Lamia and the experiencing self

Hi all,

The triumph of Bacchus by Cornelis de Vos.

I just wanted to clarify where we got to today. There are a lot of complex ideas at play in Lamia, but once you get your head around it, it’s the easiest poem to interpret of the four. So stick with it. Next week, we’ll annotate the opening together.

Hopefully, you agree that the conclusion of the main task today is that Keats offers an ambivalent presentation of Lamia at the start of the poem. The mythical Lamia was a child-devouring monster, but this Lamia is beautiful and alluring (as well as seeming devious and manipulative).

Perhaps then, it is better to reserve value judgements for now and look for another way to define her.

Instead, we looked to define her in terms of her association with what Daniel Kahneman calls ‘the experiencing self’ (see his TED talk on the subject here). The ‘experiencing self’ is the part of us that seeks pleasure in the present moment. Sigmund Freud talked about ‘the pleasure principle’, the idea that we instinctively seek pleasure and seek to avoid pain. He saw this as the driving force guiding the id.

Remember, Keats said ‘O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts.’ This suggests he wants the id to take prominence in his life. However, we also know that he held back from his pursuit of Fanny Brawne because of financial and societal pressures. Like Lorenzo, ‘honeyless days and days did he let pass’. Not only that, but Keats was terrified of publishing ‘Isabella’ because he thought it was ‘too smokeable’ – in other words, he thought the critics would hate it. So, rather than acting on his spontaneous, poetic impulses, Keats had a tendency to let thought overrule sensations. The ‘superego’ had power over the desires and impulses of the Keatsian ‘id’.

So, let’s consider how Lamia is presented at the start of the poem:

LAMIA:

Beautiful – ‘dazzling’, ‘brilliance’ colourful (‘vermillion’, ‘golden, green and blue’)

Complex and hard to define – ‘gordian shape’

Sexual/physical – ‘ruddy strife of hearts and lips’, ‘ravished’

Excitable – ‘palpitating’

Impulsive, driven and manipulative – ‘let me have once more my woman’s shape’, ‘grant my boon’

Enchanting/alluring – ‘she lifted her Circean head’

Passionate/loving – ‘for Love’s sake’ ‘I love a youth of Corinth – O the bliss!’

Powerful – ‘by my power is her beauty veiled’

Associated with beasts and gods/creatures of pleasure – ‘satyrs, fauns and Silenius’ sighs’ (Silenius was a companion of Bacchus, the god of wine)

Associated with misery and suffering – ‘some penanced lady elf’, ‘Ariadne’s tiar’, ‘Proserpine still weeps for her Sicilian air’

Associated with evil – ‘some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self’, ‘serpent’

Taking these ideas together, it is easy to see her as a representation of the physical, the sensual, the sexual – an embodiment of the id or of Freud’s pleasure principle. She acts out of a need to have her heart’s desire – and to enjoy it in the present moment. Her beauty represents her desirability, but that in turn associates her with shame and punishment. Her ‘palpitating’ nature and the changing appearance of her skin (‘full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, dissolved, or brighter shone’) represent her ‘gordian’ complexity: good/evil, beautiful/ugly, villain/victim. Perhaps she is neither good nor bad. If associated with the id, she represents sub-conscious desire/pleasure. Only the rational eye of the superego labels it good or bad.

The references to Bacchus, Silenius, satyrs, fauns etc. are important as the Cretan landscape at the start of the poem is a world of beauty and pleasure where love flourishes for Hermes (‘Real are the dreams of gods’, ‘nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do’.) Satyrs are creatures with goat-like features who attend upon Bacchus. The animal characteristics suggest that these characters live for sensations rather than thought. They focus on food, comfort, pleasure, sex. However, the rest of the poem is set in the world of mankind, where, as we have seen, love is fleeting, happiness is transient and death is inevitable.

For next lesson, make notes on the poem so far, up to line 207. You can find help with this here and here. Use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words.

You also need to be annotating the other poems too. We don’t have time to do it all in class.

Be ready to annotate the start of the poem next lesson. Make sure you have ideas to offer, especially with regard to this idea of Lamia as the sensual, experiencing self. 

Hope this helps. It’s definitely worth investing the time in Lamia – it’s easy to write about once you know it.

Mr M