Lamia (1820) Flashcards
Last of the romances of 1820 to be written
- a medieval tale dealing with a hero of chivalry, of the kind common in the Romance languages: the Arthurian romances.
- the literary genre of romance.
- a work of fiction dealing with events remote from real life, especially one of a kind popular in the 16th and 17th centuries: Elizabethan pastoral romances.
-written after Keats worked on the first act of Otho the Great
meter and rhyme
triplets and alexandrines (drydenian heroic)
written in mostly couplets
What does the poem recount?
Hermes’s love for a nymph that appears perfect because it exists outside the vicissitudes of human desire.
Its account of an erotic enthrallment between Lamia and Lycius that turns into possessiveness and destruction.
Shows how love is flawed, gives an account of its frailties
” A long poem that arches from beginning to end with a central consciousness, a directly traceable story, a singular (not necessarily single) purpose, is truly more novel than poem. But it’s a novel that relies upon the devices and music of poetry as its motif.”
Part 1: Stanza 1
Breakdown
- The “ever-smitten Hermes,” bent warm on amorous theft, leaves his golden throne, escapes the sight of his great summoner, because somewhere there was a sacred nymph before whom all the Satyrs knelt, laid pearls. He was standing there, pensive and full of painful jealousies, when he heard a mournful voice, which asked when from this “wreathed tomb shall” it wake, when move in a sweet body fit for life.” The dove-footed Hermes glided among the taller grasses, brushed around in the full-flowering weed, and found a palpitating snake, “Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusty brake.”
Anatomy of the long poem
Long poems are extreme.
Long poems grapple with narrative.
Long poems grapple with narrative but aren’t prose.
Long poems are confessional, because there is always a human being speaking and we bear witness to the dynamism of that human’s mind.
Part 1: Stanza 2
Breakdown
- She was in a “gordian shape of a 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 she breathed, dissolv’d, or brighter shone;” her head was serpent, but ah, bitter sweet, she had a woman’s mouth, with all its pearls complete; triplets: “but for her eyes” what could they do but “weep, and weep” that they were born so fair like Properine for the Sicilian air…” Her throat was serpent but the words she spake came as through bubbling honey, for Love’s sake, and thus, Hermes creeped there on his pinions listening.
Long poems are all love poems.
“The kind of respect it means to linger, to spend time with someone, time on something. To stay,” writes McHugh in her short long poem, “Not a Prayer.”
Part I, Stanza 3
Breakdown
- She addresses him, and the address of the poem shifts. “I had a splendid dream of thee last night,” saw him sitting among the gods, “the only sad one,” and, “have you found your maid?” He responds: “anything for the beautiful serpent with melancholy eyes, telling me where my nymph is.” The snake says “Bright planet” and makes Hermes take an oath.” He does, light flies from his earnest words, and the snake says says: She is “Free as air, invisibly,” says, “she tastes unseen; unseen her nimble feet / leave traces in the grass and flowers sweet.” She “plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen: and by my power is her beauty veil’d to keep it unassail’d by the glances of unlovely eyes” – and so, as a result, “I took compassion on her, bade her to steep her hair in weïrd syrops that would keep her lovelieness invisible yet free to wander as she loves in liberty” (Fancy’s casket is still unlock’d to choose, with the world of love at her feet, apparently”). The snake says that Hermes can behold her if he makes another oath to grant her “boon,” or wish–in a triplet in the narrative voice.
Long poems create intimacy
Marriage or a long-term relationship isn’t a long one-night stand in which one person never goes home. A long poem isn’t just a short poem that the poet forgot to end. Both require and inspire a different mindset, a different pacing, a different way of being, a different kind and level of intimacy with another person and with the self. When reading a good short or mid-length poem, I feel a shock of recognition – like catching a stranger’s eye on the subway – but this fleeting, intense connection underscores the separation between the poem and me, the otherness of the poet and his world from me and mine. Because of the breaks and points of entry, and simply because of how long I “exist” with and within the poem, I am committed to and invested in a long poem in a way that I can never be with a short poem.
Part I, Stanza 4
Breakdown
The serpent says that she “was a woman, let me have once more / A woman’s shape, and charming as before,” that she loves a youth of Corinth, that “give me a woman’s form, and place me where he is” (she was probably a cursed fairy); “Stoop” she tells him so that she can “breath upon his brow / and thou shalt see thy sweet nymph even now.” Triplet: “The god on half-shut feathers serene, / She breathed upon his eyes and swift was seen / Of both the guarded nymph near-smiling on the green.” Then, repetition: “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.” He experiences a “warm, flush’d moment, hovering,” dashed and enamored. Hermes puts a languid arm over the serpent. Then, at last, he turned to the nymph, his eyes bent upon her and full of adoring tears and step’t towards her. And “she, like a moon in wane, faded before him.” She cower’d, could not restrain her fearful sobs, was “self-folding like a flower.” Hermes took her chilled hand, she felt his warmth. Her eyelids open’d bland, and bloomed, like new flowers at the morning song of bees. THEN: Into the green recessed woods they flew; Nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do.
Long poems discover themselves
David Trinidad, who writes long and short poems: “I also remember thinking, in the middle of ‘A Poem Under the Influence,’ that it was like a mural (versus a shorter poem, which is more like a single canvas), so long and wide I couldn’t see what was around the corner, or where it would end.” Just as the essay is a form in which a writer discovers what she believes, the long poem is a form in which the poet discovers herself and the shape of the poem in the writing.
Part I, Stanza 5
Breakdown
Hermes and the nymph leave the serpent alone, who begins to change. Her “elfin blood in madness ran,” her mouth “foam’d…” Triplet: “Her eyes in torture fix’d, and anguish drear, / Hot, glaz’d, and wide, with lashes all sear, / Flash’d phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear.” In her train, the colors inflam’d, “she writh’d about in scarlett pain.” Her milder-mooned body’s grace turned yellow, and spoilt her silver-gold scales, made her frecklings, streaks and bars gloomy, “eclips’d her crescents, lick’d up her stars.” “Nothing but pain and ugliness were left.” She literally disappeared. “And in the air, her new voice luting soft, / Cried Lycuis!” And then these words dissolved.
Long poems allow the poet to change her mind.
This is part of the delight of the long poem. “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” writes Whitman.
Part I, Stanza 6
Breakdown
Whither fled Lamia, now a lady bright? Asks the narrative voice. To Corinth for Lycius. There she sat, “finally “passioned, / To see herself escap’d from so sore ills, / While her robes flaunted with the daffodils.”
Long poems change the mind.
In an interview with Jennifer Dick (on Doublechange), Notley said, “What I’m doing is creating – trying to create – a different consciousness … And I think this happens for some other people. It actually makes your head different.”
Part I, Stanza 7
Breakdown
Happy Lycius, for she was now a maid
“Yet of sciential brain / To unperplex bliss from its neighbor pain ; / Define their pettish limits and estrange / Their points of contact, and swift counterchange. This is “Intrigue with the specious chaos” to “dispart / its most ambiguous atoms in with sure art.” Basically, forcing univocity on things that are inextricably entangled to the point of ambiguity. Another triplet at the end, in cupids college she had spent / sweet days as a lovely graduate still unshent / and kept his rosy terms in idle languishment.”
Long poems are about process and highlight process.
Jackson Pollock’s paintings are a record of his body’s movements and his physical presence in relation to the canvas. The long poem is a record of the poet’s mind over time. Not surprisingly, time and progress are often explicit, central themes in the long poem as is the writing process itself. There is a self-consciousness (sometimes an embarrassment) about the project of writing (“I hate fussing with nature and would like the world to be / all weeds …” writes Schuyler) but also a compulsion to continue. The long poem is fueled by an unflagging curiosity about the world; “why not leave the world alone?” writes Schuyler in “Hymn to Life,” “Then there would be no books, which is not to be borne.”
The poet keeps writing, keeps writing. It is an odd thing to do, a strange way to spend time, but there is the world with its innumerable glories, and what else can a poet do but write?
The attention to process makes the long poem a highly artificial, self-consciously made thing. On the other hand, this embrace of artifice makes the poem feel more honest than poems that aim to impart a feeling while hiding their poem-ness. Long poems are buildings – sometimes glaringly out of place with the landscape, sometimes meant to blend in almost seamlessly – but never holodecks.
Long poems discover themselves.
David Trinidad, who writes long and short poems: “I also remember thinking, in the middle of ‘A Poem Under the Influence,’ that it was like a mural (versus a shorter poem, which is more like a single canvas), so long and wide I couldn’t see what was around the corner, or where it would end.” Just as the essay is a form in which a writer discovers what she believes, the long poem is a form in which the poet discovers herself and the shape of the poem in the writing.
“Whose head is not dizzy at the probably speculations of satan in this serpent prison?”
Keats, Marginal note on Paradise Lost, 9.179-91
Part I, Stanza 8
Breakdown
Why did she choose to linger by the wayside? Before we get to that, let’s talk about how she mused. And dreamt. When in the serpent’s prison house.
Two triplets in a row, suggests that as a serpent, her spirit went wherever she willed: to Elysium, to see the nymphs braiding Achilles’s mother’s hair on pearl stairs, Bacchus drinking, or underneath a gummy/sappy pine tree, or Mulciber’s palatial columns, or she’d send her dream into cities with feast and rioting.
Once, dreaming like this among the mortals she encountered the young Corinthean Lycius. Had a calm uneager face. Was ‘charioteering’ (rf to the Pheadrus?) Anyways “she fell into a swooning love of him”
One day he decided not to take the normal way home, to veer away from his friends’ and their locker-room “Corinth” talk. After a little solitude, and silence, and thoughtlessness… evening fell, and
“His phantasy was lost, where reason fades, In the calm’d twilight of Platonic shades.”
Lamia beheld him coming near… but his sandals just swept by quietly. She was
“So neighbor’d to him, and yet so unseen / She stood: he pass’d, shut up in mysteries.”
Long poems create intimacy.
Marriage or a long-term relationship isn’t a long one-night stand in which one person never goes home. A long poem isn’t just a short poem that the poet forgot to end. Both require and inspire a different mindset, a different pacing, a different way of being, a different kind and level of intimacy with another person and with the self. When reading a good short or mid-length poem, I feel a shock of recognition – like catching a stranger’s eye on the subway – but this fleeting, intense connection underscores the separation between the poem and me, the otherness of the poet and his world from me and mine. Because of the breaks and points of entry, and simply because of how long I “exist” with and within the poem, I am committed to and invested in a long poem in a way that I can never be with a short poem.
Part I, Stanza 8 (cont.)
Breakdown
She turned to him and “syllabled thus”:
Ah Lycius bright ! / And will you leave me on the hills alone? / Lycius ook back! and be some pity shone.” / He did, not with cold wonder fearingly, / But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice” [making sure she was following him] / For so delicious were the words she sung / It seem’d he had lov’d them a whole summer long.”
[?…weird rhyme…very stretched slant rhyme between Eurydice + fearingly & sung + long, language breakdown]
Then repetition, couples + internal rhymes/assonance:
“Leave thee alone! Look back! Ah, goddess, see
Whether my eyes can ever turn away from thee!
For pity do not this sad heart belie–
Even as thou vanishest so I shall die.
Stay! Though the greenest woods be thy domain,
Alone they can drink up the morning rain”
He continues:
“So sweetly to these ravish’d ears of mine
Came thy sweet greeting, that if thou shouldst fade
Thy memory will waste me into a shade:–
For pity do not melt!”–
She responds:
“Thou art a scholar, Lycius, and must know
That finer spirits cannot breathe below”
She is immortal and wishes to stay in bliss, rather than step upon the clay, rough flowers, and reminisce about her home
Then a triplet:
“…Alas! Poor youth,
What taste of purer air hast thou to soothe /
My essence? What serener palaces /
Where I may all my senses please, /
And by mysterious sleights a hundred thirsts appease?”
sleight = artifice, deceitful stratagem
the “cruel lady” leaves with no show of sorrow for her tender favorite’s woe
They kiss (another triplet)
As he from one trance was wakening / Into another, she began to sing, / Happy in beauty, life, and love, and every thing”
song too sweet for earthly lyres
“And to every word she spake entic’d him on, To unperplexed delight and pleasure known”
“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
Long poems look at the “big picture,” develop ideas and are “about” something; long poems are about nothing but themselves.
D. A. Powell: long poems make “a much bolder claim on the temporal field of poetry, sacrificing individual moments for the sake of broader ideas.” There is an inevitable “storyness,” an “aboutness” in long poems. Motifs accrue; themes that sound like or are “broader ideas” develop.
Part I, Stanza 9
Breakdown
So she judged that Lycius could not love in half a fright, and “threw the goddess off” and won his heart, more pleasantly by playing a woman’s part…
“With no more awe than what her beauty gave / That, while it smote, still garaunted to save.
Lycius to all made eloquent reply
Marrying to every word a twinborn sight”
