Lamia, the poem of the Priest of Beauty, as Oscar Wilde defined John Keats during the late Victorian era, is deeply embedded both in the traditions of the aesthetics of beauty, canonic for the English high poetry and first formulated by Philip Sidney in 1581 (The Defence of Poetry) and in the subculture, which produced the phenomenon of the English middle class as exceptional need for luxury and pleasure. The abundance of pleasure seeping from poem verses could satiate expectations for exclusive sensations even of the most effeminate audience with images of beautiful nymphs, at whose white feet the languid Triton poured pearls (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) or belles bowing down to their beloved like a fading moon or a flower cuddled into itself when evening comes (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). The lovely poem, however, also offers one of the most luxurious images inhabiting the dreams of some Gautier’s protagonists (Ramold from La Morte Amoureuse is also a priest) or Kazot – the enamored female vampire - an image implied originally by John Milton in Paradise Lost.
The poem Lamia was first published in 1820, a year before the young poet’s untimely demise (23 February 1821) as part of collection under the same title, which was found in Shelly’s pocket on the day of his death (8 July 1822). Critical reception of Keats’s works is usually defined by concepts, traditional for early English theory of literature, which differentiate in their basic search for poetry in terms of its pleasurableness and its moral value. And since positive assessment of representatives of the latter trend could be limited to findings of forthcoming turning point or maturing in the last book of the young author, without being able to exclude the abundance of allure therein (“It is impossible not to feel with weariness how his verse is at every turn abandoning itself to an unmanly and enervating luxury”, wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins; Thomas Carlyle defined Keats as ‘a miserable creature, hungering after sweets which he can’t get; going about saying, “I am so hungry; I should so like something pleasant’; “The most exclusively aesthetic and the most absolutely non–moral of all serious writers on record”, Algernon Charles Swinburne), we shall abandon detailed discussion of these meta-literary prerequisites and shall only point out that Keats’s poetry has been elevated to a cult by the Pre-Raphaelites Group. According to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Keats is one of the models of the idea of art for the sake of art itself.
I would like to review some principal statements with regards to the publishing context of Lamia. One of these is the phenomenon of English bourgeoisie, which according to Ayumi Mizukoshi (Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure, Ayumi Mizukoshi) could be understood through the key of luxury. In his opinion, luxury could be defined as the most significant socio-political idea in England in 17th century. English middle class at that time was the most luxuriously living part of the world population, which of course included fostering of elite culture. In one aspect, such elite taste may be regarded as formation of national sub-cultural aesthetics predefined by the cult of Ancient Greece, which, in cultural competition with Classical France, became and aspect of English policy. The interest towards ancient Greece art is a very important characteristic of English romanticism, which developed as opposition to the French model of neo-classicism of Latin origin adopted by European art. Insofar as Latin, Roman art is a copy, imitation of the ancient Greek original, the French model of Roman neo-classicism must submit to the supremacy of English romanticism (or Greek “neo-classicism”). Along with tourist destinations on Sublime Porte territory, the fashion of antique decorations, collection and production of ancient Greek artifacts and imitations, one of the imminent specifics of ancient Greek sub-culture in England is also the interest for poetry, which became part of the commercialization process of English bourgeois leisure time. In the beginning of 19th century poetry in England became national obsession, which in turn provided for formation of class - distinct concepts of elite and profane aesthetics.
If luxury, however, as Ayumi Mizukoshi claims, could have the importance of a socio-political idea, it might be perceived as some form of social decoration, too, of a “paradise lost”. Insofar leisure is starting to turn into a new market, it becomes a legitimate, integral part of social space and, in this sense, people, or at least representatives of bourgeoisie, are perceived not only as working but also as holidaying individuals, similarly to Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos'd/ Labour, as to debarr us when we need/ Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,/ Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse/ Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow,/ To brute deni'd, and are of Love the food,/ Love not the lowest end of human life./ For not to irksom toile, but to delight/ He made us, and delight to Reason joyn'd.
The plot of the vampire poem Lamia recreates a popular story from pre-Christian era told by Flavius Philostratos in his philosophic and religions novel The Life of Apollonius Tyanaeus (3rdThe Bride of Corinth and is believed to be one of the first vampire stories in Greek literature. In this story, the vampire (Greek Empusa, lamia (λαμίας) and mormolyce (μορμολυκίας) are depicted as demonic creatures seducing handsome young men in order to feast on their flesh and blood. One important aspect in this story, however, is the neo-Pythagorean Apollonius, who lived in the 1st century AD and, with his words, was capable of destroying vampire’s spells and make her admit to her evil intentions. In the beginning of the 19th century this form of the story was only available in original, which is the reason for many researchers to believe that, since Keats had no university background and had not studied ancient Greek, he could not possibly have been aware of the complete Philostratos’ s version but only the concise English translation, which, in my opinion, is quite doubtful or at least unproductive for the analysis of Lamia poem. (Moreover, Keats repeatedly announced his intention to start learning ancient Greek; therefore he must have had some idea of, and access to certain texts). I am writing all this because the Apollonius character in the English poem seems to have been purposefully created similar to the character, which the novel of Flavius Philostratos strived to denounce, namely that Apollonius was not a magician and sorcerer, as was the common belief in the Roman Empire during the rule of Emperor Septimius Severus, but a renowned man of wisdom and preacher. Nevertheless, his words, though philosophic in the original, and fanatic in the fictional text, have the same exorcistic effect since he destroyed spells and made the demon admit to her evil intentions. century AD). The story is known as
Though the level of Keats’s knowledge of the original ancient Greek version of The Bride of Corinth is uncertain, we must say that the English source of the plot is explicitly stated in the poem – the philosophic novel of Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. There, however, the story is “dramatically“ reduced and laid in a completely different and even contrary to the original, context. Burton quoted the story of Philostratos in Chapter 1 of Section Three (Love Melancholy) of his research named Heroical love causeth Melancholy. His Pedigree, Power, and Extent, whose purpose is to show the power of love affecting even the demons of the underworld. Moreover, he “overlooked” translating the last part of Philostratos’s story. In this context, we have a completely different interpretation of the Lamia character. In Burton’s text she is not the seducer trying to lure the handsome youth because she is essentially disposed to feed on human flesh and blood but just a demon in love, the same as Biondetta in Kazot’s Le diable amoureux and Clarimonda – in Theofan Gautier’s La Morte Amoureuse. Lamia is the invariant vampire chosen by Burton among the three creatures from Philostratos’s story- empusa, lamia and mormolyce. In this sense, the discern-ability of Burton’s quotation from The Bride of Corinth in John Keats’s poem puts the female protagonist in the context of the enamored demon and then without any doubt about the possibility of such behavior on the part of the power, which, according to Goethe, “wishes evil but does good”.
Certainly, while examining the motive for diable amoureux, this issue arises of the possible French source, which might cause some bewilderment to the “fans” of English romanticism (Kazot’s novel was first published in 1772). However, the idea of diable amoureux is not French but revolutionary and English. It was first “suggested” in Paradise Lost, of all works (first published in 10 chapters in 1667 and again in 1674 but divided into 12 chapters in imitation of Virgil’s Eneida) by John Milton – a book, which Keats was reading in the summer of 1919 specially in connection with building the character of the woman-serpent in his poem. Beth Lau, which examined in detail Keats’s interpretation of Paradise Lost (Keats's Paradise Lost), pointed out that Keats’s copy had the poem sections underlined, which described the serpent, for instance, in Book 4 “the serpent sly,/ Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine/ His braided train" (4.347-49), as well as the ones describing devil’s invasion of the serpent body in Book 9 and the way she allured Eve (158-61, 179, 499-510, 512, 516-17, 525-26, 631-43, 664-78, 1068).
The verses underlined by Keats (347-49) in Book 4 of Paradise Lost belong to the scene presenting the Garden and Satan’s first impressions of Adam and Eve (4.358 - 365), which “strangely” remind of David’s Psalm 8 where man is depicted as magnificent creation (When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour; thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; Ps.8: 4 – 7):
O Hell! what doe mine eyes with grief behold,
Into our room of bliss thus high advanc't
Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps,
Not Spirits, yet to heav'nly Spirits bright
Little inferior; whom my thoughts pursue
With wonder, and could love, so lively shines
In them Divine resemblance, and such grace
The hand that formd them on thir shape hath pourd.
(bolding is mine)
Besides reminding of a very popular David’s psalm, these verses imply that Satan could love the human creature: whom my thoughts pursue/ With wonder, and could love, so lively shines/ In them Divine resemblance.
Of course, the modality of this possibility is conditional (could love) and turns into major dramaturgical principle incidental to all artistic interpretations of the aforementioned motive. Readers’ experience of Keats’s poem is already encumbered with certain skepticism required for the development of conflict situation on previous literature works. In Le diable amoureux, for instance, the reader seems to be “forewarned” for behavioral motives of characters, thus the plot –playing enamored – has the task, which is wonderfully accomplished to an extent where the finale looks, not artistically but rather ideologically premised, to shake such initial information by putting it in conditional modality. In the course of action, the reader is bifurcated by the initial information about devil’s bad intentions and the way he plays his role of enamored, losing their notion of real and illusionary, of true and functional, of actual and theatrical and thus the finale, though artistically justified, creates the illusion of unrealism.
A similar dramaturgical principle is found in Keats’s Lamia, which, without relying on oxymoron title such as Le diable amoureux or La Morte Amoureuse, with its paratextuality, places the plot in the already existing conflict situation of the ancient myth of Lamia. The title, which to a certain extent follows or updates the model of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, creates the expectation of a poem dedicated to the fate of the ancient Greek heroine. The first verses (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.) confirm the already formed notion locating the action in the chronotopes of ancient mythology, but certainly the luxurious way this is done, with the mention of King Oberon and the fairy world of Middle Age England, adds an additional, English accent, which is very important for the poem – the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first play in English literature to introduce Celtic folklore characters and where the aforementioned King Oberon undertakes the arrangement of “Les Liaisons dangereuses” of two Athenian couples, which are also heroes of ancient Greek epos – Demetrius and Helena and Lysander and Hermia.
Of course, the diligent plot placement in the ancient mythological world aims at initiating in readers’ minds the notion of the ancient Greek myth of Lamia. According to most researches, Keats learned of this myth from Lemprière Classical Dictionary, which contains the following encyclopedia entry on Lamia: Certain monsters of Africa, who had the face and breast of a woman, and the rest of their body like that of a serpent. They allured strangers to come to them, that they might devour them, and though they were not endowed with the faculty of speech, yet their hissings were pleasing and agreeable. Some believed them to be witches, or rather evil spirits, who, under the form of a beautiful woman, enticed young children and devoured them. According to some, the fable of the Lamiae is derived from the amours of Jupiter with a certain beautiful woman called Lamia, whom the jealousy of Juno rendered deformed, and whose children she destroyed; upon which Lamia became insane, and so desperate that she eat up all the children that came in her way. They are also called Lemures. (J. Lemprière, A Classical Dictionary; Containing a Copious Account of All the Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors, 1st American from the 6th London ed. ( New York, 1809)
The dictionary definition of Lamia, which we find there, may certainly be made problematic from the point of view of contemporary knowledge of the ancient world but it justifies association of the protagonist image as female serpent with that of Lilith, who appears with a woman’s face and a serpent body in illustrations from a medieval missal, in the Pietro d'Orvieto fresco at Pisa and, of course, in Michelangelo’s Capella Sixtina ceiling in a way similar to ancient Egyptian sculptures of serpents, with a woman's bust and face, coiled around a tree. In this sense it could be said that the notion of Lamia during the time of English romanticism implicitly contains the motive of gender transformation or travesty of devil and lost paradise.
Bernice Slote, the American researcher with probably the greatest contribution to John Keats research (Keats and the Dramatic Principle), suggests the thesis of dramaturgical principles underlying Lamia, which include the essential for the genre opposition between situations and characters; poem structuring into scenes as well as additional theatrical methods including choir imitation. According to Slote, all three literary invariants of the story of The Bride of Corinth – of Philostratos, Burton and Keats – contain essential dramatic conflict between Lamia and Apollonius. The same conflict, however, could also be presented as a conflict between devil’s irrational love and philosopher’s knowledge of good and evil. Looked at that way, the plot conflict may be perceived as peculiar inversion of Paradise Lost where the enamored devil enters into conflict with the man who has sinned such as Apollonius. Certainly, we will not offer interpretation of Lamia in the context of “small diabolic tragedy” here, or Diaboliada, where the devil allures man to eat from the tree and knowledge without knowing that he will fall in love with that man at some future time and will bitterly regret being recognized by the latter as evil.
Various projections of this major conflict between “alluring” words, which are rhetorical or artistic in nature and which strive to initiate suggestions on meta level, beyond lexical meaning of words, and the “objective” words, which name and categorize reality in measurable conceptual sememas and semantic classes, in Keats’s poem are the conflict between divine and human worlds and the meanings of object in those two dimensions; the conflict between dream and reality, between imaginary and real, between the world of living and the world of dead. According to Bernice Slote, the two parts of Lamia are strictly structured with the almost classically balanced contrast between the immortal and mortal. The first part of the poem begins with a long scene (177 verses) between Hermes, Lamia and the nymph, followed by three short scenes, which gradually introduce readers into the world of dreams where the illusionary space of love is found in Corinth. The second part represents the way back – three short scenes take the characters and the reader out of the world of “Corinth dreams” back to reality depicted by a big long scene (166 verses) between Lycius, Lamia and Apollonius. Such structure could provide a perception about some aspects applicable to Lamia character since it reveals very interesting parallels in the character system composition and plot situations. One of these is the possibility to resolve conflicts in the aspects of their visualization (of visibility and invisibility). For instance, in the beginning Lamia protects the beautiful nymph from unwanted courtiers making her invisible for those she could not fall in love with. However, later on Lamia becomes passionate but Apollonius, trying to protect his disciple, makes his beloved disappear forever.
The issue of visibility and invisibility of object as expression of categorical relationships, between good and evil for example, is of course related to their visible form, which begins to be perceived as an objective semiotic system of the characters’ essential nature. What do I mean? According to Bernice Slote, metamorphoses or transformations are the drivers in the poem plot. Metamorphoses are the acts of dramatic conflict creation and resolving and of dramatic action development. Moreover, in the dramaturgical unity of the poem metamorphoses breed one another. Metamorphosis or imagination, which Lamia makes with the nymph making her invisible for Hermes (by visualization), becomes the reason or precondition for Lamia’s metamorphosis from serpent into female form performed by the grateful Hermes. Thanks to this inverse metamorphosis of Ovid, Lycius “automatically” falls in love with Lamia because he can see her. In turn, she “automatically” transforms for him the real world into a dream world because he is in love with her. Apollonius, in his turn, destroys and transforms Lamia into nothing that could be objectively contemplated, nothing sensory. This last metamorphosis, however, from body into nothing or from visible into invisible shape, causes the demise of Lycius. Thus, metamorphoses in Keats’s poem could be perceived as the visible surface, which reflects the deep “undercurrent” of the actual dramatic conflict. Metamorphoses are theatrical, imaginable, visual metaphors of essential moods and attitudes of heroes. For example, Lycius falls in love with Lamia not because of her wonderful metamorphosis but simple because he sees her; Lamia “transforms” Lycius’s dreams into reality simply because he is in love and this happens of itself, because this is the way the eyes of a person in love see the world. In this aspect, metamorphoses in Keats’s poem could be regarded as visual shape; these are projected image, depiction or imaginary form of some internal essence. Lamia projects the nymph image into Hermes’s eternal dream; Hermes projects Lamia’s image into human reality; Apollonius, in turn, erases such image from reality.
The metamorphosis as created in its primary poetic form by Ovid could be perceived as semiotic system or visual metaphor expressing some essential attitude. It is the possible objective form of an essential human emotion in eternity. In this sense, it is not random but internally reconditions; it represents some internal essence. Let us examine the first metamorphosis of Lamia, from serpent into woman on the basis of aforementioned considerations about metamorphosis semantics.
Actually, the reader first meets Lamia through the sound picture of her lone voice, mournful voice, which is capable of suppressing all pain in a gentle heart and invoke compassion (such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys/ All pain but pity):
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!
In these verses the human body is presented as possibility of a perfect life (fit for life) and as the only form, which can accomplish the full charm of love. It is identified as the only form of expression and realization of love as an exquisite form of amorousness. In this sense love may be regarded also as the only meaning of human life, essential expression of humane. Human body organs (lips and heart) are the only ones, which can implement love as feeling, presence, as being in reality. In the aspects of the enamored devil plot we could say that human body turns into a preferred metamorphosis, which is capable of resurrecting a lost completeness; it is the ideal form for realization of a love disposition (for instance, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the devil enters the serpent because he finds her form as the most appropriate one for realization of his evil intentions – in whose mazie foulds/ To hide me, and the dark intent I bring (161, 162). In this sense, and with the assumption that human body is the expression of an essential longing for love, a possible metamorphosis of Lamia into human body might be regarded just as an aspect of her nature, as a form of her love.
Before continuing, the distant similarity must be pointed out of the quoted verse with the fragment of Mozart’s Requiem – Lacrimosa (Similar observations will be made further, too, in the poem analysis since these are part of the sub-culture of luxury where it was laid):
Lacrimosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus.
Huic ergo parce, Deus:
Pie Jesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem. Amen.
The aspects leading to the expectation of resurrection from the metamorphosis into a human body are imperative, on the one hand, because of the perception of serpent body as grave in verse 38 (wreathed tomb), and the perception of life without love as backwater, and on the other hand – by epithets like winged heels and dove-footed, which represent Hermes in the semiotics of a Christian harbinger angel.
This, however, is the visible form of Lamia in the beginning (47 – 65):
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…
The way the visual image of Lamia is described rather creates the feeling of a luxurious boudoir or dressing room strewed with precious stones (Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue), which shine with dazzling exquisiteness (even the image ‘silver moons’ creates the feeling of some expensive jewelry). The mention of leopard and zebra skin qualities, which are logically incompatible with the description of any other animal skin, seem more like luxurious garments, and the presence of ancient Greek names (Ariadne’s tiar; Proserpine) function more like prestigious fashionable labels. In this sense, the visual image of a woman-serpent offered in Keats’s poem, invokes the presence of an expensively dressed woman. In verse 92, for instance, Lamia is called brilliance feminine, and Hermes addresses her with beauteous wreath.
However, I would like to draw special attention to verses 55 and 56: She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf,/ Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self, where the image of the penitent sinner is preset, particularly that of Mary Magdalene from Caravaggio’s painting Penitent Magdalene. This image is later developed in the poem in the aspects of metamorphose for which Lamia is begging and which takes place in verses 146 to 166. Such metamorphosis is presented as penitence from Caravaggio’s painting, as removing jewels and expensive garments (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). In this sense, in the semantics of Lamia metamorphosis we could search for the semantic expression ‘penitence’. The image of the penitent sinner, I believe, could rightly be referred to the logos of Lamia since the modern semantic class of her name contains the notion of a renowned Corinthian courtesan, which lived in the third century BC and which was the respected lover of the ancient Greek warrior Demetrius (Demetrius Poliorcetes – 337-283 BC). Plutarch, in his work The life of Demetrius, mentioned that, notwithstanding her fading beauty and the fact that Demetrius was many years her junior, shed so much charmed him that, of all women Demetrius had, he could only truly love Lamia. Another legendary Corinthian prostitute was mentioned by Burton in his The Anatomy of Melancholy. This was the exceptionally beautiful Lais, who lived during the Peloponnese war. She was the lover of Arystyp, the ancient Greek philosopher and disciple of Socrates, who dedicated most of his works to her; unfortunately these works were lost. Arystyp preached that the aim of life is pursuit of pleasure (ευδαιμονία - bliss). Corinth, the place where Keats’s poem is set, in addition to the First Message of Apostle Paul to its citizens speaking of true Christian love, was also famous as the most favorable environment for the development of the Burton’s so-called melancholy of love since the place was abundant with Venus temples. “Corinth so infamous of old, and the opportunity of the place to entertain those foreign comers; every day strangers came in, at each gate, from all quarters. In that one temple of Venus a thousand whores did prostitute themselves, as Strabo writes, besides Lais and the rest of better note: all nations resorted thither, as to a school of Venus.“(Burton)
Maybe from the aspects of penitence only or the model of Mary Magdalene, the penitent sinner, we could understand the transformed image of Lamia combining the newborn, pure bride (a lady bright,/ A full-born beauty new and exquisite) and the experienced in the art of love, Cupid’s school graduate – an image identical to the “school of Venus” mentioned in The Anatomy of Melancholy.
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.
Lamia metamorphosis is signified as “Renaissance” of Beauty, which, notwithstanding its exceptionally erotic explications (A virgin purest lipp’d, yet in the lore/ Of love deep learned to the red heart’s core), could be associated with the dialectical evangelist image of the wise Virgin. I would like to draw attention to another thing associated with the image of the spring garden with flowers in bloom used in verse 187 (on spring-flowered lea/ Spread a green kirtle to the minstrelsy). An interesting parallel may be made with the image of the Heaven-descending, as a bride dressed up for her groom, New Jerusalem of St. John Theologos (Rev. 21:2). In this case, however, it must be said that Keats’s image could be perceived as Renaissance (Regain) of the Eden Garden of the Old Testament, the Garden of Adam and Eve, whilst the New Jerusalem is a completely different topos and has the meaning of man’s habitat after Resurrection. Further in the text, we will elaborate on that. Another interesting observation with regard to this scene is the parallel between the metaphorical “veiling” of Lamia as a bride and unveiling of the nymph (It is Lamia that puts the veil (by my power is her beauty veil’d – bolding is mine) on the nymph to abate her courtiers) in front of Hermes.
One function of the scene between Hermes and the nymph is to parallel the love story of Lamia and Lycius by outlining the contrast between divine and earthly, imaginary and real, eternal and transient. Similar approach is used by William Shakespeare, Keats’s favorite writer, in the aforementioned comedy Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the background of Tezeus’s wedding, several love stories develop – between the two young couples – Demetrius and Helena and Lysander and Hermia; the fairy one between Oberon and Titania and the Ovid one between Piram and Tisba in the tragicomic horror remake of the amateur theatrical cast – reflecting the thesis of the marital happy end of love in the diversity of plot lines and genre conventions, which the chaotic dream chronotop offers. With Keats, the divine story has the function of sanctioning dream in artistic space of the poem, identifying it with divine reality.
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.
The dream is perceived as divine reality (Real are the dreams of Gods) and a form of immortality. From this point of view, the poem theogony describes immortality of gods with their eternal dreaming. In this sense, the dream as reality of human existence could be regarded as a form of divine life.
A very interesting contamination of the encyclopedic myth of Lamia and the story of Flavius Philostratus is the identification of Lycius with Jupiter, made by Keats in his poem.
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.
Thus a sort of myth inversion results where it is not the supreme god who takes a mortal girl as lover but Lamia, who to a great extent could be perceived in the aspects of divine or afterlife, and who falls in love with a mortal man resembling Jupiter in merit. It is this love that kindles the desire of the female demon to actually reinstate her human body, however, the metamorphosis, unlike the usual metamorphoses of Jupiter, is realized as act of love and not seduction. Lamia chooses a human body as a form of amorousness in order to preserve her mood for love, to be in the state of love. In this sense, if we are to update the semantic model of the enamored devil, we must acknowledge that the metamorphosis completed aims at realization of an act of love rather than temptation.
Let us see how this love happens. It seems that the poem once again relies on plot inversion in Paradise Lost. With Milton, the devil in a serpent’s body allures Eve when she first walks away from Adam. With Keats, Lycius, the male character, retreats, walks away from his companions (he made retire/ From his companions), from Corinth talk, engaging, please pay attention, in platonic deliberations:
Thoughtless at first, but ere eve’s star appeared
His phantasy was lost, where reason fades,
In the calm’d twilight of Platonic shades.
In this sense, Lycius’s retreat, withdrawal from his companions is presented as philosophic act, as act of revelation. From this point of view, the actions that follow could be perceived more like philosophic reflections on the nature of Beauty and Love and of their feasibility, their reality on earth. This includes this final scene where the philosopher Apollonius, especially in the text of Flavius Philostratus, turns the wedding feast into philosophic discussion. The scene where Lycius first meets Lamia is projected in the context of fatal action as the one undertaken by Orpheus, who looked back to see whether his Eurydice was still following him (Orpheus-like at an Eurydice). From this motive, however, the element is used, which must underline Lycius’s expectation, when looking back, to see something he has longed for all his life (a whole summer long), and only several verse further on the drama is updated of the archetypal situation in the aforementioned semantic class where the fear lies of losing the vision, which has been “accomplished”, as Orpheus loses the almost resurrected Eurydice in this fatal act of love. In this sense, it could be said that Lycius, from the very beginning, realizes that Lamia is a vision and that her visible image as Beauty is only possible in the form of vision. She is perceived as eidos, a possible result of the philosophic revelation of Beauty for which Lycius searched a whole summer long. That is, from the very beginning Lycius realized that the beauty he was seeing or visualizing (actually, Lycius means “light”) whereto human criteria for measurability could not be applied as presented in the form of cup, which refilled itself any time someone drank from it (And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up,/ Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup,/ And still the cup was full), seem to exist not as human body or sense but rather as contents, as origin of such form, as material measure of the existing visual image. Thus, he could only perceive Lamia as Goddess, Naiad (Stay! though a Naiad of the rivers, stay! / To thy far wishes will thy streams obey), forest nymph (Stay! though the greenest woods be thy domain,/ Alone they can drink up the morning rain), Pleiad (Though a descended Pleiad, will not one/ Of thine harmonious sisters keep in tune/ Thy spheres, and as thy silver proxy shine?) or, in other words, as eidos. In this sense, we could regard the meeting of Lycius with Lamia as platonic inference, visualization or revelation that Beauty has no objective reality beyond imaginable and the world of ideas because its origin and its characteristics may only be divine. The short exercise on the topic of Orpheus and Eurydice where the first “love game” of the characters in Keats’s poem takes place, begins with Lycius’s absolute belief that even if his Eurydice (we should remind here that almost to the end Lycius did not know the true name of Lamia and only recognized his beloved in comparable poetic models) disappeared, he would die at the same moment. (Even as thou vanishest so I shall die). Though not mentioned, such words are not vane but find reflection in another ancient Greek myth about the relations between lovers from the world of dead and the world of living. This is the myth of Laodamia. Her fiancé, Protesilaus, had to sail with Geek ships to Troy immediately after the wedding. When she heard about her husband’s death, Laodamia begged the gods to revive his in order to bid him farewell. They agreed and Protesilaus came to life for three hours. When the time came for him to return to the dead, Laodamia could not bear the parting and killed herself. In Plato’s Symposium, Lycius’s words that he would rather die if his beautiful vision disappeared, find even stronger congruence. In his praise of Eros, Phaedrus quotes exactly this part of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice claiming that “coddled” Orpheus showed weakness because instead of finding the courage to die of love, he “contrived” to enter Hades alive. Moreover, Phaedrus believed that gods only showed Orpheus the ghost of Eurydice and not her herself.
Extremely interesting is the next line of Lamia, which of course is not devoid of some perfectly exquisite coquetry. Actually, if we are to examine the heroine’s words in the dramaturgical context of coquetry, we could say that her influence over Lycius is due solely to her refined feminine behavior and not magic. According to the aforementioned treatise of Burton, one trick that almost always works when a woman wishes to bind down or “bewitch” (charm) her chosen one, is to reject him at first. Similar piece of advices gives Hermia in Midsummer Night’s Dream when Helena asks her how she has managed to win Demetrius’s love though not of great beauty: Helena: O, teach me how you look, and with what art/ You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart. Hermia: I frown upon him, yet he loves me still. I give him curses, yet he gives me love. The more I hate, the more he follows me. In this sense, it could be said that Lycius’s love is ingenuous, i.e. he is not bewitched by Lamia as, for instance, the love begins of one of the most popular literary couples – Tristan and Isolde, who drink wine with charming herbs. The magic in the love of Lamia and Lycius only relates to metamorphosis in feminine form, to real embodiment in a female body but neither is this magic dependent on Lamia (the metamorphosis is caused by Hermes), such as the devil’s entering a serpent body in Paradise Lost, nor is Lycius’s love the result of external magical effect insofar as the image of the cup with love elixir, in this case the beauty of Lamia, which Lycius drinks with his eyes, functions as extended metaphor and has no significance for the plot in the morphology and scripting of action.
Certainly, a philosophic idea could also be found here, about the human body as already mentioned. Human body is the perfect form for expression of the idea of love. In this sense, the metamorphosis into a human body in the poem plot and in the literary context it is laid in carries the semantics of a declaration of love. In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Florizel presents realization of the love of gods as humbling and transformations:
The gods themselves,
Humbling their deities to love, have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them: Jupiter
Became a bull, and bellow'd; the green Neptune
A ram, and bleated; and the fire-robed god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now. Their transformations
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer,
Nor in a way so chaste, since my desires
Run not before mine honour, nor my lusts
Burn hotter than my faith.
Such transformations are particularly diverse with Zeus and Burton, in his The Anatomy of Melancholy, names but five: satire, shepherd, bull, swan, and golden rain. However, none of these forms of love expression may be defined as “chaste” (so chaste) and perfect as the human one, according to Florizel. That is why Lamia chooses another approach, different from the examples we hind in Hellenic mythology. Her line begins coquettishly but at the same time in the manner adopted by Socrates in Plato’s Dialogues and based on a heuristic method. “If I should stay”– the conditional expression rather implies the idea of impossibility. Further on, Lamia starts to deliberate on the philosophic eidos of beauty and the possibility of love realization on earth. And with devilish coquetry she convinces Lycius that this could only happen if he managed “through mysterious sleights” to turn this “floor of clay” where even flowers were too rough for her ethereal body (And pain my steps upon these flowers too rough), into such matter that would cloud the memories of her home (In fact, the expression is the following: To dull the nice remembrance of my home. It may be appropriate to remind here that Satan in Paradise Lost often remembers Heaven with nostalgia and Earth seems too fit to replace it). Earth in the line of the transformed beauty is also described as valley without joy and void of immortality and happiness. (Over these hills and vales, where no joy is,—/ Empty of immortality and bliss!). With her next argument in favor of the thesis of her absurd existence, according to the set of terms adopted by her interlocutor, Lamia reminds Lycius of the fact that he is a scholar and as such should be aware that tender spirits, as he imagines Beauty to be, could not have existence in human climate or outside Paradise. It would be interesting, however, to draw attention to the following phrase in Lamia’s line relating to her existence of the idea of beauty: Alas! poor youth,/ What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe/ My essence? It is interesting because it makes problematic the notion of Lamia as vampire. Her essence is such that it could not be sustained in the space inhabited by man, with his blood, but on the contrary – as divine idea it needs something that is purer than air. However, in this argument we find another striking similarity with the praise of Eros delivered by another table-companion at Plato’s Symposium – his host, Agafon. He endeavors to describe the qualities of the god of love and one of these – tenderness – he claims could only be relayed by a poet such as Homer. Agafon quotes verses 92 and 93 of Chapter ХІХ of Iliad where the tenderness of the Goddess Ate is described in the following way:
Her feet are tender, for she sets her steps,
Not on the ground but on the heads of men
Keats, who started studying Greek in order to read Homer in original, uses the same image with regards to Lamia:
“If I should stay,”
Said Lamia, “here, upon this floor of clay,
“And pain my steps upon these flowers too rough
Ate is the ancient Greek goddess of fatal blindness. According to Homer, she was the daughter of Zeus and was banished from Olympus by her father after he found that she misled him. Agafon, however, develops further this image with regard to Eros’s tenderness by saying that Eros found even human hair not enough tender for him and that he could only live in human hearts and souls and not in every one at that, but only in softer ones. Where he sees ill temper and rough soul, he runs away. I believe that the argument used by Lamia in verses 281 – 283: Alas! poor youth,/ What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe/ My essence? gives us sufficient grounds to look for Plato’s ideas of love in the heroine’s image.
The possible conclusion of Lycius, following his own logic and led by the same Socratian manner as used by Lamia, is that if Beauty is a divine idea as he believes a priori, then it could not exist on earth. And if this is possible somehow, it may only take place in the form of love since only love could justify acceptance of pain, which materialization brings. In other words, if human body could invoke the notion of Beauty, it is because such body was made to express and receive love.
On dramaturgical level, the pragmatic significance of Lamia’s words is to convince Lycius that she is female, and not a vampire or a vision, that she possesses a true female body, i.e. that the metamorphosis, which we acknowledged both as intention and immanent nature, is real.
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.
Lamia’s behavior, the song, the kisses, the glances, all aim at convincing Lycius that she is a real woman of flesh and blood and that her metamorphosis is real, genuine. This is very important because, from her point of view, the reality of transformation, the condescension into a warm and vulnerable, mortal body is equivalent to true love (Aphrodite Ourania) unlike condescension of Olympic gods, with whom, by the way, Lamia has conflict, in animal forms representative of the lasciviousness of their intentions (Aphrodite Pandemos). At the same time we should not omit to say that all such elements – kisses, hugs and sweet words aim, according to Burton’s treatise, at invoking love melancholy or love, there again defined as medelam illicit amoris – ‘disease of consciousness’ or imagination laesa (Latin for ‘sick imagination’), and the kiss as “inevitable infection” causing such disease and recommended by Avicenna to be cured via bleeding. Certainly, if we continue to speculate over the quoted verses from the poem and accept that Lamia is actually a vampire, we could say that blood is necessary for her exclusively in the aspects of her metamorphosis (or transformation, in the terms of vampirology) into a human body wherewith she could be capable of loving and being loved. Blood and heart, which could feel pain, are the elements required for materialization of life as love.
Defining the pragmatic significance of Lamia’s speech as convincing Lycius that she, though as Beauty cannot be mortal, is not a goddess, notwithstanding the parallels with the words of Phaedrus and Agafon from Plato’s Symposium, we could say that Lamia presents herself in the same aspects Socrates presents the true nature of Eros. Diotima (“respected by Zeus”), which is, let us pay attention, the only female speech in Plato’s synchronous (the speech of the participants in the Symposium) and diachronous (the mechanism of retold words realized in the treatise: Apollodor < Aristodem < Socrates < Diotima) logos of Eros, defines love as essence between gods and mortals, which is called great demon (Δαίμονας μεγάλος). One quality ascribed to such essence or such demon is its ability to die and survice. And another thing, which I believe is very important for Keats’s poem and the way we look at it, Diatoma defines man’s strive towards Beauty, such as love, as strive towards eternal existence in a state of bliss, happiness. Possession of Beauty she presents as contemplation consuming all senses of man and he could do nothing else, neither eat nor drink, and without seeing it could live not a minute longer.
Though at serious risk for our dissertation taking the form of explanatory notes, we could not miss the next set of verses (315-321) in this truly luxurious reading where the heroine first meets Lycius:
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?
These verses offer a new model, which might be used to “produce” identity of poem’s characters, new roles of imitation in sustaining their gothic verification – of Venus and Adonis. The first meeting of Lamia and Lycius takes place on the eve of Adonia (Adonic feasts), which coincide in time with the set of the Shakespeare’s comedy – at midsummer night. The Adonis Cult was not included in the official celebration calendar of Ancient Greece. It was celebrated mostly by women belonging to marginal, underground social classes, and served as pretext for unbridled expression of emotions in the strictly regulated existence of women in the patriarchal Olympic society. Celebrations lasted for two days and participants mourned the death of Adonis. According to Plato, special groups of women – loose women, prostitutes, and mistresses – used to gather on the rooftops, apart from men, and wail, drink and sing: We celebrate the Adonia and we bewail Adonis. In one fragment by Sappho, we find the following reference to this celebration: delicate Adonis is dying, Kytherea; what should we do? Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your garments. At this celebration, women also used to plant fast-fading flowers, to symbolize the evanescence of happiness and love.
Thus Keats’s characters acquire new poetic identity. In addition to Orpheus and Eurydice, they are presented in the semantic classes of Aphrodite and Adonis, which also have their own “Roman” context as Venus and Adonis (Ovid, Shakespeare). Certainly, coming upon such plot in an English poem, we could not go further with our analysis without saying a few words about Shakespeare’s poem, which largely implies the model of the seducer or the logos of Lamia as femininity alluring handsome young men. Even the first verses (16 and 17) outline the strange duality and complementarities of the sound and meaning of kiss and serpent: Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses,/ And being set, I'll smother thee with kisses; (Venus). The next section of verses from Keats’s poem, which in the context of dramaturgical rationalization of the text have the function, according to Bernice Slote, of a stage Choir, seem to enter into some kind of polemics with Venus’s behavior in Shakespeare’s poem, who is not able to renounce her divine nature:
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.
Venus’s behavior as the goddess of love in the Shakespeare’s poem is defined in the aspects of temptation. She tries to seduce Adonis and her actions, though benevolent, could only lead to his sin, to degrading of his sublime idea of love. Adonis definitely differentiates between love and lust (Venus Popularia and Venus Celestia). The actual metaphor, the complete acceptance of female body with its vulnerability and mortality (frail-strung heart) is an act of denial, on the part of Lamia, of divine nature imperatives towards man, of her magic craft applied to the love of her beloved, which is only precious for her as the product of her essential beauty or of his idea of beauty, which she embodies. In the actual act of metamorphosis, Lamia rescinds the role of Shakespearean seducer thus gaining the affection of Choir in Keats’s poem: Thus gentle Lamia judg’d, and judg’d aright,/ That Lycius could not love in half a fright. In this sense, returning to discourses of Paradise Lost, we could say that love, which God requires for Himself from Adam, assuming certain degree of awe of the divine nature, could not be a perfect expression of human existence because the involvement of free will is neglected in the constitution of the independent human image of man. In the explicit imperative of divine integrity, such divine love as declared remains discredited and is itself the premise for sin.
All arguments so far could convince us that if we insert the image of Lamia from Keats’s poem into the model of the enamored devil, her metamorphosis, or her amorousness, must be defined as genuine. Lamia is a demon truly in love with Lycius. Before completing the topic about the implicit discourse of Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis in Keats’s text, we must not omit, certainly, the role of the boar, whose action – the killing of Adonis – is perceived as act of love, as kiss (If he did see his face, why then I know/ He thought to kiss him, and hath kill'd him so (1109-1110). In Keats’s plot, the function of the “enamored monster” that kills his beloved is performed by Apollonius. Actually, in his first appearance (only at the end of the first part – verses 362 – 377) he is presented as an old man with grey beard, sharp eyes and bald head. (curl’d gray beard, sharp eyes, and smooth bald crown). Lycius present him as “trusty guide,” “good instructor” but in Lamia’s presence he is perceived as “The ghost of folly haunting my sweet dreams”. I believe these are sufficiently distinctive elements, which could give us grounds to examine the image of Apollonius in the context of the pre-sin plot of Adam and Eve as image of God Father in the way He is depicted in medieval art. An interesting detail of the scene of the meeting with the philosopher are the words of Lamia, who says that she cannot remember where actually she has seen that face.
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?
If we assume that Lamia knew Apollonius and truly cannot remember where and in what circumstances she met him, and we have no reason to doubt that she is telling the truth, we must assume also that she is playing some plot she has already been a part of, a plot, which we will now clearly identify or accept further here as the plot of Paradise Lost.
As mentioned above, Milton first expressed the supposition that devil “could love” man. Actually, in his poem Satan has not direct or any other bearing on him. In almost all key scenes of Paradise Lost, Satan is presented as dramatically divided between hatred for God and love for man. Not once he is struck by the beauty of Adam and Eve and eventually loses his desire for revenge, which is anyway not directed to them but to their Creator.
Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This Flourie Plat, the sweet recess of EVE
Thus earlie, thus alone; her Heav'nly forme
Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine,
Her graceful Innocence, her every Aire
Of gesture or lest action overawd
His Malice, and with rapine sweet bereav'd
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remaind
Stupidly good, of enmitie disarm'd,
Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge;
But the hot Hell that alwayes in him burnes,
Though in mid Heav'n, soon ended his delight,
And tortures him now more, the more he sees
Of pleasure not for him ordain'd: then soon
Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts
Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites.
(Book IX, 455-472)
In Paradise Lost, Satan does not show his potential love for Adam and Eve. Nevertheless, it remains the only feeling he ever shows he could have for them. In this sense, if we speak about the same plot of Eden events in both poems, by Milton and by Keats, we could say that, with Keats, the enamored devil (Lamia) “wishes no evil,” it is just in love with man losing all other memories, including those of God.
The intimate space of Lamia and Lycius in Keats’s poem has the characteristics of the Garden of Eden before the original sin when humanity or man used to be man and woman. However, we must say that this pre-sinful space is different from the Kingdom of Heaven, which has the promise of Christianity and where man is perceived as the possessor of certain social status (For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. (Matthew 22:30). In this sense, if we regard Lamia as enamored devil, her “evilness” could be realized in the aspects of man’s return into the sin-less space, which, however, does not have the sanction of divinity of the New Testament, i.e. in the lost paradise. This pre-sinful and blissful space (empery of joys) is formed in the eyes of Lamia and Lycius: He answer’d, bending to her open eyes,/ Where he was mirror’d small in paradise. Certainly here we can find a very interesting catoptric play between the mirrored image of man and his essence as God’s image. In the act of contemplation in Lamia’s eyes man seems to restore his pre-sin state in the Garden of Eden when God’s image in him was not darkened by the original sin. In this sense, if we examine Lamia in the aspects of the enamored devil, we have the act of the return of man to Paradise. This state, however, from a post-sinful soteriological position, is perceived as purely sensitive and devoid of certain aspects of knowledge. Lycius is in the pre-sin state of Adam insofar as he remains ignored by knowledge possessed by Apollonius. And if we could construe the original sin of Eden as knowledge of the devil, of which existence man have only heard, the return of Lycius to Eden through the eyes of Lamia could be perceived as ignoring the knowledge of God and the Kingdom of Heaven, of which he, too, has only heard. In Keats’s inversion, the request of Lamia not to invite Apollonius to the wedding may be regarded as analogous to the divine prohibition, which in Paradise Lost is identified directly as abstention or “diet” from knowledge as reads the exact expression used by Milton.
Both forms of abstention from knowledge are not followed. Let us continue, however, the parallels between Keats’s and Milton’s poems by offering substitution of God with Apollonius. In fact, his appearance in the final scene could be interpreted in various literary models and genre conventions. On the one hand, he is the uninvited, Stone Guest, but in this capacity and as accepted substitution of God he is also Deus ex machine in the classic norms of comedy. In the anteroom, before introducing him to the guests, Lycius forgets his promise to Lamia and, in this aspect his moral behavior could be identified with Peter’s denial of Jesus. On the other hand, however, based on the aspects of a pre-sinful situation, in this scene Lycius feels almost the same shame of his stay in the ‘purple-lined palace of sweet sin’ (verse 31) as Adam feels before God after the original sin.
Most researchers regard the accent placed by Keats on the semantic importance of the lack of name for Lamia in a small miniature of twenty verses (verse 84 – 105) as lack of knowledge for the nature of things or as possibility for categorical non-relativity of things. For instance, the availability of a name could have associated unequivocally Lamia with serpent nature and would have brought to fore the opposition good-evil. It seems, however, that we must pay attention to yet another aspect of this issue – the divine nature of antinomy and “anomy”.
Whispering in midnight silence, said the youth,
“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?
Perceived as the attribute of mortals, the name may also be contemplated as substitution of subject. Such perception is found in the way God discloses Himself to man (Moses) as personality and as immortal under the name of Yehvah, which means ‘I AM THAT I AM, I AM the Everlasting (Exodus 3:14)’. In this sense, the absence of a name, the anomy is a form of immortality of the individual, which does not work by the principles of kin, known and accessible to man. Therefore, the name may also be defined as form of belonging to the post-sin mechanism of immortality, which is repressive to the individual – the kin. Lycius asks after Lamia’s name exactly in such aspect (“Or friends or kinsfolk on the citied earth,/ “To share our marriage feast and nuptial mirth?”). In the greatest tragedy of love, Romeo and Juliet, it is the name, as identification dogma of the kin, which causes the fatal end of the short ephemeral love of the enamored. Let us remember part of the famous scene under the most popular balcony in Verona:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.
I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
In this sense, the name could be construed as breach of the intimate space of the enamored, as disruption (break the silence) of their mutual self-sufficiency. It relays the repressive semantics of kin onto the unique and unutterable content of the beloved by frustrating, destroying the small intimate world of the enamored (come crashing into my little world), where only its completeness could be sensed. I believe that readers of this text, who undoubtedly know the quoted song of Depeche Mode, will not find it inappropriate to regard Lycius’s words about the name of Lamia and about her consent to pass the boundaries of intimacy as violence (Words like violence). This is the meaning of the words uttered by the lyrical Choir in the poem
O senseless Lycius! Madman! wherefore flout
The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister’d hours,
And show to common eyes these secret bowers?
In the first verses of the second part of the poem, the invasion of the outer world is presented as noise, interference (trumpet sound) in the intimate space of enamored:
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.
In Milton’s Lost Paradise, the original sin is interpreted in the theosophical aspects of breaching the divine sanction regulating the blissful status of man. Such blissful status is guaranteed by ignoring of principles affirming the integrity of man as rational being. With Keats, the lost perception of paradise is the result of the effect of philosophy on imagination, the former failing to acknowledge the latter’s reproductive ability and the actuality of an existence, which is not based on proven philosophical principles of knowledge:
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.
In order to accept the criterion of divine in Keats’s poem, let us first look into some aspects of devil’s behavior in the Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost. I would say that it is implemented in two things - metamorphosis or entering the serpent body as the fittest to hide his true intentions (in whose mazie foulds/ To hide me, and the dark intent I bring – underlined by Keats’s reading), and the rhetoric of the speech used to invoke the appetite for knowledge. Following the logic of this text, if entering the serpent body is perceived as means of hiding dark intent in Milton’s poem, then the metamorphosis back into a female body with Keats could be regarded as openness or revelation. In the copy of Paradise Lost, which Keats read in the summer of 1819, he underlined the following very interesting verses:
She scarse had said, though brief, when now more bold
The Tempter, but with shew of Zeale and Love
To Man, and indignation at his wrong,
New part puts on, and as to passion mov'd,
Fluctuats disturbd, yet comely, and in act
Rais'd, as of som great matter to begin.
As when of old som Orator renound
In ATHENS or free ROME, where Eloquence
Flourishd, since mute, to som great cause addrest,
Stood in himself collected, while each part,
Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue,
Somtimes in highth began, as no delay
Of Preface brooking through his Zeal of Right.
So standing, moving, or to highth upgrown
The Tempter all impassiond thus began.
These verses interpret Satan’s alluring words as philosophic utterances (old som orator renound/ in ATHENS or free ROME). Then the original sin (great cause) is an act of philosophic rhetoric. Thus, in the context of Paradise Lost, the philosopher Apollonius, who saved Lycius in the story of The Bride of Corinth, in Keats’s poem, becomes the substitute of the seducer, who gives knowledge to man thus depriving him of happiness. Apollonius, however, defines his own behavior in the aspects of the all-knowing, absolute and jealous of his creation God of the Old Testament: from every ill/ Of life have I preserv’d thee to this day,/ “And shall I see thee made a serpent’s prey? In this sense we could speak of the presence of an implicit, preset prohibition on the part of the philosopher to Lycius, who in Philostratos’s story is presented, on the one hand, as a very strenuous philosopher, and on the other hand, as susceptible to the tender passion. The expression „from every ill of life” could be interpreted both as ‘from every evil of life’ and ‘from every illness of life. Such thesis could find grounds in Burton’s text where love is regarded as variation of melancholy, since, as he wrote, similar to all other melancholies, it is expressed as disease of the brain because of disruption of imagination (imagination laesa – Latin for “sick imagination”). Burton even enumerates several methods of curing love melancholy, including its treatment as “cholera” and bleeding, which Avicenna used to recommend in such cases. First and foremost, however, Burton recommends dissuasion and good advice given at the right time by some wise and respected man of authority: Quis enim modus adsit amori? (For what limit has love?) But, without question, good counsel and advice must needs be of great force, especially if it shall proceed from a wise, fatherly, reverent, discreet person, a man of authority, whom the parties do respect, stand in awe of, or from a judicious friend, of itself alone it is able to divert and suffice.Paradise Lost “tricks” Eve into abandoning her imposed “diet” of knowledge. (MEMB.V.SUBSECT.III) Before seeing how convincing Apollonius is in Keats’s poem, however, we should see how Satan in
Satan presents life based on knowledge (it gives you Life/ to Knowledge (verses 686 – 687) as a new, much more perfect form of life (life more perfect) where man will acquire much more elevated status – divine status (and yee shall be as Gods (verse 708). Moreover, the knowledge of good and evil is presented also as promise of happiness, as a road that would lead man to a “happier life” (atchieving what might leade/ To happier life), but the meaning of this should be as unknown to man as death (whatever thing Death be). In fact Satan lures man with promise or with the messianic idea of his transformation into god. He assures Eve of that providing as evidence his own metamorphosis: look on mee,/ Mee who have touch'd and tasted, yet both live,/ And life more perfet have attaind then Fate/ Meant mee, by ventring higher then my Lot./ Shall that be shut to Man, which to the Beast/ Is open? Actually, the serpent metamorphosis really takes place but in the opposite direction, like demotion from demonic, angelic form. This happens in Book X where, instead of the expected applause for his successful solicitation of man to knowledge, Satan hears the hissing of demons wonderfully transformed.
Apollonius of Keats’s poem is the man in possession of the knowledge of good and evil since he is the only one to recognize Lamia as foul demon. But the metamorphosis he has experienced as a result of such possession serves for the purpose of him being discredited by Lycius, who urges Corinthians to look upon his wretched appearance:
“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.”
Many researchers draw attention to the fact that by exposing Lamia Apollonius himself acquires the serpent features, which she had before her metamorphosis into human form (lashless eyelids stretch/ “Around his demon eyes). Construed in the context of Paradise Lost, the metamorphosis of Apollonius subsequent to the act, which deprives man of happiness, identifies him unambiguously with the seducer or devil, the enemy of man in the original sin plot.
Comparing the two poems – Milton’s Paradise Lost and „Dreams Lost”, as Keats’s poem was defined in the beginning of this text – we must note that restrictions for knowledge that specify the perfect status of man discredit the authority of those, who impose such restrictions – God and Apollonius. In Paradise Lost, man is not so much unaware of good and evil but rather of the reason why he is banned from such knowledge. In this sense, we could talk more about discrediting law-maker’s authority rather than any guilt of man for the original sin. What frustrates man is ignorance and lack of reasonable explanation as to why he should not do certain things, not eat from the tree of knowledge. It is the lack of such explanation that affects man’s virtue as a reasonable being. Similarly, the knowledge offered by Apollonius for differentiating of good from evil is the pre-sin form of ignorance in respect of the reasonable justification of this knowledge. Apollonius defines Lycius’s bride as Lamia with the semantics such term carries in Philostratos’s text – “vampire”. The priest in Gautier’s La Morte Amoureuse acts likewise with the sacrilege, from the point of view of higher theosophical principles, of a dead and properly buried body. (In the beginning of ХVІІІ century the Sorbonne announced its official position of condemnation of heathen practices for destroying vampires defining these as sacrilege of dead bodies) Such knowledge, however, presented in the form of catechesis, turns out to be destructive, dysfunctional in terms of regaining “paradise lost by man”. In other words, depicting some life as illusionary, imaginary does not prove the absence of such life but rather destroys the entire existence – the one of Lycius or, in the metaphoric of his name, of light itself, which creates images from naught.
In Paradise Lost, there is another important observation to be made, namely that Adam actually makes “informed” choice with regards to the original sin. He chooses sin in order to remain with Eve, in whose company he can feel the virtue of his being.
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn'd,
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?
Should God create another EVE, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
(Book IX, 908 – 916)
According to Milton’s “Twelve Books” Adam chooses knowledge because he wants to preserve his self-dignity as reasonable being, which dignity in the company of his Creator, who keeps him in ignorance, he is not able to affirm. Adam makes a conscientious choice between losing Paradise and losing Eve, which could also be perceived as aesthetic choice. He chooses the fairest of Creation, the last and best/ Of all Gods Works.
The finale of Keats’s poem exposes Adam’s original sin in Paradise Lost as the choice between La Morte Amoureuse and Eve- doomed to die (compare the expressions in Milton’s poem “How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,/ Defac't, deflourd, and now to Death devote?” (9, 900 – 901) and the knowledgeable or omniscient Apollonius who cannot explain the completeness, the essence of things, cannot envelop the meaning of Beauty. Lycius opts for sharing the fate of his beloved though her existence only remains “lighted” in his imagination as image in his dreams. (Let us remember the verse where he sees his image in her eyes as inhabitant of Heaven). In this sense, we could regard imagination, dreams, as the divine part of human nature with the subtle distinction that gods can dream forever (Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass/ Their pleasures in a long immortal dream). Thus, if we read the following fragment of Paradise Lost, which gives Adam’s welcoming words to Eve when he first sees her:
…Return fair EVE,
Whom fli'st thou? whom thou fli'st, of him thou art,
His flesh, his bone; to give thee being I lent
Out of my side to thee, neerest my heart
Substantial Life, to have thee by my side
Henceforth an individual solace dear;
Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim
My other half: with that thy gentle hand
Seisd mine, I yeilded, and from that time see
How beauty is excelld by manly grace
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.
(4, 481 – 491),
we could consider Eve the materialization of man’s imagination. She is the substance of life, which is nearest to man’s (neerest my heart/ Substantial Life), she is a being of such substance. Moreover, the first memory of Eve is how she came awake (That day I oft remember, when from sleep/ I first awak't, and found myself repos'd/ Under a shade on flours). I cannot miss, in this fragment from Book IV (481 – 491), the exceptional play of images, mutually penetrating and giving existence to one another. The first thing Eve sees after her creation is her mirrored image perceived, however, as her heavenly projection:
I thither went
With unexperienc't thought, and laid me downe
On the green bank, to look into the cleer
Smooth Lake, that to me seemd another Skie.
As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A Shape within the watry gleam appeerd
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleasd I soon returnd,
Pleas'd it returnd as soon with answering looks
Of sympathie and love
In this moment, contemplating her mirrored image on the lake surface where also heaven is mirrored (Pure as th' expanse of Heav'n), Eve hears the Divine Words “informing” her that what she sees in the water is herself, her being (What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self). We should point out here that the word is not about image but about being. The mirrored image is rationalized in God’s words as the being itself. On the other hand, such being, i.e. Eve, is defined as Adam’s image (hee/ whose image thou art). In this sense it could be said that Eve’s being is Adam’s image though, in her opinion, “more tender, and beautiful”. In fact, the aforementioned words of Adam are contained in Eve’s speech of gratitude. That is, Adam even sees his own words in her speech.
Interpretation of Eve’s image as materialization of human imagination finds reason also in the fact that the philosopher Apollonius, who ignores the imaginary aspects of reality, leads ascetic life. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton even deliberates on the issue of whether a scholar should marry. Some make a doubt, an uxor literato sit ducenda, whether a scholar should marry, if she be fair she will bring him back from his grammar to his horn book, or else with kissing and dalliance she will hinder his study.
For Keats’ imagination and the poetical circle he belonged to have the significance of aesthetic principle expressed by production of sensitive images. And there is hardly a serious study of his poetics, which fails to quote the following lines from his letter to Benjamin Bailey (22 November, 1817): I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination — What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not — for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty — In a Word, you may know my favorite Speculation by my first Book and the little song [that is, ‘O Sorrow’] I sent in my last [letter to Bailey] — which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these Matters — The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream — he awoke and found it truth…. However it may be, O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is ‘a Vision in the form of Youth’ a Shadow of reality to come….
Keat’s comparison of Adam’s imagination and dream is fairly justified from the point of view of the quoted fragment from Book IV of Paradise Lost where the Divine Voice calls Eve Adam’s image (Whose image thou art), i.e. she was created by his imagination as his fine image. Imagination, or the ability of the heart to feel affection (we could even compare the expression ‘holiness of the Heart's affections’, used by Keats in his letter to Bailey, with the already quoted verses from Paradise Lost – neerest my heart/ Substantial Life.) for Keats are essential cognitive perception, which regard truth as Beauty. In these, man is defined as a beauty- sensitive being, as cultured and humane creature, which affirms itself in the realization of aesthetic values, in his ability to judge Beautiful. It could be said that in Keats’s aesthetics man is dependent on the being of Beauty wherein he affirms himself. Aesthetics as a value system for responding to beauty is a much bigger essential category in the humane creature structure than moral and ethos. And if in Paradise Lost man betrays his ethic qualities affirming himself in aesthetic ones but does not die, in Keats’s Lamia man, when deprived of Beauty, loses the reason for living as aesthetically conscious being. In Keats’s poetics, the woman is perceived as materialization of human dreams, i.e. she is important as objective form of Beauty where striving for the Beautiful is defined as immanent to man. It is a real image in respect whereof man is self-defined as a different being based on humanitarian perception of beauty. In this sense, the image of the woman, discriminated in medieval and post-medieval literature in the likeness of seduction, sinfulness and demon, is vindicated in Keats’s poems and prevails over the discourses of male ethos ratified in genre traditions and usually realized in heroic aspects.
Insofar man is self-affirmed as aesthetic being, Beauty may be regarded as artistic act creating “bounties”. In the beginning, we pointed out the fact that in ХVІІІ and ХІХ c. in England art got to be considered a market niche. In the context of Paradise Lost, however, where we tried to place Keats’s poem, art or theater seems to be the transformed space where man can really reinstate his status of aesthetic being. One aspect of Lamia’s metamorphosis is its theatrical realization. Lamia, as Kazot’s Le diable amoureux by the way, plays the role of woman in love. She restores the lost sense of paradise in Lycius and his status of valued creature, which, insofar as according to Sophocles’ classical tragedy (Antigone) woman was created to be loved, is created to love. The appearance of Apollonius as deos ex machina in the last scene, on the one hand heralds the extremity and incompleteness of the reader, the viewer, the man to fulfill himself as aesthetic being, i.e. the time restrictions of the parallel artistic reality here and now, and on the other hand – within the plot frames deprives the protagonist of his existential ability to dream, i.e. punishes him with insomnia. Actually, in the myth of Lamia Hera punishes her husband’s lover by killing her children but also with insomnia. In the context of our reckoning so far, we could regard such punishment as final losing of paradise and of what is true divine reality – the dream.
In conclusion, I would like to draw your attention to the finale of Plato’s Symposium, where love is defined as prevailing immanent need of man for blissful status. As such, however, love could only be expressed in regard to the lacking things, i.e. the things man does not or cannot have forever. We could similarly define the importance of dreams and imagination in human life, which Apollonius obviated. Dream is that lack of life, that disadvantage or deficiency of existing life that gives man the status of enamored. From this point of view, a love-inspiring Lamia is only possible as vision, as dream, as something not belonging to man but only as vision, as reality beyond the scientifically justified life she could appear as power, as Eros, who makes man perceive himself as a creature made to love and be loved.