Snaky, sneaky, serpentine shape-shifter

The idea of “close reading” – a verity in contemporary graduate studies, indeed in undergraduate education – somehow escaped me when I went to college. When I came to Georgetown, it was one of the terms of art that perplexed me the most. I soon learned what it was, but aah, then to practice it … that was more difficult. As a person with a quick mind and perhaps quicker mouth, and after a long life as a journalist, where speed is prized on a par with insight and style, the slow, careful (some might say lugubrious) work of close reading did not come at all easily. This essay is the closest I came during my graduate work to a pure close reading of a text. 

 “Lamia” is a slippery poem, difficult to grasp hold of. Drawn to the poem initially because of its snake-woman, I was interested in finding out what Keats would do with a shape-shifting creature, such a fool for love that she would change her very physical being in order to be with the object of her desire. Humans, from the Bible and the Greeks onward, have been obsessed with animals – hunting them, idolizing them, loving them, morphing into them – and perhaps none more so than the slithering, slimy, serpentine serpent who was the root of all evil, way back when. Carrying something of a grudge against Keats ever since I read his depiction of the rape/not-rape of Madeline in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” I wanted to see how he would treat Lamia.

The poem itself is a shape-shifter. It begins, rather confusingly, with a pair of lovers (Hermes and his sought-after nymph) who turn out not to be the poem’s main focus, and Keats takes his time in moving Lycius and Lamia to centerstage. Perhaps this is because they too may not be his true primary concern.

Although the poem seems, on its surface, to be about passionate love, and does a convincing job of portraying the spell of passion, it seems at its heart, so to speak, to be about so many other things as well – divisions and dualities and dyads of so many kinds. The poet seems concerned with the question of how love and passion coexist with the world outside the bower, with society; with the question of where reason (“cold philosophy”) and love stand in relation to each other; with the issue of competing loyalties (Lycius, torn between Appollonius and Lamia). And then, perhaps not on a conscious level, there are the poet’s own decidedly mixed feelings toward the monstrous changeling, Lamia herself.

Although the heroic couplets Keats uses to tell his story have often been used in a humorous vein, their sing-song quality, their obviousness, is to this reader reminiscent of childhood rhymes. The fact that Keats begins in the realm of fairyland – “Upon a time, before the fairy broods/ Drove nymph and satyr from the prosperous woods,” – and later returns to that realm, evoking it again – may be one clue as to why he chose rhyming couplets.

Keats starts off, sure-footed, with his fairy story that is no fairy story: the first and third stanzas are especially strong, with clear, deliberate masculine rhymes that never devolve into humor or childishness. He varies his iambic pentameter just enough to spice things up – an alexandrine here, a triplet there. Keats had said of “Lamia” in September 1819 in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats that “there is that sort of fire in it that must take hold of people in some way – give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation,” and the third stanza of the poem certainly packs a wallop in the sensation department. The snake, who we have already learned in the previous stanza is “palpitating” (a word that either bears an erotic charge or is a sign of emotional or medical distress), is no ordinary snake. First off, in line 47, she is referred to by a feminine pronoun; she is a gendered creature. Next, we are told she has a “gordian shape” – that is to say, she is knotty, a puzzle, unknowable (what men have for eons said about women). She will be difficult to untangle, figure out, understand, and thus control. (Perhaps Keats is here presaging the poem’s end: Just as Alexander the Great sliced through the original Gordian knot with his sword, someone may have to slice through, or see through, or otherwise put an end to, Lamia.) In lines 48-50, Keats gives us a wonderfully vivid portrait of the pre-metamorphosis snake: colors are reeled off, animals are named in a trio of similes. Each of these three lines is structured similarly, with a caesura marked by a comma at mid-line, and the “ed” endings of the words “striped,” “freckled,” “eyed,” and “barred” providing an insistent rhythm, a drumbeat that lets us know something significant is about to happen. But before it does, smaller, quasi-magical, shape-shiftings occur: The snake’s “silver moons” do several things (perhaps at once, perhaps sequentially; perhaps it’s up to the snake’s viewer to interpret): They “Dissolved, or brighter shone, or interwreathed.”

The following lines are, to this reader, among the most interesting in the poem:

She seemed at once some penanced lady elf,
Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self,

None of the three major characters in the poem – Lamia, Lycius, Apollonius – is presented as entirely good or evil, and while that might seem at first to be a positive attribute, it is actually (or also) a weakness. Lycius, who we originally want to admire for his single-minded passion, ends up fatally flawed by his desire to breach his secret love bower and pettily, shallowly show off his trophy bride to the world around him. (As readers, we blame him, but can we really? Wouldn’t we too want to “pace abroad majestical” with our “prize”?) Apollonius, who seems at first regard to be the sage tutor, the wise man, is by the poem’s end an avatar of “cold philosophy,” the one who would “clip an angel’s wings.” It is only with Lamia that Keats’ ability to see both good and evil, to both sympathize and be repelled, results in a rich, textured portrait. And it is in the lines above that Keats first shows us Lamia’s complications and his complicated view of her. He offers us an array of possibilities, greater and lesser evils that she may be. Keats lists them, in ascending order of gravity, but he also, quite intriguingly, proffers a series of possible female identities: She could be simply a “penanced lady elf,” serving time, as it were, for her misdeeds, which are likely trivial, as an elf is no major criminal, usually understood to be more mischievous than evil, and she is just “some” penanced lady elf, the implication being that penanced lady elves are a dime a dozen. In addition, being female, Lamia can’t be a regular elf, she must be that other kind – a “lady” elf. The next possibility is that she is “some demon’s mistress,” a demon being several orders of evil worse than an elf, and by throwing in her lot with the demon and becoming his mistress, Lamia (or anyone) is complicit in the demon’s evil-doing. Once again, she would be merely “some” demon’s mistress, the demon being nothing special as demons go. Finally, it occurs to Keats that Lamia might herself be the demon – autonomous, a free agent, not a “lady” version, not the mistress, but the thing itself, with the emphasis on “the,” i.e., the one and only. To the viewer/narrator, she appears to be playing these multiple roles all at once. To the reader, it appears that there are an awful lot of “S”s in these two lines, which when read aloud, create the hissing “sss” sound of a serpent.

The stanza goes on to offer two goddesses, Ariadne and Proserpine, placing Lamia in lofty company and laying the groundwork for Lycius’ comment in line 87 that he has assumed Lamia is “Not mortal, but of heavenly progeny.” Each of these goddesses brings with her the suggestion of homelessness and displacement (Ariadne abandoned by Theseus far from home on Naxos and Proserpine condemned to spend half of each year in the underworld, again far from home). The reader is told nothing of Lamia’s home or family, although we do find out, in lines 90-92, that she has no “friends or kinsfolk on the citied earth … ‘no friends, … not one.’ ” She is alone, unprotected, unsupported, not even sprung, like Athena, from the head of a god. We know nothing of her life before we meet her in snake form.

The poem goes on to introduce us to the true monstrousness of what Lamia is: Neither one thing nor the other, a bit of both, existing in a frightening gray area. For as horrifying as her later metamorphosis from serpent to “real woman, lineal indeed” is meant to be, the state of being indeterminate, having characteristics of two modes of being, animal and human, is even more repellent.

Lines 59-60, which display Lamia’s odd admixture, have some odd characteristics of their own:

Her head was serpent but – ah, bitter-sweet! –
She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete.

This is a jarring couplet for a couple of reasons. The exclamation of “ah, bitter-sweet!,” set off by dashes, is not a smoothly executed parenthetical; it seems to be nothing more than a rude interruption, a disruption of the line, the thought. But of course, it is there for a reason. What could it be? The narrator, despite being repulsed by Lamia’s serpent’s head, is attracted to her “woman’s mouth,” and that attraction is “bitter-sweet” (to say the least), not only because of the transgressive mixing of snake head and human mouth but also due to the mouth having “all its pearls complete.” Faster than a reader can think vagina dentata, we have a perfect picture of horror, the narrator wanting to venture into decidedly verboten territory. Line 60 is an alexandrine, the extra foot (in comparison with the pentameter of most of the rest of the poem) giving the line added heft and a bit of clumsiness too. It is out of place perhaps, as is a woman’s mouth set in a serpent’s head.

Part II of the poem starts powerfully, with aphoristic lines and short, punchy masculine rhymes, and a seemingly clear sense of purpose and direction, harking back to the powerful scene-setting of the start of Part I. But we are in a far different place now than at the beginning of the poem (lines 1-5, Part II):

Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is (Love forgive us!) cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast:
That is a doubtful tale from fairyland,
Hard for the non-elect to understand.

Keats repeats the word “love” three times in as many lines, just to make sure we understand his subject, and he ends line 2 with a drumbeat of stresses, the strong trio of words culminating in the final spondee. But he interrupts himself once again with the parenthetical “Love forgive us!” (interestingly, another edition of the poem I read encases the phrase in em dashes rather than parentheses, creating a slightly lower fence between the phrase and the surrounding thoughts). Wondering why he creates this disruption, I can only think that there is something sardonic, a touch of irony here: Does Keats really want love’s forgiveness for the statement he is in the middle of making? Does he really believe love fares better when set among riches rather than amid poverty?

We don’t have to wait long for an answer (or a partial answer, for a conundrum remains, at least for this reader): Keats next pulls the rug out from under the idea that love might better flourish in a “palace” (and there is much talk of palaces in this poem; it is a recurring motif). His words are strong: palatial love isn’t just “torment,” it is “grievous” torment. But he inserts a three-fold equivocation into his assertion before we can get to the grievous torment: This kind of love is “perhaps” and “at last” grievous torment, and the enjambed line makes us wait until the following line to apprehend the phrase “grievous torment.” I read “at last” as meaning that there may be a moment when love in the palace, in the bower, surrounded by all the wonders of the “glowing banquet room” Keats is soon to paint for us, may seem pretty good. But the moment of equivocation done with, the poet really piles it on. He is not content simply to liken love amid luxury to grievous torment, he creates a comparative – how grievous? more grievous than “a hermit’s fast.” We are left with the vivid image not only of solitude (which might be attractive) but of hermitude (sic), which most certainly is not. Furthermore, the hermit in this phrase is fasting, giving us not only loneliness but hunger, privation upon privation, deprivation of both heart and body.

Then, pulling yet another rug out from where it was hidden under the previous rug, Keats seems to renounce everything he has just said (both thoughts about love), calling them “a doubtful tale from fairyland.” Or is he simply reneging on the latter thought, the idea that love in a palace is no good? By alluding once again to “fairyland,” he is reminding us at the start of the poem’s second part that we as readers are in the realm of fairies, peris, goddesses. We are the non-elect, not residents of fairyland, and so it is difficult for us to understand this tale. We can never fully enter into the world, the passions, the divided loyalties, the transformations, both physical and emotional, of Lycius and Lamia.

In this fairy world of “Lamia,” where magic and spells and trances operate and where some correspondences with the reader’s own world may be found, two issues seem of paramount importance: one is the question of wakefulness vs. dream state, the other of seeing, visibility, invisibility. When the lovers, Lamia and Lycius, are “enthroned in the eventide,” we are seduced, just as they have seduced each other: We can practically see and feel the “airy texture” of the “curtaining” as it floats, unveiling “summer heaven” (i.e., permitting it to be seen by the lovers from their unseen vantage point). We luxuriate along with them in their post-coital bliss for the millisecond Keats permits us (and them), but then the serpent of their own devising enters the scene and their relationship.

Their “eyelids closed,” the lovers (fascinatingly) can’t give it all up to love, to passion. They are “Saving a tithe which love still open kept,/ That they might see each other while they almost slept.” They have trusted each other enough to let go in the erotic sense, but they cannot let go of the sight of each other. (It’s almost like a spy movie: They must keep “eyes on,” as the lingo of those films would have it.) They cannot surrender to sleep. They are saving a tithe, holding on to a shred of what? Something that causes mistrust, that prevents a complete devolution into love.

Given that Lycius, and by extension Keats, does not fully trust Lamia – indeed, as previously stated, is often repelled by her – his mistrust of her is understandable. But hers of him? More difficult to comprehend. Perhaps she is not, in the end, fully comfortable with the boundary she has crossed, the journey she has made, in her metamorphosis from serpent to person. Although she has thrown “the goddess off … playing woman’s part,” she cannot, after all, make a home in Lycius’ human world.