There's a wealth of Keats's characteristic bright, urgent imagery throughout "Lamia." In this poem about the seductive power of dreams and of passion, sensuous description brings a gorgeous, deceptive fairyland to life—and invites readers to consider ways in which poetry itself might be gorgeously deceptive.
A famous and telling passage of Keatsian imagery appears when Hermes first claps eyes on Lamia:
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—
The rich language here piles one image on top of another, creating an overwhelming dazzle:
- First comes that line of color-related words: vermillion (a rich orange-red), golden, green, blue—a shimmering rainbow.
- Then come the markings of a host of exotic beasts: zebra stripes, leopard spots, peacock eyes—markings meant both for display and for disguise.
- Those are capped with "crimson" stripes, which introduce another, slightly different shade of red to the vermillion that's already there.
- On top of this frenzy of color and pattern come "silver moons" that shift as Lamia moves, making her already "gordian" (or knotty) shape even harder to grasp.
The bewildering, overpowering, shifty beauty here introduces not just Lamia's appearance but her nature. She's gorgeous to look upon—but also, beneath all that shifting, flickering, iridescent gorgeousness, hard to get a clear look at.
And that's even before readers get to one of her most striking features:
Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete:
"Bitter-sweet" is right. Pearls are a commonplace metaphor when poets (especially the Renaissance poets Keats loved) are trying to describe a lovely lady's lustrous smile. Such pearls feel rather less commonplace when they uncannily appear in the mouth of a serpent. Coming upon this detail after the dizzying beauty of the earlier imagery, readers might feel their skin crawling a little, as if what they thought was just a gorgeous snake had sat up and grinned at them.
The pure, intense power of Keats's imagery here thus combines fascination and discomfort. You can't look away from this rainbowy, flickering, shifting vision of loveliness—but nor can you sink into it without a shiver of horror. The poem's dilemma appears right here in Lamia's gordian tangle.
Compare that with the similarly famous passage in which Lamia sheds her serpent form to become a mortal woman:
Her mouth foam'd, and the grass, therewith besprent,
Wither'd at dew so sweet and virulent;
Her eyes in torture fix'd, and anguish drear,
Hot, glaz'd, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
Flash'd phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear.
Many critics have observed that the imagery here might draw on Keats's medical training. As a young apothecary-to-be, he would have observed plenty of the pain he depicts here: the foaming mouth, the fixed and burning eyes, the writhing and convulsions. The later vision of Lamia's shimmering body being consumed by "volcanian," sulfuric yellows and reds might also suggest the fearful, devouring power of a chemical reaction.
Regardless of their source, these images all point toward the fact that Lamia, to get what she wants, has to endure a horrible contact with mortal earthiness:
A deep volcanian yellow took the place
Of all her milder-mooned body's grace;
And, as the lava ravishes the mead,
Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede;
Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars,
Eclips'd her crescents, and lick'd up her stars:
Lamia must surrender her starry luster to volcanic forces: her transformation burns her up like "lava." The process of becoming human here means leaving behind the airy, celestial world: the moons and stars that decorate her serpent body are here either fierily consumed or "eclips'd."
She must also leave behind her jewel-like snaky colors:
So that, in moments few, she was undrest
Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst,
And rubious-argent: of all these bereft,
Nothing but pain and ugliness were left.
Repeating elements of his initial description of her snake form, Keats adds even more jeweled color here, including the very Keatsian coinage "rubious-argent"—that is, a shimmery reddish-silver. Keats draws that word's parts from Shakespeare (who describes a "rubious" lip in Twelfth Night) and the language of heraldry (in which "argent" means silver). Besides evoking an unearthly but instantly vivid color, then, this language links Lamia's snake-form to poetry and to medieval chivalry, emphasizing that she's a creature of an artful dream-world.
Even in looking at two short passages, we've barely scratched the surface of their potent imagery—and there's much more imagery to find throughout this poem. Readers who are approaching "Lamia" for the first time might want to keep an eye out for Keats's descriptions of Hermes's beauty, of Lamia's dreamy palace, of Apollonius's deadly stare (all highlighted here), and ask: How does this language conjure not just a vision, but an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling?