his famous odes, he was living in his friend’s house Wentworth Place on the edge of Hampstead Heath, where ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ was composed under a plum tree in the garden.

You might know, too, about his love for Fanny Brawne, who also lived in Wentworth Place with her mother, and how due to his financial position and poor prospects he couldn’t marry her, so their relationship remained unconsummated. Keats is one of our great poets of tragic romance and sexual frustration…

And what of the poems themselves? Well, on the GCSE syllabus it’s usually the sumptuous ‘To Autumn’, but his other odes are also very well-known – ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ for example. Odes are praise poems addressed to a specific person or thing, but Keats really elevated the form in English with his intricately musical and philosophical works. It’s his odes that are most often referenced in popular culture (see Tim Turnbull’s witty poem ‘Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn’).

After that, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is one of my favourites, a fantastically atmospheric faerie ballad about a knight undone in an ‘elfin grot’ and pining away. Keats’ sonnets ‘When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be’, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and ‘Bright Star’ (the latter written for Fanny) are fine examples of the form – ‘Bright Star’ is, in fact, one of the very few poems I have by heart, though don’t test me when I’m a few glasses of wine down… And if you’ve ever been following my social media on Halloween, you might also know the nightmarish fragment that is ‘This Living Hand…’ is my favourite ghost poem.

If you want to know where to begin with Keats, have a look at these, and see what you think (though don’t click on the last one if you don’t want Keats to haunt you for all eternity).

And if you’re a Keats fan already, and starting to suspect you know more about Keats than I do, well that’s probably true (I’m well aware that Keats super-fans are seriously into their guy). But hear me out.

The reason for this post is that I think his longer poems don’t get enough attention. They’re not novel-length like Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno - instead Keats specialised in poems about the length of a short story, which are easy to read in one sitting. And it’s clear he took them very seriously and poured a lot of his poetic efforts into these longer pieces. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, or ‘Isabella or The Pot of Basil’ are both hugely enjoyable, but we’re going to read ‘Lamia’ together this month. I haven’t read it for twenty years, but from what I do dimly recall I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Let’s start with the poem’s name then, ‘Lamia’.

It’s a woman’s name, like Agnes or Isabella (interesting how Keats always foregrounds the heroine).

But I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say Lamia is also a name that would have been associated with femme fatales. In ancient Greek mythology Lamia is a vengeful mother who, having lost her own children, wreaks revenge by snatching other children and devouring them. She can also, apparently, pop out her eyes and put them back in.

Later, the name Lamia becomes associated with a type of demon that seduces young men then feeds on their flesh afterwards. Keats is inspired to write this poem by an account of Apollonius of Tyana, a Greek philosopher, defeating a Lamia figure.

In many accounts, Lamia is also half-snake (her name might derive from her large throat or gullet), part dragoness, or a kind of vampire.

So when Keats’ readers saw that name at the top of the poem, it’s worth remembering that they would have been coming to it expecting something fairly bloodthirsty about an explicit villainess. It’s a bit like calling your poem Attack of the 50ft Woman or Sharknado.   

The poem, which is out of copyright, is here if you wish to read it in its entirety. But if you’re happy to, we can start it together. I would suggest, for the full effect, reading this aloud:

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.

So what do you notice first of all? ‘Upon a time’ is a nice, freshening up of ‘Once upon a time’ – add the ‘faery broods’ and we seem to be in the land of folk or fairytale. But then all the classical hoards come stumbling in: nymphs, satyrs, dryads, fauns. Jove is another name for Jupiter, the Roman King of the gods, but then we also have Hermes, the messenger of the gods and trickster, called here by his Greek name (the Roman equivalent would be Mercury). It’s a bit of a hotch-potch. The great text it calls to mind is of course, with that reference to the king of the fairies Oberon, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the Greek hero Theseus coexists with Bottom the weaver, an Indian changeling boy, and fairies called Peaseblossom and Mustardseed – but it’s a rich, strange mixture, already larded with proper names. It’s also a kind of highly artificial pastoral, ostensibly set in nature but glittering with artifice: diadems, gems, gold, (and in the next verse) pearls.

What else? It’s in rhyming couplets, which are hard to keep up for a whole, long poem. It’s also in a fairly clean iambic pentameter – an iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, and on each line there are five iambs. This is the metre of Shakespeare too, of course, and is a rhythm associated with ambition and literary greatness. It is a far cry from the raggedy, strange folk-rhythms we heard in Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. Keats is announcing he's a serious Poet.  Now, back to Hermes. Why is he in Crete again?

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.

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.

Well this is kind of gross, and maybe kind of camp too? This poor nymph has hundreds of hairy satyrs following her round the whole time, including hanging out where she bathes. And Hermes is so obsessed with her he blushes from his heels to his hairline! So he’s pretty hot and bothered. And his hair is in ‘jealous curls’ around his ‘bare’ shoulders. What would that even look like? I’m picturing a pink Hans in Zoolander. And then he’s hunting for her ‘secret bed’? Ugh. I’m not sure it will help at all if I tell you I just looked Hermes up on Wikipedia, and apparently he pursued a princess of Crete called Apemosyne, so this might be a version of her?

Apemosyne fled from Hermes, and he couldn’t catch her because she was faster, so Hermes laid some hides across her path to make her slip. Then he raped her. And her brother, angry because he thought she was lying about being molested by a god, kicked her to death.

Right, probably shouldn’t have told you that. We shouldn’t be this pissed off already. Keats says a ‘nymph’ though so maybe it’s someone else anyway… And hold on, because Lamia is coming…

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!"

So a question for you – what do you make of Lamia? What are our first impressions? What’s the effect of hearing her voice before we see her, and does she sound like you expect her to?

Comments are OPEN, so I’d love to hear you thoughts, along with your favourite Keats poems or lines…