Kelvin O’Connell

1/28/22

The Flawed Hypostasis of Lycius

The world of “Lamia”, and particularly of Lycius is one of repose and imagination.

Separated from reason, the world shimmers, as in a fantasy. The love of Lycius and Lamia is of

the most poetical kind; it marks not the love between two people, but of a person and an idea, in

the tradition of Renaissance love sonnets. Lycius’s own world rotates around him, and he can

only maintain this form of beauty in thoughtlessness. His world is golden, and gilded with a

sense of immortality; but his childish actions and denial of reality eventually lead to his own

death, as he can no longer accept truth.

Lycius is a contradiction. He is a “thoughtless” philosopher; he exists in a dream, yet he

is entirely unconcerned about the fact that he is also awake (Keats, Lamia, line.134). The enemy

in this story is reason itself, so we are forced to question what Keats means by the label

philosopher. This could just be a joke, our sarcastic narrator could have feigned this epithet, but

it is important to examine. He is a philosopher in the same way a poet like Keats is: he studies

the beauty of the world by twisting and distorting it, much like how “philosophy will clip an

Angel’s wings” (Keats, “Lamia”, line.234). Poets force their characters into preordained stories,

only to whet their muse. Instead of choosing to “unweave a rainbow” they gild tragedies with

florid song, and by these motives to find beauty we are forced to see Lycius as a parallel to

Keats.

Lycius is labeled as a “philosopher” not necessarily as a profession, or even denoting

rationalism, but in that Lycius has invented a lens of viewing the abstract world. It is a poetical
way of viewing the world, where misery is beautiful and love is death. Such philosophers are

often the protagonists of Keats’s poems, and most importantly in “The Fall of Hyperion”:

The poet and the dreamer are distinct,

Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.

The one pours out a balm upon the world,

The other vexes it.

(Keats, lns. 199-202)

Keats invents new words for these philosophers, one is a poet and the other, a dreamer. In all of

“Lamia” up until the final 70 lines, Lycius seems to be a poet entirely. He embalms his own

world by the poetic image of Lamia whom he created, but in the final lines, we see the dreamer

exposed to the reality he has fled. As a dreamer, he wishes to escape the pains of the world

through his dreams. The dreamer will venom his days and bear “more woes than all his sins

deserve'' because in Elysium he spots vestiges of reality, much like the unique manner Lycius

views the world (Keats, “The Fall of Hyperion”, line. 176). The vanishment of Lamia certainly

caused Lycius more woe than he deserved. He is a poet and a dreamer: he “pours balm” upon his

own subjective world, and yet in doing so vexes it.

The dangerous contrast of dreamer and poet is ultimately what led Lycius to his fate. In

desperate attempts at creating a perfectly poetical world he usurps Lamia’s will in favor of his

own Arcadia. He embalms his own world with: Greek gods, “white robes”, “silken couches”, and

“bright eyes double bright”, but in doing so, he pushed his own poetry much further than it could

handle (Keats, “Lamia”, 196,197, 214). Seeking pleasure, he also presented Lamia to the world

despite her objections:“He thereat was stung, / Perverse, with stronger fancy to reclaim / Her

wild and timid nature to his aim” (Keats, lns. 69-71). Keats uses the word “stung” to imitate
traditionally man being stung by the spear of Eros, and the word “perverse” similarly intimating

sexual desire; but the desire here is to experiment with poetry. “He took delight/ Luxurious in her

sorrows”, not in her as an object of his sexual desires.

He made his own Arcadia, and by pushing it too far, his world collapsed. Reason (critics)

and the external world crush Lycius and he dies. As a dreamer, this is his destiny. He was

doomed to die by exposure to the world just as he started feeling the bliss of his unmitigated

devotion to fancy. Because he was a poet, his world shattered. Even Lycius himself became his

own creation. He was a beautiful youth, energetic, mirthful, and innocent, but after his death, and

after his world of poesy was destroyed, we are left with one final image of him:“And, in its

marriage robe, the heavy body wound” (Keats, line. 311). There is a startling ambiguity in the

reference to Lycius as “it”. This merges the characters of Lamia and Lycius together. A “robe”

does not identify gender, and “the heavy body wound” produces the effect of amphibologia;

“wound” holds the image of wind, the feeling of pain, and the winding snakelike lines of a limp

body. Lycius is just as much a poetic creation as was Lamia. We were made to believe that we

knew these characters personally, that as a reader we are indebted to know everything about their

idiosyncrasy. But when the artifice becomes exposed humanity falters; Lycius and Lamia

become indistinguishable.

The contradiction of the poet and dreamer is what killed him. His system would have

lasted if he settled for just one; in attempting both he lost hold of himself and reality, causing

both to retaliate and unweave his illusions. Lycius is so drenched in artiface that he is as human

as a statue of a Greek hero. There is no real Lycius — one is a hollow figure and the other is a

lively poetic character — but neither are actually the true Lycius. Ultimately both reduce to being

inventions of the true poet: Keats.

 Keats imitates Lycius in that he views himself as a poetic dreamer. He receives negative

attention from critics, and the real world acts primarily as a canvas for his own poetic

imaginings. Keats is visiting a level of self scrutiny that is parallel to “Why did I laugh

to-night?”, in which laughing at himself “sad and alone” is a mark of suicide. In Keats’s poetic

landscape there is a strong dichotomy that forms in the consciousness of a figure. One, sad and

alone is a poet, or a dreamer. The other is a satirist; in pain and loneliness they find comedy, and

through the vanity and extravagance of our confessions and sorrows, they cannot help but mock

even themselves. Lycius of course is a poet/dreamer, Keats is both, and the narrator of “Lamia”

is a satirist. The structural irony provided by the narrator makes the sarcastic humor an even

deeper pool to wade through. Most of the narrator’s comedy comes from foreshadowing events,

especially the death of Lamia and Lycius. In foreshadowing the death of Lamia by Apollonius

the narrator remarks:

Save one, who look’d thereon with eye severe,

And with calm-planted steps walk’d in austere;

‘Twas Apollonius: something too he laugh’d,

As though some knotty problem, that had daft

His patient thought, had now begun to thaw,

And solve and melt:—’twas just as he foresaw.

(Keats, “Lamia”, lines. 157-62)

The “knotty problem” is unweaving Lamia, “solve and melt” is possibly a suggestion of

alchemy: to solve you need a solution, a possible pun on the dual essence of Lamia and Lycius,

as they are a solution of two melted poetical figures. Such witticisms and foreshadowings are

what show the dark humor and satire by the narrator, and he laughs at himself in almost the same
way the speaker of “Why did I laugh to-night?” does. The narrator has no morals, and he laughs

at the decadence of the atmosphere, but it is entirely of his invention and storytelling. The

absurdities arising from both the narrator of “Lamia” and the speaker of “Why did I laugh

to-night?” portend death; And it is the suicide of the poet in both.

In the two poems, the use of “wherefore” has the same result. It predicts the death of the

subject by an unwise decision or suggested action; in “Lamia”: “O senseless Lycius! Madman!

Wherefore flout / The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister’d hours / And show to common eyes

these secret bowers?” (Keats, lines. 47-9). And in “Why did I laugh to-night?”: “Say, wherefore

did I laugh? O mortal pain! / O Darkness! Darkness! Ever must I moan” (Keats, “Why did I

laugh to-night?”, lines. 6-7). To “laugh”, and to “flout the silent-blessing fate” are both methods

of suicide for the poets. To “laugh” is to give in to the satirist and to shatter what makes us

human; it destroys both beauty and truth, and they turn into “the world’s gaudy ensigns”, which

offer nothing compared to Death (Keats, “Why did I laugh to-night?”, ln.12). Lycius caused his

death by showing the world his creations.

The act of laughing presages death. This works not only because a laugh is an emblem of

dejection and capitulation, but because laughing at sorrow is a contradiction of sorts as well.

While creating his world of pleasant illusions, Lycius cannot escape the world. He may gild it

with aureat conceits, but his neglect of truth takes nothing away from it. “Lamia” is a poem that

operates as a reminder that when contradictions are used as more than an artifice in the golden

realms of poetry, they are self-destructive, or even suicidal. Ironically, Lycius cannot exist in his

own creation either. He makes himself stand as tall as Michelangelo, crafting gods and heroes

that woo and conquer; but his creations are false and his craft is feigned. He cannot accept that

the hero he makes himself become isn't his real self. And in the silence after the poem ends, we
can almost hear the narrator exclaim: “I am better than thou art now: I am a Fool, thou art

nothing” (Shakespeare, “King Lear”, 1.4.199-200).