here is a "semi-divine force" operating in the
world of myth symbolism in Lamia and in these experiences the poet
"projects on the highest imaginative level man's dream of permanence for
his more hopeful psychological states of being" (Boulger 244) This coarse
physical way is practiced by the ordinary sensual breed, not by the poet or
his hero. Keats employs symbols taken from the world of nature, mythology,
love, and art in Lamia. (255) "Love is the major focus for the major
incidents in the poem, and these incidents are ordered and made meaningful
by the mythological structure" (248). Lycius needed human love whereas
Lamia needed a love of a divine kind. Lycius could never rise to the level
of divine love between immortals. (248)
According to W. Jackson Bate, author of John Keats, Lamia was conceived
as an "enigma" (Bate 554). He states that practically all of her qualities
have an opposite, "real or potential" (554). The first thing we are never
completely sure of is if Lamia is really a woman or a snake. The poet
tells us that she was a woman once but we do not know if she was born a
woman. Bate notes that Lamia undergoes four changes in the poem--a woman,
she is now a serpent, she becomes a woman again, and at the end when she
disappears, she turns into a serpent again. Another question concerning
Lamia is whether she is mortal or not, or "perhaps something that falls in
between, or, more probably, something essentially different from either
category though capable of participating in both," (554) says Bate.
We do know that Keats uses "astronomical imagery" when describing Lamia,
but his descriptions are as "something evanescent or in constant elusive
motion" (554). For instance, we are told that "silver moon, that, as she
breath'd/Dissolved, or brighter shone, ot interwreathed/ Their lustures
with the gloomier tapestries." (53). We are told that she wears a tia...