Lamia

"Lamia" is a narrative poem written by the English poet John Keats, which first appeared in the volume Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, published in July 1820. The poem was written in 1819, during the famously productive period that produced his 1819 odes. It was composed soon after his "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and his odes on Melancholy, on Indolence, on a Grecian Urn and to a Nightingale and just before "To Autumn". Plot The poem tells how the god Hermes hears of a nymph who is more beautiful than all. Hermes, searching for the nymph, instead comes across Lamia, trapped in the form of a serpent. She reveals the previously invisible nymph to him and in return he restores her human form. She goes to seek a youth of Corinth, Lycius, while Hermes and his nymph depart together into the woods. The relationship between Lycius and Lamia, however, is destroyed when the sage Apollonius reveals Lamia's true identity at their wedding feast, whereupon she seemingly disappears and Lycius dies of grief. Analysis According to Michael O'Neill, Lamia in the poem "is treated ambivalently but with considerable sympathy", making "a sharp contrast with the more leisurely and seemingly uncritical use of romance in [the] two narrative poems that follow ... the hapless Lycius is caught between the reductive rationalism of Apollonius and the bewitching illusoriness of Lamia." Influence At the "immortal dinner party" held by Benjamin Haydon on 28 December 1817, Keats agreed with Charles Lamb that Newton "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours".