Lamia, Keats

·         ‘Lamia’ tells the story of the god Hermes who ears of a nymph who is more beautiful than all. On his way to find the nymph he comes across a Lamia (who is trapped in the form of a serpent). Hermes transforms the Lamia into her human form after she reveals that the previously invisible nymph to him. Lamia goes to the Greek city of Corinth where she falls in love with a man called Lycius. At their bridal feast, Apollonius, one of Lycius’s friends, recognises Lamia as an evil sorceress and calls her by her name. As a result of this Lamia vanishes and heartbroken, Lycius falls dead.

Pluto Roman god of the underworld and judge of the dead.	Plato (ic) Ancient Greek philosopher known for his ‘theory of forms’ - everything on earth, whether an object or an idea, is actually an imperfect copy of an ideal and permanent “form” that exists somewhere, beyond our universe.  Plato believed that the ideal version of love is a meeting of the minds and doesn’t entail a physical aspect― “platonic relationship.”
Hermes An Olympian god in Ancient Greek mythology and religion. He was the messenger of the Gods as well as being the god of transitions and boundaries. He is also the protector of literature and poetry.	Lethe Lethe was also the name of the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion
Jove God of sky and thunder in Ancient Roman mythology.	Circe (an) The goddess of magic (or sometimes a nymph, witch, enchantress or sorceress).
Nymph A mythological spirit of nature imagined as a beautiful maiden who inhabits rivers, woods or other locations.	Crete Greek Island
Satyrs Creatures who looked like men but had the hooves and feet as well as the tails of goats. Pastimes – chase after wood nymphs and play nasty tricks on men.	Corinth The Greek capital city of Corinthia.
Proserpine Roman goddess of the underworld	Elysium A ‘paradise’ or the ‘Elysian Fields’ is a  conception of the afterlife, the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous.
Olympus Mount Olympus – home of the Greek Olympian gods.	Nereids Sea nymphs in Greek mythology who helped sailors on their voyage when face with severe storms.
Apollo Greek god of music; god of healing; god of light; god of truth

·         ‘The sound of characters’ voices are just as important as the words they speak’

·         Before the serpent begins to even speak in the poem, her voice is described as being ‘a mournful voice/such as once heard, in a gentle voice, destroys/All pain but pity’.

·         The use of recurring sibilants capture the serpent’s hissing snakelike voice however the use of the words ‘pain’ and ‘pity’ portray the vulnerability of the serpent and creates pathos for the reader. Nevertheless, the negative ‘satanic’ connotations of a serpent make us cautious of the snake supposedly because of her ability to charm.

·         ‘Her throat was serpent but the words she spake/ Came, as through bubbling honey’ – captures the seductive power and sweetness of her voice – Keats could be trying to almost warn us of the way in which we as readers should consider the words used in the poem by characters.

·         Keats also wants us to know how Hermes sounds and so his voice is compared by the other vocal tones of the other gods. For example the voice of Muses is described as being ‘soft, lute-finger’d...chanting clear’. The fact that his voice is being compared to the other gods makes him more complex –

·         ‘It is Lamia who must go in pursuit of her man, apparently reversing the conventions of traditional romance narrative’

·         Narrative rhyme of 708 lines of rhymed couplets.

·         The opening words ‘once upon a time’ echo a fairy tale, an appropriate opening for a narrative that involves mythological creatures such as nymphs, satyrs and gods.

·         A lamia – reputed to feast on the blood of children.

·         “There are instances when the women of his poetry are also literally cruel, the two most obvious examples being Lamia, a 'cruel lady' (I. 290) and the mysterious La Belle Dame Sans Merci who seduces and then abandons the knight, leaving him anguished, 'haggard' and 'woe-begone'. In both of these examples, there is an inextricable link between sex and cruelty. The women use sex to assert their supremacy over men - ultimately obtaining power and control rather than love.”

·         “Lamia's seduction of Lycius is wholly dishonest, she is a serpent, a 'gordian shape of dazzling hue' who bribes the love-struck Hermes to turn her into a woman so that she can enact her seduction of Lycius (her ruthlessness even extends so far that she perpetuates female subordination as a way to meet her own needs: she reveals the nymph to Hermes hence treating her as nothing more than a bargaining tool). He is duly dumbstruck by her beauty, so much so he believes her to be a Goddess. Her incredible sexuality dims Lycius's common sense.”

·         However we still feel sympathetic towards Lamia towards the end of the poem. Appollonius and his ‘cold philosophy’ destroy Lamia from her human form – ultimately it is males that either transform her into her female form and she depends on males to prolong her female form as well.

·         “In some ways Lamia is cruel but Keats resists the temptation to make her only that, making her a multi-faceted character rather than a simple, one dimensional villain. She is a Romantic 'pin-up', if you will; rationality and reason being what ultimately crushes both hers and Lycius's happiness.”

·         However, the fact that she is a female in a time where females were seen as inferior as men, the fact that she has the ability to be ‘cruel’ makes her powerful. On the other hand, we may also feel sympathy for her because despite her power and ability she is still destroyed both physically and emotionally – she ‘vanishes’ and her love with Lycius at her own dinner party is destroyed. She is in a worst state than what she was at the beginning of the poem when she took the form of a serpent as opposed to her ceasing to exist at the end of the poem.

·         “Throughout his poetry, the feminine presence is an intricate one. He is puzzled and enchanted by women.”

Heroic couplets ­ reflect characters/story
Iambic pentameter ­ typical of Greek Mythology
Couplets run over rhyme scheme to progress to end/sense of continuous motion.

·         Since Hermes in Greek Mythology is known as being cunning, our suspicions arise when he appears in the beginning of  the poem. 

La Belle Dame Sans Merci (essay improvement)

Explore the ways in which Keats depicts power in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’

Jess Cornelius

Keats represents power in an ambiguous way in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Although Keats uses a traditional ballad form, used to depict the story in the most archaic way possible, the way he depicts powerful people are not commonplace of those who were powerful in his time – for example, the Knight is portrayed as being weak and lonely while the kings, princes and warriors are ‘deathly pale’. The fact that the beautiful woman the narrator describes who ‘shows no mercy’ is interesting because although she is the supposedly most powerful in the poem, she is a mysterious character who cannot be translated easily in the poem – we are unaware of who she truly is and why she has such a powerful effect on the hapless knights, kings, princes and warriors. At the time, Keats was experiencing his own conflicts that perhaps created the foundation of the poem. For example, Keats was said to have been ‘on fire poetically, in love, growing ill and suffering from depression’.  Keats had begun to show symptoms of tuberculosis after nursing his brother, which could have possibly influenced the weak portrayal of the knight and of the dying, bleak and ‘withering’ scene that is portrayed in the first stanza.

Keats begins ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ with a question and response form in order to structure the narrative. In this question and response ‘interrogation’, we begin to get an idea of where this narrative is set and captivate the supposedly difficult situation the knight has found himself in. Because the narrator’s questions to the knight ‘oh what can ail the, knight – at – arms’, are repeated in the first two stanzas, we are constantly reminded of the dire situation the knight is in and how hopeless and powerless he is. The question also becomes pitying the second time it is used, because we as the reader are aware of how at odds this knight is within society and how unlike a knight he is due to the adjectives and nouns used such as ‘alone and palely loitering’, ‘so haggard and so woe-begone’.

The repetition of the words and phrases used in the first two stanzas are also used in the last stanza, such as ‘alone and palely loitering’ and ‘the sedge has withered from the lake’ not only creates a cyclical structure in the poem but it suggests the incapability of the powerless to move forward or to escape anything. Those who are powerful, which in this case is ‘a lady’ who is ‘fully beautiful’ entraps ‘pale kings … pale princes…and pale warriors’ on a ‘cold hill side’.  From this, we can infer that only those who possess beauty, who are ‘full beautiful’ are the most dominant, while those who lack this sense of beauty and majestic power only become powerless like those ‘on the cold hill side’, who are ‘death – pale…starved lips in the gloam’.

Keats also represents power and control by the way he structures the poem and the rhyme scheme he uses. For example, although Keats uses a traditional ballad with the traditional quatrain to appropriate the form to its medieval  story, Keats controls the way in which the sentences are structured to move the narrative forward. He alternates between tetrameters & trimeters which creates an almost ‘sing – song’ pace, however Keats compresses the lines by using three tetrameters followed by a final short line of 5 or 4 syllables therefore hastening the poem’s rhythm. He does this to cause disruption in this natural ‘sing song’ flow of the poem, reflecting the disruption that is experienced by the knight.  As a result of this, stanzas 1, 2 and 13 sound more abrupt such as ‘no birds sing’, ‘and the harvest’s done’, gives us a sense of the knight’s fate. We get an vivid image of desolation and we as the readers feel as though we can almost ‘see through the eyes’ of the knight – we feel a sense of loneliness, helplessness and vulnerability as the setting gives us the sense of the predicament of the knight.  By controlling the rhythm, Keats highlights the disruptions the Knight faces in this poem which subsequently makes him less powerful – for example the fact that he is ‘alone and palely loitering’ and ‘so haggard and woe-begone’ gives us the image that he is lost and lacks control in a unknown place suggesting that he is a weak knight.

It also important to note that when the mysterious lady appears, rhyme appears to become more constant, evolving into more of a full rhyme than some of the half rhymes that are used such as ‘loitering’ and ‘sing’ and ‘begone’ and ‘done’ when the knight is the main focus in the narrative. When the lady is the main focus of the narrative in stanza 4 appears, rhyme seems to become more constant and Keats begins to use full rhymes more frequently, such as ‘child’ and ‘wild’, ‘dew’ and ‘true’ and ‘all’ and ‘thrall’. This highlights the power this mysterious lady has over the knight who is ‘alone and palely loitering’, a deliberate technique Keats uses in order to make the lady seem like an enchantress and something of the supernatural – for example she is described as being a ‘faery’s child’ and living in an ‘elfin grot’ as well as being able to ‘lull’ the knight to sleep- this portrayal of the lady makes her seem subhuman – she lacks human characteristics but she possesses magical or supernatural powers that makes her powerful.

However, the way in which Keats chooses certain characters to depict them as being powerful is not stereotypical and is unusual for his time. From the very beginning to the very end of the poem we are almost disappointed by the knight because he does not show any heroic actions which we would expect from a knight – even when he does appear to show a little more power in stanza 5 by making ‘a garland for her head’, and therefore essentially objectifying her, she is still more powerful not just to the knight when he is ‘lulled to sleep’ but also to the atmosphere of the poem – we as readers almost forget the miserable bleak scene, as ‘no birds sing’ and the ‘sedge has withered from the lake’ which is being described at the start of the poem because in her presence things seem to be ‘fragrant’ and ‘floral’. Not only that, but the fact that this lady has the ability to entice the most powerful and the most elite who are all terrified of the lady when they cry ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci/Hath the in thrall!’ makes her seem not only the most powerful but it intimidates us as the readers. 

The poem demonstrates a parallel between the Knight’s situation and Keats’ conflicts with the pains of love. It could therefore be said that the lady is symbolic for this love and subsequent pain Keats had felt  - Keats is the knight who ‘meets’ the lady (or in his own life, has fallen in love) and as a result comes into conflict with the pains of love (paralleling with the knight’s own difficult situation when he is left on ‘a cold hill side’ and is ‘alone and palely loitering’).  This is demonstrated in an extract of a letter from Keats to Fanny Brawne, his fiancée, when he was living in the Isle of Wight – he says  ‘if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me I have never known any unalloy’d  Happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of someone has always  spoilt my hours’. Keats had experienced much grief and sadness in his turbulent life – for example, his father’s sudden death and his mother’s subsequent marriage two months later, followed by both his mother’s and brother’s death from tuberculosis meant that ‘death or sickness of someone’ had ‘always spoilt’ his life. If this is the case, and if the lady is supposed to be symbolic of love, then Keats is trying to tell us that love is much more dangerous than grief. It has captivated and destroyed the ‘pale kings…princes … and warriors’ and had left the knight, weak and vulnerable therefore somewhat unheroic as he himself is destroyed by ‘love’ or the lady. As a result, we can infer that Keats’ experience with love in his life is more destroying than the griefs of sickness and death in his life, therefore making love a more powerful, more stronger emotion, something that Keats in his own life was experiencing himself.