Résumé
Résumé de Lamia
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
For readers who enjoy myth, rich description and short stories in verse, and anyone curious about Keats beyond his odes.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
Lamia is a long story poem by John Keats, written in 1819 and printed in 1820 in the book that also holds Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Hyperion. It runs to a little over seven hundred lines, split into two parts, and it is written in rhyming pairs of lines. Keats took his tale from an old Greek story of a serpent woman, which he found retold in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. He wrote it at a time when he was ill, short of money and deeply in love with Fanny Brawne.
The poem gives you a god on the hunt, a snake that speaks like a woman, a young man of Corinth and a wise old teacher. It asks a plain question in rich language. What happens to a beautiful thing when someone insists on looking at it coldly and naming what it is? You will meet bright pictures, sharp humour and a narrator who often steps in to speak to you. Let us begin with the god Hermes, who is searching a forest for something he cannot find.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A god hunts and finds a serpentFree
- 2A bargain changes serpent into woman
- 3Lamia meets Lycius on the road
- 4Love in a palace hidden from the world
- 5Cold philosophy and the fear of the clear eye
- 6How Keats tells the tale
Point clé 1 sur 6
A god hunts and finds a serpent
The poem opens in the age when fairies and nymphs still lived in the woods and the gods walked among them. Hermes, the messenger of Jove, leaves Olympus and slips down to an island forest. He is not here on any errand for the king of the gods. He is looking for a nymph he has fallen in love with, one who stays out of sight of every god and man.
He cannot find her. As he searches, he hears a voice sobbing and complaining in the thickets. It is not a girl in tears but a serpent, and Keats paints her in a long and glittering passage. Her skin is striped and spotted with gold, green, scarlet and silver, and she seems to shine like something made of jewels and fire. She is beautiful and a little frightening at the same time.
Then she speaks, and she knows him at once. She calls Hermes by name and says she can tell who he is. Her voice is soft and clever, and she is plainly more than an animal. She is a Lamia, a creature of old legend who can take a woman's shape and who feeds on the lives of men, though Keats lets that darker side stay in the background for now.
This first scene sets the mood of the whole poem. Beauty and danger sit side by side, and the reader is asked to feel both pulls at once. Keats makes you pity the serpent before you can judge her. She weeps, she wants something badly, and the god who watches her wants something just as badly. That shared wanting leads straight to a bargain.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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