Lamia
John Keats (1795–1821), 1820
★ 3.82 from 868 ratings on Goodreads
A serpent becomes a woman, a philosopher refuses to look away, and a feast is conjured out of nothing: Keats's late poem of magic against analysis. Keats's lines move with a slow, lyrical shimmer, mixing tender longing with a quiet unease at what reason can do to magic.
Feels like wonder, longing and unease. About love, art and identity.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy narrative poetry with rich description, mythic material, and a troubled romance at its center. The 1820 diction and dense allusions can make the verse slow going.
Why read it
It offers a compact, vivid look at Keats's late style, where sensuous beauty and skeptical thought press against each other.
Pages from the book
Dazzling all over, and yet somehow sorrowful.
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 interwreathedTheir 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 fireSprinkled 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: What is lost every time we explain something beautiful.
Upon her aching forehead be there hungThe leaves of willow and of adder’s tongue;And for the youth, quick, let us strip for himThe thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swimInto forgetfulness; and, for the sage,Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wageWar on his temples. Do not all charms flyAt the mere touch of cold philosophy?There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:We know her woof, her texture; she is givenIn the dull catalogue of common things. The uncomfortable arithmetic of love and money.
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust;Love in a palace is perhaps at lastMore grievous torment than a hermit’s fast—That is a doubtful tale from faery land,Hard for the non-elect to understand. John Keats.Keats trained as a surgeon's dresser at Guy's Hospital before turning to poetry, and found the plot of Lamia in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
Books that feel like this
Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems
Christina Rossetti, 1862
Also longing and love.
More by John Keats
Poetry
John Keats, 1820
Poems that make beauty and mortality argue in the same breath—odes, sonnets, and mythic fragments from a writer who died at twenty-five.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Lamia for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy narrative poetry with rich description, mythic material, and a troubled romance at its center. The 1820 diction and dense allusions can make the verse slow going.
- What is Lamia like?
- Keats's lines move with a slow, lyrical shimmer, mixing tender longing with a quiet unease at what reason can do to magic. Feels like wonder, longing and unease. About love, art and identity.
- What should I read after Lamia?
- If you liked Lamia, try A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare), Shadowings (Lafcadio Hearn) and Niels Lyhne (J. P. Jacobsen).
A taste of the feed
A description of a place so lush it can put a queen to sleep.
I know a banke where the wilde time blowes, Where Oxslips and the nodding Violet growes, Quite ouer-cannoped with luscious woodbine, With sweet muske roses, and with Eglantine; There sleepes Tytania, sometime of the night, Lul’d in these flowers, with dances and delight: And there the snake throwes her enammel’d skinne, Weed wide enough to rap a Fairy in.
A Midsummer Night's Dream · William Shakespeare
The night sea does not look like water; it looks like a mind.
THE moon had not yet risen; but the vast of the night was all seething with stars, and bridged by a Milky Way of extraordinary brightness. There was no wind; but the sea, far as sight could reach, was running in ripples of fire,—a vision of infernal beauty. Only the ripplings were radiant (between them was blackness absolute);—and the luminosity was amazing. Most of the undulations were yellow like candle-flame; but there were crimson lampings also,—and azure, and orange, and emerald. And the sinuous flickering of all seemed, not a pulsing of many waters, but a laboring of many wills,—a fleeting conscious and monstrous,—a writhing and a swarming incalculable, as of dragon-life in some depth of Erebus.
Shadowings · Lafcadio Hearn
The fear of people who feel too much, and the wish to burn slowly.
Involuntarily he made a gesture as if to ward it off with his hand. After all, he was afraid in his inmost heart of this mighty thing called passion. This storm-wind sweeping away everything settled and authorized and acquired in humanity as if it were dead leaves. He did not like it! This roaring flame squandering itself in its own smoke—no, he wanted to burn slowly.
Niels Lyhne · J. P. Jacobsen
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