Lamia

Lamia By John Keats Classic Poetry "Lamia" is a narrative poem written by English poet John Keats in 1820. The poem was written in 1819, soon after "La belle dame sans merci" and his odes on Melancholy, on Indolence, to a Grecian Urn and to a Nightingale and just before "Ode to Autumn". The poem tells how the god Hermes hears of a nymph who is more beautiful than all. Hermes, searching for the nymph, instead comes across a Lamia, trapped in the form of a serpent. She reveals the previously invisible nymph to him and in return he restores her human form. She goes to seek a youth of Corinth, Lycius, while Hermes and his nymph depart together into the woods. The relationship between Lycius and Lamia, however, is destroyed when the sage Apollonius reveals Lamia's true identity at their wedding feast, whereupon she seemingly disappears and Lycius dies of grief. Keats's poem had a deep influence on Edgar Allan Poe's sonnet "To Science", specifically lines 229-238 and the discussion of the baleful effects of "cold philosophy":