Primitive Sense inLamia

Abstract

A poet may strip layers of culture from his own and his reader's consciousness, almost without premediation, laying bare some long buried matrix of primal feeling. So it is with Shelley when, translating Bion, he has Venus bewail the death of Adonis, 'Oh, let thy breath flow from thy dying soul/ Even to my mouth and heart, that I may suck.' With like intuition, the English Adonais, John Keats, flashes toward unfamiliar sensations. In the last of his letters he recalls 'all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem'. It is that primitive sense of the elemental, of time-encrusted insights, in Lamia that I should like to consider in terms of folklore. Tabu is important in Keats's poetry. The Knight at arms of 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' (first version), having broken a tabu by eating fairy food, roots, honey, and manna dew,' enters the thralldom of a being who is a fairy femme fatale and a Circe who looks 'as she did love' (while yet a serpent, Lamia has a 'Circean head'). Warned in a dream, instead of joining her other captives, he has a painful release 'on the cold hill's side', there to wither like the sedge. Compression, ambivalent sexual adventure, and abandonment after a broken tabu which usually alienates the wanderer from fellow mortals, not from a temptress, suggest without elaborating or clarifying the old motifs. To savages rather than to medieval knights sexual intercourse during war was apparently tabu because of a fear that 'close contact with women should infect them with feminine weakness and cowardice'.2 The interest of 'the camelion Poet' in the story of Cupid and Psyche made him familiar with the tabu against seeing a mate or against seeing him naked. Because the oracle of Apollo had revealed to Psyche's father that she would marry a dragon (old style serpent), her sisters made her dread lying with something monstrous. Thus Psyche lit a lamp at night and heedlessly woke Cupid when oil dripped on his body.3