Ironic Tragedy Evident in 'Lamia'

As a Romantic, Keats maintained a tragic concern with the importance of dramatic irony - or, as noted by Schlegel, the ‘secret irony’ in which the audience is aware of the protagonist’s situation and his own ignorance of it. In ‘Lamia’, this notion is evident both throughout the poem as Lycius is unaware of Lamia’s true form as a serpent, and in the extract as Lamia ‘won his heart more pleasantly by playing woman’s part’; the choice of wording by Keats here having significance in that the phrase ‘woman’s part’ creates a link to dramatic tragedies, where actors play the ‘part’ of a character, thus highlighting how Lamia is actively creating a fallacy in order to be with Lycius: something which will surely crack and eventually end in tragedy.

This ‘secret irony’ is seen in Keat’s other poetry, too: for example in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, the lady deceives the knight-at-arms into believing that she is an innocent ‘faery’s child’ despite being a temptress who ‘hath in thrall’ her ‘death-pale’ victims; this irony is important in the tragedies of Keats and other Romantics, as it shows the inevitable influence of selfish motives present in human nature, allowing the reader or audience a deeper insight into the tragedy. A biographical reading of Keats’s poetry may focus on how his tragic concerns explore the tragedies of his own life and experiences with Fanny Brawne; in particular, an allegorical reading of ‘Lamia’ may follow Lycius as being Keats himself and Lamia as being Fanny Brawne, whom Keats wished to love deeply but without societal expectations and the confines of marriage. Following this allegory, Keats’s tragic concerns of forbidden love and the idea of doomed lovers taking refuge in magical dream worlds to protect themselves from the harsh reality outside are emphasised, as we are able to infer that these ideas are representative of how Keats felt about his relationship with Brawne. Additionally, the line ‘nor grew they pale, as moral lovers do’ in ‘Lamia’ further provides evidence for Keats’s belief that human, ‘moral’ love is inferior and fated to end in death, as the word ‘pale’ is often used by Keats surrounding matters of death and weakness, such as with the knight-at-arms ‘palely loitering’ in ‘La Belle Dame’.

However, it can be argued that ‘Lamia’ is not representative of these tragic concerns to the same extent that Keats’s other poems are; ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ shows a great juxtaposition between Madeline’s chamber, surrounded by lavish imagery of the sublime which acts as a safe haven for herself and Porphyro, and the ‘barbarian hordes’ who disprove of them inside of the castle and ‘storm’ outside, which successfully reflects Keats’s tragic concerns surrounding love as brought on by his own love with Brawne. Moreover, ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’ perhaps is more apt in showing Keats’s tragic concern of doomed, star-crossed love than ‘Lamia’ is, in that because of Porphyro’s social class Isabella and Porphyro ‘could not in the self-same mansion dwell’, and so are fated to be kept apart only to ‘nightly weep’ over their situation, the word ‘weep’ suggesting feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness. Although it is possible to see Keats’s tragic concerns in ‘Lamia’ through a biographical reading of the poem, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Isabella’ are perhaps more representative of his tragic concerns, including setting as a means of highlighting the tragedy of doomed lovers.

Another one of Keats’s tragic concerns is inevitable endings, brought about as a result of fate and forces of nature and displayed in his poetry mainly through foreshadowing. In this way, ‘Lamia’ does not show the inevitability of its tragic ending in the same way Keats’s other poems do, as although we can infer that Lamia and Lycius’ relationship won’t end well due to a plethora of factors, such as Lycius’ hamartia of being ‘senseless’ and ‘blind’ to Lamia’s true identity and the countless references to Classical tragedies paralleling the lovers’ narrative throughout the poem, in ‘La Belle Dame’, ‘Isabella’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ we are either directly told the tragic ending at the start of the poem (i.e. the retrospective narrative of ‘La Belle Dame’ and the knight as being ‘alone and palely loitering’ as a result of the lady’s villainy), or the start of the poem contains pathetic fallacy in its description of the scene which foreshadows the tragic ending: for instance, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ opens with the line ‘St Agnes’ Eve- Ah, bitter chill it was!’, ‘bitter chill’ evoking the sense that the evening is cruel and harsh, perhaps even stuck frozen in this way, inevitably doomed to ill fate. It is only to an extent that Keats’s ‘Lamia’ is representative of his tragic concern of inevitable endings, displaying this theme in a more nuanced way comparative to his other poems.

We see evidence for many of Keats’s tragic concerns both in the extract where Lamia entices Lycius and throughout the poem, such as the themes of blindness and insight, dream and reality, forbidden love and inevitable endings which are not only common to notions of Romantic tragedy but of Classical and Aristotelean tragedy, too. ‘Lamia’ alone is not fully representative of these concerns, however, as it is only through looking at Keats’s other poems alongside ‘Lamia’ that we can see his tragic concerns displayed in full.