wonder I did not put this before – I shall go on tomorrow- it is so fine now I must take a bit of a walk – Saturday – With my inconstant disposition it is no wonder that this morning, amid all our bad times and misfortunes, I should feel so alert and well spirited. At this moment you are perhaps in a very different state of Mind. It is because my hopes are very paramount to my despair. I have been reading over a part of a short poem I have composed lately call’d ‘Lamia’ – and I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way – give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation. What they want is a sensation of some sort. I wish I could pitch the key of your spirits as high as mine is – but your organ loft is beyond the reach of my voice –
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?
Keats clearly captured the ‘fire’ of the Lamia in his poem and we are ‘held’ by the combination of her exoticism and magic. The uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding the reader’s reception of the lamia’s description, renders her compelling and more than just a little sympathetic unlike child slaughtering, mythical predescessor. Nothing and no one is fixed in history or Art!
