‘Lamia’ and the Question of Keats’s Tragic Concerns Laura Waterman College

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...