On John Keats' Lamia

This post is about John Keats' poem Lamia. But first let's talk about Apollonius.

It was a very common name in classical Greece. There are dozens of Apolloniuses, historical and not: generals, artists, mathematicians, all sorts. For the non-specialist reader, however, there are basically just three to contend with:

Apollonius of Rhodes (fl. 300-250 BCE), the historical author of The Argonautica, an epic poem of the Hellenistic period.

Apollonius of Tyre, a fictional ruler who is the hero of a popular romance adventure, perhaps originally a lost Greek novel from about the third century CE, but retold numerous times; Shakespeare altered his name to Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

Apollonius of Tyana (c. 15? - c. 100? CE), a probably historical wandering philosopher, chiefly known through highly imaginative accounts of his miraculous feats, in particular Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana (c. 220 CE). It's this Apollonius who's relevant to Lamia.

For Philostratus (Book IV Ch 25) it was one of Apollonius' great triumphs: saving the young Menippus of Lycia from marrying a lamia. "These beings", says Apollonius,"fall in love, and they are devoted to the delights of Aphrodite, but especially to the flesh of human beings, and they decoy with such delights those whom they mean to devour in their feasts". 

Robert Burton didn't mention that the lamia's end-goal was devouring her lover. At this moment in his vast ramble he was only interested in demonstrating that daemonic spirits such as lamiae do fall in love. Maybe Burton's compressed account, the absence of motives and consequences, was just the thing to spark Keats' imagination; what was really going on in this story? (It's in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Third Partition, Sect. II, Memb. I, Subsect. I. Keats appended it as a footnote to Lamia, though editors often miss it out.)

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For by some freakful chance he made retire
From his companions, and set forth to walk,
Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk:
Over the solitary hills he fared,
Thoughtless at first, but ere eve's star appeared
His phantasy was lost, where reason fades,
In the calm'd twilight of Platonic shades.
Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near—
Close to her passing, in indifference drear,
His silent sandals swept the mossy green;
So neighbour'd to him, and yet so unseen
She stood: he pass'd, shut up in mysteries,
His mind wrapp'd like his mantle, while her eyes
Follow'd his steps, and her neck regal white
Turn'd—syllabling thus, "Ah, Lycius bright,
And will you leave me on the hills alone?
Lycius, look back! and be some pity shown."
He did; not with cold wonder fearingly,
But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice;
For so delicious were the words she sung,
It seem'd he had lov'd them a whole summer long:
And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up,
Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup,
And still the cup was full,—

(Lamia I, 230-253)

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Not that Keats intended to spell out his answer; Lamia is a notoriously ambivalent poem, maybe a reader-baiting poem. Charles Lamb admired the gorgeous imagery but found it a construction of fancy rather than feeling (he preferred Isabella). Yet behind the Drydenian polish and the Chaucerian pacing other readers have found a welter of feelings; generosity, pity, amusement, cynicism, bitterness, and fury. At different times it seems to be anti-love, anti-people, anti-women, anti-men, anti-gods and anti-civilization. You must admit he's got a point. It's scathing about the imagination and, of course, it's also anti-science. (It was Keats' own innovation to make Lycius die from his teacher's meddling. No triumph for Apollonius here!)

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A male youth who falls for a female spirit... the parallel with Endymion is palpable. But Lamia is an anti-Endymion, naturally; Keats had gone off the earlier poem before he'd even finished writing it. But though Lamia is mainly oppositional it isn't purely so. There's nothing like being heavily criticised for realizing you were onto something after all. They make a fascinating complementary pair. And if much is gained by Lamia's sharpness, yet much is lost too; it isn't so exploratory. They're the two Keats poems I turn to most often, of his longer ones anyway. (I must admit I do appreciate it when a poem is actually finished; when we just have to take it for what it is, not for what it might have been; when it acquires a certain independence and undeniably says something, even if it isn't what the author meant to say.) 

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Aside from the story about Apollonius, there was a broader mythic background to these lamiae (summarized in classical dictionaries such as Lemprière): according to some, Lamia was a beautiful woman cruelly punished by Hera for the usual reasons and transformed into a monster on a vengeance trip. Keats apparently took some ideas from this background mythology, e.g. the combination of womanly features with a snake body, Lamia telling Hermes she was once a woman, etc.  

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My posts about Keats' poems:

On "I Stood Tiptoe..."
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/08/notes-on-i-stood-tiptoe.html
On Endymion:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/12/john-keats-endymion-1817.html
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/11/all-tendrils-green.html
On Isabella, or The Pot of Basil:
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-pot-of-basil.html

On Lamia:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2026/01/on-john-keats-lamia.html