KEATS, SHAKESPEARE, MILTON, AND THE METAPHYSICS OF PERCEPTION AND IDENTITY

Transcription

1 KEATS, SHAKESPEARE, MILTON, AND THE METAPHYSICS OF PERCEPTION AND IDENTITY AS 3 6 $ lo I C L & C.MX18 A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of The Requirements for The Degree Master of Arts In English: Literature by Matthew James Martin San Francisco, California August 2012

2 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Keats, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Metaphysics o f Perception and Identity by Matthew James Martin, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in English Literature at San Francisco State University. Gitanjali Shahani Professor of English

3 KEATS, SHAKESPEARE, MILTON, AND THE METAPHYSICS OF PERCEPTION AND IDENTITY Matthew James Martin San Francisco, California 2012 In this thesis, I examine Keats s poetry about poetry writing as it is informed through readings of Shakespeare and Milton, working to illuminate his philosophical ambitions and to show, through detailed readings, the importance of his metaphysics on our understanding of his poetics. While Shakespeare s A Midsummer Night s Dream stages the conflict between the development of poetic voice and arbitrary reason in Athens s dream world, Keats internalizes this struggle, illustrating the anxieties present in his own developing poetic voice. Keats also assimilates Milton s philosophies on dreams and reason, recasting Milton s universal drama of absolute obedience to God and earthly temptation as the internal creative temptations of the poet. Through sustained formalist analysis of perception and consciousness in Keats s major verse, this project expounds the complex functions of poetic influence, inspiration, and voice in Keats s intricate adaptations of Shakespeare s and Milton s meditations of perception and identity. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank Professors Shahani and Schoerke for their expertise, help, and support, and for pushing me to write a far better thesis than I could have produced on my own. I would also like to thank my friends and family for their constant support and faith in a positive outcome.

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction Of Imagination All Compact : Poetic Voice and the Construction of Self in A Midsummer Night s Dream and Ode to a Nightingale Half in Love with Easeful Death : Dreaming and Identity Creation in Lamia and Paradise Lost Conclusion Works Cited Works Consulted...107

6 1 Introduction The speaker of Keats s unforgettable and perhaps most popular poem requests a beaker full of the warm South so he can drink and leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim ( Ode to a Nightingale, 15, 19-20). The speaker engages with a nightingale that becomes more and more fictionalized as the poem goes on, transforming from a voice (the nightingale never being physically seen by the speaker) to a representative of an ideal peaceful and poetic realm found in nature. The speaker longs to experience life as the nightingale does (and, in effect, become the ideal) and shed his human identity for an uncomplicated, contented existence in which he can sing with full-throated ease (line 10). This ideal poet who always sings easily at full strength is happy apart from people, happy in and of himself noumenally happy. From these few lines, it is clear how essential an examination of philosophical components is to any study of Keats s poetry, since this poem and much of his other work meditates on the complexities of voice, inspiration, and altered consciousness in verse. In this thesis, I examine Keats s creative imagination as it is informed through readings of Shakespeare and Milton, working to elucidate his philosophical ambitions and to show the significance of his metaphysics on our understanding of his poetics. While Shakespeare s A Midsummer Night s Dream stages the conflict between the development of poetic voice and arbitrary reason in a dreamlike Athens, Keats internalizes this battle, illustrating the tensions present in his own maturing poetic voice.

7 2 Further, Keats assimilates Milton s philosophies on dreams and reason, recasting Milton s universal drama of absolute obedience to God and earthly temptation as the internal creative temptations of the poet. Together, an understanding of the influence of Shakespeare and Milton leads to a better understanding of Keats s poetic ambitions and achievements. Much of Keats s major work, including Ode to a Nightingale, revolves around the act of composing imaginative verse. Of this poem Alan Grob writes that Keats infers from the apparent presence of happiness as a datum of consciousness the necessary existence of a noumenal order where happiness can exist without contradiction (294). Grob s statement helps explain how the speaker in Nightingale moves from hearing the bird s song to imagining, not only a space where the nightingale finds happiness, but a space where the speaker can follow and discover happiness that is not soon-fleeting. I use the term metaphysics in the thesis s title to consider philosophical moves like Grob s identification of a Kantian noumenal order in Keats s work and to recall the earlier trend in literary criticism (from roughly the late 1940s to early 60s) that is interested in investigating ontological and epistemological concerns within an aesthetic context and how poets engage in dialogue with their philosophical ancestors.1this thesis, through sustained formalist analysis of perception and consciousness in Keats s major verse, 1 Metaphysical ideas in the Scarlet Letter (Warfel, 1963), Mythical Thought and Metaphysical Language (Sontag, 1961), On the Indispensability of Metaphysical Principles in Aesthetics (Kuhn, 1950), and The Metaphysical Changes of Stevens Esthetique du Mai (Riddel, 1961) are just a few metaphysical literary studies from this era.

8 3 unpacks these complex tropes and reveals Keats s intricate adaptations of Shakespeare s and Milton s versions of perception and identity before him. Keats s interest in the dramatic mode to address the metaphysics of perception and identity is one of many ways his work is indebted to Shakespeare s plays and Milton s heavily dramatized epics. Keats, of course, proclaims his interest in bold early modern English in On first looking into Chapman s Homer (1817). Announcing himself as much [...] travell d in poetic realms (1), Keats represents himself as nonetheless stunned by the power of seventeenth-century language to speak out loud to him (8). As will be discussed below, many critics have established links between the work of Keats and Shakespeare, Keats and Milton, and Milton and Shakespeare, but rarely are the three investigated within the same project; this objective is rarer still under the rubric of aesthetic metaphysics. In order to appreciate fully Keats s interrogations into consciousness, this thesis investigates essential representations of dreams and how they strengthen or weaken characters identities in Paradise Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Ode to a Nightingale, and Lamia. Besides the intertextual echoes from these works in Keats s poetry, there are many philosophical echoes found in these early modern works that Keats considers and adapts, creating, not only a unique poetics and metaphysics informed by Shakespeare and Milton, but his ideal version of the poet whose

9 4 voice is as negatively capable2 and chameleonic3 as Shakespeare s and as determined and accurate as Milton s. Keats uses dream states to best meditate on the relationship between perception and identity because dreaming allows contact with an altered perception and an alternate self in a consequence-free environment. The temporary nature of dreaming allows dreamers to experience thoughts and events that would normally be outside of their everyday consciousnesses, yet they can wake up with a sense of freedom to access or avoid possibilities presented in a dream. In many of Keats s later poems, his speakers try to experience the noumenon of a being that exists outside the human world of pain. The dream state takes the shape of this temporary access to the noumenon of exterior entities, where, not only will a speaker experience thoughts and feelings protected from realworld ramifications, he can experience the thoughts and feelings of another being, giving him an insight into his own identity that would not exist from dreaming alone. Rather than offer escape from human consciousness, dream states, especially those that can access the consciousness of other beings, reinforce identity. It is no real surprise, then, that Keats frames his efforts to construct his poetic identity through the use of dream 2 Keats describes negative capability in his letter to his brothers on 21 December 1817: when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason {Letters 1.193). 3 Keats explains the chameleon poet to Woodhouse on 27 October 1818 is the type of poet distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime : it is not itself it has no self it is every thing and nothing It has no character...what shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er delights the camelion Poet (Letters 1.387).

10 5 states and by transforming the dreamers of Shakespeare s and Milton s work as the other entities he wishes to assimilate but ultimately set himself apart from. Why Shakespeare? Shakespeare s influence on Keats is a frequently discussed topic in literary th criticism. Two 20 Century monographs exist for the purpose of investigating Shakespeare s influence on Keats s poetry: John Middleton Murry s Keats and Shakespeare, which focuses particularly on the Shakespearean qualities of Keats s Ode to Autumn and the reminiscences to Othello and Henry V in Keats s discarded dramatic fragment King Stephen (189, 203); and R. S. White s Keats as a Reader o f Shakespeare, which takes a more scholarly approach to Keats s indebtedness by tying Keats s Shakespearean allusions to the marginal comments Keats makes in his own copies of Shakespeare s works. Studies like these exist in part because Keats almost advertises Shakespeare s influence in his poetry and personal letters by quoting from nearly every Shakespeare play, excepting only Titus Andronicus, 1 Henry VI, The Comedy o f Errors, and Pericles (R. S. White 16). Keats also credits Shakespeare with possessing better than anyone his idea of Negative Capability and implicitly attributes the characteristics of the camelion Poet to him, as distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime. Between Keats s own writings about Shakespeare and the Shakespearean echoes in his poetry and prose, the potential for critical work on this connection is nearly unlimited.

11 6 R. S. White s study updates Caroline Spurgeon s Keats s Shakespeare, a 1928 collection of many of the markings and annotations made by Keats in his personal collection of Shakespeare s works. Spurgeon determines that we now know for certain that Keats owned and marked in all his nine volumes of Shakespeare (vi), which forms an authentic record of the study and the love of our greatest poet by the one whom many to-day place nearest to him (vii). Through her study of Keats s Shakespeare collection, Spurgeon concludes that The Tempest and A Midsummer Night s Dream were his most read and annotated of the plays (5), and A Midsummer Night s Dream was one he came back to multiple times in more than one volume (51). In fact, one of his longest notes made throughout the collection is a comment on Titania s speech starting at II.i.81, which he culminates in apostrophe: O Shakespeare thy ways are but just searchable! The thing is a piece of profound verdure (52). In a recent reexamination of Keats s copious marginalia, book historian H. J. Jackson comments on this kind of writing from Keats as the admiration of an apprentice trying to work out how such great effects may be brought about; but surely it is also the admiration of a reader carried away and speaking for (and to) other readers who have the same experience (195). Jackson also writes that Keats s poetic praise shows the indebtedness of one author to another (in both directions Shakespeare owes Keats for On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once More ) and provide[s] direct evidence of the relationship between reading and new writing (186). Though Keats criticism has utilized marginalia more in recent years, it

12 7 has not diminished interest in Keats s indebtedness to Shakespeare, but has reaffirmed the enterprise, as Jackson s and White s studies indicate. Keats is also not alone in his praise and indebtedness to Shakespeare; to all of the Romantics Shakespeare is a formative figure. Jonathan Bate criticizes Harold Bloom s anxiety of influence for telling only the negative side of literary antecedence; Bate, instead, suggests that being a descendant of a great poet may bring confidence instead of anxiety (2). Certainly Keats exhibits feelings of both anxiety and confidence throughout his career: confidence in his early writing by daring to Fancy Shakespeare his Presider (letter to Haydon 10, 11 May 1817) {Letters 1.142), and anxiety when he stands on guard against Milton later in his career (To George and Georgiana Keats, 24 September 1819) (Letters ). The Romantics, inspired by nature and their own internal lives, look toward Shakespeare as their guiding light, since they view him as Samuel Johnson, agreeing with Dryden, sees him, as the poet of nature (qtd. in Bate 8). Shakespeare also, by being absent from his plays (through his adeptness as a chameleon poet ), anticipates the Romantics own preoccupations with the self: Shakespeare was thus brought to the centre of their thinking, a position he had not occupied in the eighteenth century when, though universally admired, he exercised little influence on poetic practice and was marginalized by critics who embraced neo-classical principles. (Bate 19) Bate s quotation reveals another reason why Romantics preferred Shakespeare and other early moderns, because they were less concerned with neo-classical principles and

13 therefore more closely reflected the Romantic movement. While Bate finds value and potential in Bloom s anxiety of influence theory, he proposes that each Romantic discovers his own voice through a creative tension with both Shakespeare and Milton: It is as if his lyrical genius is forged from the clash of dramatic and epic as his two mighty forebears are pitted against each other (3). Keats s poetry embodies this creative tension better than the work of any other poet of the period. Like the aforementioned studies, Chapter One begins from the locus of intertextuality, but is more interested in thematic convergences between the poets and even more interested in the challenges Shakespeare provides Keats in dealing with dreams and altered perception in his poetry about poetry. It is in this way of poetic challenge and response that I agree with Jonathan Bate that literary influence can lead to creative confidence and even motivation. Unlike many of the above studies that hunt for Shakespearean echoes in specific lines of Keats s work, this chapter sees Shakespeare as the direct inspiration of the Nightingale ode. The chapter focuses on Keats s adaptation of Shakespeare s representations of dream and identity in A Midsummer Night s Dream. Specifically, the chapter investigates the dreamlike world of Athens in A Midsummer Night s Dream and the poetic ambitions of many of its characters and their use of poetic language to strengthen their identities and persuade or manipulate other characters within the imaginative dream-world, and how Keats turns these considerations of poetic voice into the internal debates of the poet in Ode to a Nightingale. Galvanized by Shakespeare s play, Keats s speaker considers the proper use of dream-vision in

14 9 composition, whether the poet s role is more a translating of vision or a self-constructing and rigorous form of poetry writing. Rather than allow a muse to supersede their poetic voices, Keats and his speaker decide to reject escapism and place themselves firmly in the world of human turmoil, depending on the human condition and their own labor to create a poetry that is both humanist and uniquely Keatsian. Why Milton? An important allusion links the two early modern works discussed in this thesis. Milton borrows Hermia s and Helena s equivocating speeches on transforming a Heaven unto a Hell (1.207) and making a heaven of a hell (11.243), respectively, to reflect Satan s dilemma over his intellectual attempt to make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven (1.255) and his infinite despair To which the Hell he experiences seems a Heaven (IV.74, 78). Paul Stevens argues that Milton reacts against the anarchically imaginative world of A Midsummer Night s Dream, those works of fancy which like Circe s narcotic songs and Satan s proud imaginations only lull the sense (5). Satan s thoughts here, then, powered by the ambivalence of the allusion to A Midsummer Night's Dream, help illustrate Satan s anti-rational psyche, the narcotic songs of sin. For Milton to pit Shakespearean imagination against divine reason only shows his indebtedness to Shakespeare for providing him with the poetic technique and philosophical antecedence from which he can situate his own poetics.

15 10 While Shakespeare seems to be at the top of Keats s poetic pantheon, Keats s enthusiasm for Milton is frequently noted. He writes to Benjamin Bailey, I am convinced more and more every day that [...] a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the World Shakespeare and the paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover (14 August 1819) {Letters ). Keats even dedicates a poem to Milton in his On Seeing a Lock of Milton s Hair. And like Shakespeare s influence on Keats, critics are almost equally, if not more, interested in the relationship between Keats and Milton, seeing Milton as, to a greater extent than Shakespeare, the prime precursor poet (Kitson 463). In H. J. Jackson s study of marginalia, she comments on the importance of Keats s notes in Milton: The two volumes of Paradise Lost are so small as almost to defy annotation, unlike the vast inviting Shakespeare [the folio copy]; and yet the whole of the text is marked and there are about twenty notes, most of them long and involved. Keats must have worked with this Milton over several months, reading it through carefully and returning to some parts repeatedly. (194) Nicola Trott s Milton and the Romantics also argues for designating Paradise Lost the preeminent predecessor to all Romantic poetry. She posits that Milton s poem is selfconsciously epic, utilizing its classical ancestors while revising their themes of war and empire in favor of a Christian narrative and monument, a revisionist motion in which the Romantics position themselves in relation to Milton (521). Trott sees this Romantic revisionism arise from, in part, the Romantics reaction to the French Revolution, and the

16 11 disappointment that ensues. Since Milton, too, witnessed a revolution fail and immortalized it in verse, the Romantics identified with his work of post-revolutionary defeat (525). However, according to Trott, Keats rather appreciates more the sensuousness of Milton, or what [Keats] calls his capacity for the poetical Luxury of solacing himself at intervals with cups of old wine (530).4 While the Romantics are all interested in revising Paradise Lost to their own strengths and idiosyncrasies, Trott sees Keats as the defeated adorer, whose near death-by-milton has nevertheless given him an insight into his own, quite different poetic nature (521). Trott also leaves Keats out of the Satanist position of the Romantics diabolic interpretation of Paradise Lost, that which posits a rebellious or ironic reader, who refuses to comply with the moral structure of the poem (526). Instead, Keats takes his inspiration, particularly regarding his conception of the imagination, from the feminine-erotic moment in which Adam dreams of the creation of Eve (VIII ): The Imagination may be compared to Adam s dream, writes Keats, he awoke and found it truth (531). Trott is correct in noting the feminine-erotic moment of Eve s creation as an important moment in Keats s understanding of the imagination. Chapter Two of this thesis investigates the important and strong influence of Milton on Keats s poetry, though unlike many critics who establish Milton as the most important influence, this thesis aims to show both ancestors as perhaps equally important. While others have established the 4 Milton himself, rather surprisingly, referred to poetry as simple, sensuous, passionate (O f Education). Romanticism is much given to definitions of poetry, and Milton s doubtless contributes to its restoration of feeling and emotion to the heart o f intellectual endeavor (530).

17 12 deep connections among Keats, Shakespeare, and Milton, this thesis examines representations of dreaming as rich resources for understanding the relationship between Keats s metaphysics and his poetics, as informed by his poetic elders. This chapter focuses on Milton s dramatic representations of dreaming and consciousness in Paradise Lost and Keats s dream portraits in Lamia, investigating the philosophical implications of their poetry based on recurrent tropes of perception, reality, and identity. The chapter delves into the ways in which Milton and Keats present dreaming as prophetic, communicatory, and permeable. Both works show key differences in who has the ability to dream protagonist vs. antagonist, God vs. mortal and how narrators present this information. Though both poets are ambivalent about dreaming (due to the vulnerability of the dreamer to outside influence), dreaming in both works has the potential to inform the mortal dreamer of a higher state of being. The chapter investigates the analogue of Keats s near-death-by-milton in Lamia, the poet-figure s death by illusion: it explores the dangers, in both works, of composing, like the speaker in Nightingale, based on outside illusions rather than on a thoughtful, reflective, and internal locomotion. While the general consensus of Nightingale is that the speaker desires to join the nightingale as a poet who sings in full-throated ease (and surely he expresses this desire at the poem s beginning, as analyzed above), there is a drive in Keats that opposes this longing. His sonnet When I have fears that I may cease to be similarly conveys the poet s anxiety over beholding the cloudy symbols of a high romance (6) and dying before he can trace / Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance (7-8), but not

18 13 without revealing an equivocating attitude over this goal. The speaker does hope to live long enough to write a high romance, but, as the speaker of the ode initially depends on the nightingale to compose, this speaker is also not the creator of this high romance. Instead, the magic hand of chance is, and it is chance that offers composition in fullthroated ease. Not only is chance doing the work, but its hand is only tracing shadows, not the work of art the poet has seen in a vision. What chance does offer is the same ease that the nightingale offers: the faery power / Of unreflecting love (11-12). It is this unreflecting love and the speaker s being half in love with easeful Death in the ode (52) that offer a key to understanding Keats s philosophies on composing poetry. When I have fears that I may cease to be illustrates the poet s growing understanding of the nature of inspiration. As the nightingale and Lamia present their respective poet-figures with glimpses into uncomplicated, painless, and productive worlds, the faery power of inspired writing provides words on a page, but not an understanding of the human condition or the effort required to distinguish one s poetic identity. By engaging with the blinding dream world of A Midsummer Night s Dream and the sensual temptations of Paradise Lost, Keats aims his poetics of composition upward while differentiating his voice from his literary heroes.

19 14 Of Imagination All Compact : Poetic Voice and the Construction of Self in A Midsummer N ight s Dream and Ode to a Nightingale In The Fall o f Hyperion, Keats, writing as himself ( this warm scribe, my hand ), provides a prologue for the coming dream-joumey of the poet-protagonist (1.18): For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. (1.8-11) Keats explains that when dreams are not recorded, they undergo a dark dissolution, never to be recovered or shared. Imagination, in general, seems to have an intrinsic trajectory towards death, by being silenced and forgotten. It is therefore the responsibility of the poet to combat the enchantment and charm of silence with his own poetic spell and save dreams and imagination for poets and non-poets to experience consciously and intellectually. Barry Weller, in his study of A Midsummer Night s Dream, argues that theater invites a confusion or failure of recognition of the distinction between empirical reality and the play (77). Colin McGinn also highlights this key slippage, though he elides the work of the playwright: all the work of creation is performed by the imagination initially the actors, but crucially the audience s (29). Weller thinks that the transforming power of theater, or of imagination generally, relies upon making the distinction between reality and art or, to think of it another way, there is very little to

20 15 be gained from a play, whether it is pleasure, knowledge, or catharsis if the events are understood as reality instead of art and Shakespeare makes his entire play about this distinction (77). While many critics would look forward to later acts for consideration of the aesthetic, I think the most provocative display of Shakespeare s distinction between reality and art comes not from the dream in the wood or the meta-theatrical playwithin-a-play at the end of A Midsummer Night s Dream, but contrary to our expectations in the realistic opening act. While the first scene does not explicitly tackle meta-theatricality to the extent of the mechanicals finale, my close reading of the play s introduction and poetic trajectory of Helena locates a similar, less studied metapoeticism. Within the play s opening moments, Shakespeare s interests and representations of the dream and altered perception reveal a system of poetry creation that Keats appropriates and develops in his Ode to a Nightingale. A Midsummer Night s Dream embodies the transformative theatrical concerns with its meta-theatricality, the play s tactics to make the audience aware of its constructedness as a performance, as a written work, as art. The play reveals this constructedness explicitly by staging a play within the play and, more implicitly, by creating a separate, imaginative fairy world outside of the realistic frame of Athens. Further, if we consider Jacques s All the world s a stage meditation from As You Like It, then this meta-theatricality is always already meta-poeticism: if All the world s a stage, then all its actors, all the world s people, speak poetry. Keats, too, exploits this meta-poeticism in Ode to a Nightingale, making a poem commonly thought to be about

21 16 vision resulting from the poet s intimate interaction with the nightingale into a poem about writing a poem as lasting and universal as the nightingale s song without the nightingale s assistance. While not utilizing theater to access the reader s imagination, Keats uses the ever-shifting drama of his speaker s consciousness to confuse the empirical reality of the poem and illustrate the poet s struggle between crafting a unique work with a unique voice and allowing a muse to supplant his poetics, as represented by the nightingale in the ode.5 Shakespeare also tampers with identity: the suitors in A Midsummer Night s Dream are interchangeable non-characters as confirmed by Shakespeare when he literally interchanges them by having them pursue a different lady; and Hermia and Helena grapple with speaking through the voices of others and finding their own voices. Both works demonstrate the necessary labor of maintaining one s own identity where identity is often easy, if not satisfying, to surrender; and it is poetic language that is considered the appropriate tool for performing this maintenance. Keats interprets A Midsummer Night s Dream as a play about poetry s power of elucidating one s dreams, to save Imagination from the sable charm, or unreflective death. Shakespeare s characters are forced to understand and sharpen their poetic 5 Many critics have argued that one of the most distinctive and significant attributes of Keats s Great Odes is their dramatic quality. Walter Jackson Bate locates a second voice in Nightingale and Grecian Urn that questions and qualifies their odal hymn form (500). John Creaser sees the Keatsian ode as a subtle kind of dramatic monologue that distinguishes between the immediate utterance of the poet as speaker and his reflective consciousness (239). Paul de Man sees one of Keats s later poems, To as having the same dramatic organization of the odes. He thinks the poem reveals the paradox that the odes obfuscate through their richness, which is to destroy the entities they claim to praise; or, to put it less bluntly, the ambiguity o f feeling toward these entities is such that the poems fall apart (192).

22 17 language or be stripped of agency and follow the paths set out by others. Ode to a Nightingale adapts this message, giving the poet-speaker the choice of duplicating the easy, poetic song of the nightingale or facing the difficult, but far more rewarding, enterprise of finding his own voice. Shakespeare notes the difficulties of composing poetry by showing the poetic inclinations of characters steeped in the irrational dream states of lovers. A Midsummer Night s Dream begins with Theseus, the apostle of reason, as Garber and other critics see him, placed in a state of irrationality similar to the young lovers in the play (70).6 Theseus fervently awaits his and Hippolyta s nuptial hour Four happy days from the present moment ( ):... but O, methinks how slow This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires Like to a stepdame or a dowager Long withering out a young man s revenue. ( ) Throughout the six-line opening speech, Theseus sets the stage for a play consumed with anxieties of marriage and parental authority, identity and autonomy, and, importantly to 6 The critical agreement that Theseus represents rationality is widespread. Garber thinks Theseus stands as the apostle of reason against imagination, and therefore as a kind of limit to the transforming world of dream (70). R.W. Dent writes: According to a good many critics, Shakespeare contrasts from the start the irrationality o f the lovers with what these critics regard as the admirable rationality of Theseus-Hippolyta. The latter become a kind o f ideal which the lovers approach by the end of the play (116). And Milagro Ducasse-Turner notes that the dream world of the moonlit wood is often interpreted as a metaphor for the creative potential of the human imagination. As Theseus, the voice of reason in the play asserts, it can play tricks on us (279).

23 18 this chapter, dreaming and perception. Theseus s joyful first sentence-and-a-half is interrupted by a bitter impatience, as he compares the moon and time to a mother figure squandering the young man s inheritance. His perception of time has lengthened in his eagerness to see himself and Hippolyta joined, and this altered perception compromises his sense of autonomy and free will. The philosopher Colin McGinn sees the consciousness of the lover [as] itself a strange blend of dream and wakefulness, prone to illusion, close to madness, though he applies this altered state of consciousness only to the wood, as inhabited by the lovers in the middle acts (21).7 But Theseus is not in the wood and he is not a young man like Lysander and Demetrius. In his love state, Theseus acts close to madness in his back-and-forth irrationality, perceives the illusion of slow time rather than its reality, and sees himself as not in control of his being but instead having his desires delayed by a personified, dawdling nature in this quasi-dream state. When Hippolyta curbs Theseus s adolescent paroxysm, assuring him that Four nights will quickly dream away the time, she shows her awareness of Theseus s dream consciousness, and assures him in the same language that the time will pass quickly, the anxieties will then be forgotten, and that time itself will do the dreaming for him (8). Theseus is not the apostle of reason as he seems to some, and, since he is Duke of Athens, Athens is not the rational opposite of the wood as it is conventionally read, but 7 The consciousness o f the lover is itself a strange blend of dream and wakefulness, prone to illusion, close to madness so the wood represents this altered state of consciousness. If romantic love is a waking dream, then the wood is the place for such dreams to unfold: it is the place for dreaming and waking to become one, for these parts of the characters lives to bleed into one another (21).

24 19 the irrational dream world of multiple pairs of lovers. Instead, the dream world pervades the entire play, of which Theseus plays one part in the dramatization of lovers expressive difficulty. Rather than display simple impatience, Theseus s speech shows an equivocation influenced by his anxious visions, an interpretation strengthened by the dream-signal word methinks. Eleanor Cook has considered the uses of methinks and methought as dream formulae for Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats. For example, she notes that Paradise Lost uses the present tense, methinks, three times in all. In the two other uses, both in Book X, the meaning of judgment dominates, though judgment is informed by some visionary sense, whether infernal or human (35). Though, as we shall see in later uses of the word in the work of Milton and Keats, Cook finds the past-tense methought to be more strongly associated with visionary response (35), methinks still signals judgment of dream or vision, though it indicates reasoning more than [...] speculation or visionary narrative (34). Theseus s perceived rationality might be best defended by the application of Cook s meaning of methinks, but he is still consumed with visionary narrative, as much in a dream state as the lovers in the wood. Rather than representing the sojourn in the woods as dream (and love as a dream, and dream a metaphor for drama), Shakespeare presents the entire play as a dream or as having the potential for dream. Read in this way, the opening scene with Theseus and Hippolyta is a microcosm of and a prelude to the themes that run throughout the rest of the play, culminating in the meta-theatricality of the mechanicals production of Pyramus and

25 20 Thisby. Keats recognizes this dream-ruled Athens and the imaginative language required to negotiate with a dreamer when he similarly adopts the meta-poetic implications of repelling unconscious visions in Ode to a Nightingale. Theseus reveals his irrational thought process, and the dreamlike world of Athens, through his non-sequiturs, marking a world that necessitates a language that appeals to imagination rather than reason. After Hippolyta assures him time will progress quickly, Theseus tells Philostrate to Turn melancholy forth to funerals / The pale companion is not for our pomp (14-15). Theseus reveals here that not happiness for his marriage but sadness and death are on his mind and must be shunned until the wedding, and that it is his master of the revels who must provide the outward show of pomp that will affect his inward condition of melancholy. Garber sees Theseus s court as the practical everyday world of Athens, in which reason and law hold sway, opposite from the dream world which exists only within the wood (62). Garber s view derives from an interpretation of the wood as crazy (OED), which has become something of a truism in A Midsummer Night s Dream studies, like Theseus s rationality. But Theseus s reason is not as stable as it could be and his decision-making skills may be somewhat impaired, as exemplified by his punishment of Hermia. Garber thinks that no one s happiness is taken into account by Theseus because his reasonable solution upon the lovers fails to account for passion or imagination (62). Theseus fails to take others happiness into account not because he disregards passion or imagination, but because he is consumed with his own passions ( desires ) and imagination (the extended perception

26 21 of four days and the personification of the moon). Passion and imagination rule Theseus s court and the world of A Midsummer Night s Dream, rather than reason. But since this world is all passion and imagination, reason may not be the best mental faculty for traversing such a land. The Duke judges and enforces his rulings, and since he cannot be persuaded by reason, poetic competence is the most appropriate tool for negotiating such a world. Theseus s anti-rational introduction to the play may convince the lovers to develop a language that affects imagination rather than rational thought, to utilize poetry as their principle means of communication. Finally, Theseus openly admits to possessing the distracted mentality of the lover, complete with forgetfulness and dream logic. After Theseus offers Hermia her choice of death, forced marriage, or nunhood, he tells her not to decide hastily, but to wait until his wedding day, The sealing day betwixt my love and me / For everlasting bond of fellowship (84-5). In delivering a digression inappropriately directed at a woman who is meant to marry against her will, Theseus again illustrates that he is too distracted to properly adjudicate the issue with which he is faced. Theseus openly reveals his distraction after Lysander claims that Demetrius has already wooed Helena: I must confess that I have heard so much, And with Demetrius thought to have spoke thereof; But, being over-full of self affairs, My mind did lose it. ( )

27 22 He admits that he is not only preoccupied with his own arrangements, but so glutted with them that other considerations in his mind have begun to spill out. Still, even after this disclosure, he fails (or forgets) to renege on his judgment of Hermia. Theseus, rather than being the figure of rationality or the antithesis of dream and imagination in the play, acts irrationally, exhibiting many of the qualities that define the lovers, including an occasional dream logic that may be partly responsible for Hermia s proposed punishment. Once we realize that Athens is not a center of rationality and surely we should have known this, since Act 1 scene 2 at Quince s house is hardly a place of reason, logic, and order then we must conclude that, if the wood provides a dream world or representation of the lover s psyche, it must be thought of as just another dream or set of dreams, rather than the nexus or apotheosis of dream activity in the play. Instead, the entire play is concerned with the travails of creating poetic language and illusion, of creating the same dreamlike suspension of disbelief that the state of the lover can produce. This state of the play reflects Keats s ode, where the poet-figure becomes sporadically aware that his compositions are created by visions of the nightingale, influenced by pleasurable reveries instead of reflective judgment, as Theseus manages his court. However, Theseus, because of his commitment to rationality or his position at the top of the play s hierarchy, never needs to surrender his imagination to that of the poetic lover. Rather than riddl[ing] very prettily (II.ii.59) to win Hippolyta s favor like the other characters in the play, Theseus depends on force to entice her and woo[s her] with [his] sword (Li. 16). This difference in imagination prevents Theseus from

28 23 understanding the motives of the young lovers and discriminating between the triad of lunatic, lover, and poet, a triad that is meant to demean the roles of poet and lover according to Garber (85-6).8 If a lover s consciousness is a strange blend of dream and wakefulness, prone to illusion, close to madness (McGinn 21), it is especially telling that Theseus associates the poet with these afflictions when he says, The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact (V.l.7-8). While the consensus for many years has been that there is a strong element of irony here, that [Theseus s] rationalism too strongly contradicts the main themes of the play (Grady 300), I think there is creative truth in Theseus s words. Though Theseus means to demean the lover and poet, his words provide a secondary and apt meaning of which he is not conscious, a recurring motif in the play.9 The Norton edition of the play glosses compact as composed, which literarily implies that the group of the lunatic, lover, and poet are made up of or created by imagination. Compact also conveys the quality of tightly packed or dense, those qualities in verse which promote pleasure through dissection. In my reading, the group of the lunatic, lover, and poet shares the quality of having a mode of communication that is difficult for others outside the group to comprehend. Shakespeare attempts to convey the difficulty of composing poetry and drama by 8 Keats perhaps picks up on or modifies the triad to a dyad when he differentiates between the dreams of the poet and the fanatic as Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes in The Fall o f Hyperion (1.198). 9 See, for example, Bottom s malapropisms like I have an exposition o f sleep come upon me (IV ).

29 24 comparing writing to the communication of lovers and lunatics, an enterprise that is fraught with difficulties and misunderstandings as illustrated by the play itself. When Egeus and the lovers enter the court, the play expands on the difficulties built into the expressive modes of the poet, lover, and lunatic; specifically, Shakespeare exploits the language of authorship to discuss the marriage prospects of Hermia. Barry Weller s study of A Midsummer Night s Dream looks at this language, but does not follow the trajectory through to the language of dreaming. Weller aptly observes that in the opening scene, Hermia is not only treated as disposable property but also discussed as something resembling pure fiction, her identity existing as a creation of her lovers, or a social artifact (73). He notes that both Egeus and Theseus use the metaphor of printing to describe Hermia. Egeus complains that Lysander has stol n the impression of her fantasy (I.i.32), and Theseus tells her that she is but as a form in wax / By him [Egeus] imprinted, and within his power / To leave the figure, or disfigure it (49). Keats s speaker in Ode to a Nightingale inhabits a similar position as Hermia in initially allowing the bird to dominate his poetic voice, thus preventing him from creating a unique identity, just as the men in Hermia s life continually occupy her voice and identity. Weller also mentions that Shakespeare uses the printing metaphor in other plays for begetting children, but in A Midsummer Night s Dream the feminine here is merely a neutral medium for the transmission of male identity, and Lysander and Demetrius are vying not so much for the girl of their dreams as for printing privileges (74). Unfortunately, Weller does not explicitly say what the privileges of printing through

30 25 Hermia are, but judging from how he perceives the totally empty goal of desire (73), there may be few privileges short of transmission of identity for identity s sake. But in a world where identity is so fluid,10 there may be an inherent value in reinforcing one s identity by distributing it to others. By reproducing identity, it is easier to rediscover it when it is in doubt, though dispersing it through multiple sources makes discovery of the genuine, original identity incredibly difficult. Perhaps Shakespeare is also suggesting that identity is altered somewhat through the act of writing and distributing (and, in keeping with the themes of this study and the play, through dreaming and loving, too). The play considers Egeus s patriarchal printing metaphor version of loyalty with Lysander s poetic and transformative method of gaining Hermia s love. Weller places an important analysis of this scene in a footnote: lovers, whose words owe their allegiance to desire (faining) rather than to some external principle of reality, are like poets, who know and acknowledge that their language is fictive; the true deceivers are the self-deceived like Egeus, who, clinging to a legal fiction of his daughter s identity, claims to be giving an adequate account of the empirical world. (74) Lovers are like poets is a somewhat fitting way of seeing Lysander and Demetrius s language here and throughout the play, since they create something from their airy nothings (V.i.15) rather than some external principle of reality, though they use the 10 Lysander and Demetrius are interchangeable and so are their objects of affection, Bottom s head is transformed into that of an ass s, etc.

31 26 power more like Keats s nightingale in forcing their identities on the perceiver. However, Egeus is not so much self-deceived as he is unsure of how to play the game. Lysander has figured out how to influence Hermia s imagination by using poetic language, a skill Egeus has not acquired. Egeus instead tries to present himself as a god (47): since he is Hermia s creator, poetic license over her reality should be given to him. To regain control, he attempts to use Demetrius as his proxy, who in not wanting [Egeus s] voice, may be too visibly a puppet to harness an effective poetic power toward Hermia (54). It is also possible that Demetrius was introduced too late to have an impact or that Hermia knows about his previous engagement to her closest friend, Helena.11 Lysander s approach seems stronger, as it has turned her obedience (37), which has been given to Egeus all her life, To stubborn harshness (38). Hermia knows not by what power [she is] made bold, but we can deduce that it is Lysander s poetry, which has made her act and speak under his influence (though we can certainly see her react against him in private when he riddles very prettily ). Rather than influencing Hermia poetically, Egeus has been attempting to influence Hermia through reality (a very harsh version of it), but it is in the realm of poetic unreality that identity proliferation is most effective. Lysander s manipulation of Hermia s identity and voice is exactly the fear that Keats has over the nightingale s influence. 11 The object and the pleasure of mine eye / Is only Helena. To her, my lord, / Was I betrothed ere I saw Hermia (IV ).

32 27 Weller neglects to mention the presence of dream consciousness early in the play, which is fed upon by the power of poetic language. Again before anyone has discussed the wood, Egeus describes Hermia as if she is already within a dream or altered state, consistent with the critical consensus that love equals dream in the play. Egeus reveals his belief that Hermia is in an altered state based on her lover s wooing: Lysander has bewitched her (27), given her rhymes (28), by moonlight at her window sung / With feigning voice verses of feigning love (30-1), and stol n the impression of her fantasy (32) with gifts and conceits (33). All of these quotations either denote or connote the language of dream, sleep, or poetry, which Lysander has used to turn Hermia away from the external social reality of owing obedience to her father. Shakespeare is strongly linking dreaming to poetry poetry is figuratively presented to Hermia as the language of love and literally through rhymes, as we see the lovers speak later in the wood. The power of verse alters Hermia s consciousness, removes her from reality (as her father conceives of it), even at the threat of death. This type of reality-adjusting power of literature and imagination is exactly what scares the mechanicals: they fear that they will frighten the ladies with their depiction of a lion, though their fear is comically unreal a fear that parodies Egeus s anxiety about Hermia. Shakespeare uses the character of Helena to further explore the power of poetic language when she takes the stage after Lysander and Hermia make plans to meet in the woods and escape the tyranny of Egeus. Helena understands Hermia s tongue s sweet air / more tuneable than lark to shepherd s ear to be a crucial power in captivating both

33 28 Lysander and Demetrius (182-3). She also comments that Hermia s eyes are lodestars (183), but her voice is considered doubly: Your words I catch, fair Hermia; ere I go, / My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye, / My tongue should catch your tongue s sweet melody (187-9). She hears the words, but does not understand the timbre, the subtext, or the tones that produce Hermia s charming song. She desires her ear to catch [Hermia s] voice, not to fully become Hermia herself. Instead she wants her own parts to learn from Hermia so she can become the object of fixation. Helena s hope is to learn how to translate[] Hermia s song, a literary task not without its own poetic capacity (191). Weller reads more into Helena s desired translation : Here Helena imagines de-facing herself, erasing her own identity to assume that of another; the transfiguration begins with disfiguration, and indeed Helena s language is constantly disfiguring her (72). I do not entirely agree with Weller s argument that Helena is erasing her own identity. Translation or, perhaps more appropriately regarding song, transposition does not involve the destruction of the original source, but a transcription that ideally retains the same information and spirit of the source. Helena wants to experience the components of Hermia s attraction ( Your words I catch ) and appropriate them for her own use. In this way, Helena, though she lacks the poetic ability to translate herself to Hermia, understands the relationship between poetry and identity creation. Shakespeare illustrates Helena s developing position as a poet figure as she continues to further understand poetic language and its effective application. Helena thinks she can borrow from Hermia to attain an emotional reciprocity from Demetrius,

34 29 but a reciprocated affection does not stabilize Hermia s perception of reality and identity. Hermia shows a melancholic and equivocating mind reminiscent of Theseus when she and Lysander decide to leave Athens. She tells Helena: Before the time I did Lysander see Seemed Athens as a paradise to me. O then, what graces in my love do dwell, That he hath turned a heaven unto a hell? (204-7) Though somewhat subtle, Hermia displays her equivocation in her seeming praise of Lysander. Rather than saying that Lysander seems heavenly, or has made Athens heavenly, or that Athens is a hellish place since it will not allow her to be married to Lysander, she instead claims that Lysander, through his graces, is to blame for her perception of Athens as a hell. Unlike Theseus, who seems irrational in awaiting a pleasant time, Hermia understandably feels many emotions in deciding to leave her home, family, and friends to pursue love. This speech indicates that Hermia is conscious of some power Lysander has, but she does not yet understand that it is poetry that he has used to manipulate images and ideas in her mind; it is this power that Helena progressively understands throughout the play. Helena s growing understanding of poetry s power persists, her own voice becoming stronger as Shakespeare illustrates the poet s process of assimilating the voices of others. Interestingly, Helena uses the same language as Hermia to respond to Demetrius s threat of doing her mischief in the wood (II.i.237):

35 30 We cannot fight for love as men may do; We should be wooed, and were not made to woo. I ll follow thee, and make a heaven of hell, To die upon the hand I love so well. (II.i.241-4) This pair of rhyming couplets calls attention to Helena s increasing knowledge of poetry s power. Helena has appropriated Hermia s language, not an insignificant detail after hearing her desire for her ear to catch [her] voice and her tongue, Hermia s tongue s sweet melody. But her appropriation is not merely imitation, as her intention differs substantially. Rather than her love for Demetrius turning everything else she loves into a hell (as Hermia s love for Lysander does), Helena inverts the phrase that Milton will take up later to mean she will turn whatever wrong Demetrius can do to her into a heaven. Helena transforms Hermia s words to correspond to her need. Hermia uses the phrase to describe what seems to be a reciprocated but fatalistic love; Helena appropriates them to endure an unrequited love and persist in wooing as men may do. Hermia s use of the phrase illustrates her perceived powerlessness, while Helena s adaptation of Hermia s language helps her create a more constructive and forceful identity. As Lysander and Demetrius are pining for printing privileges through Hermia to transfer male identity, Helena follows suit by wooing Demetrius in a blatantly poetic manner. Through her inverted allusion to the Daphne and Apollo myth, she has wrested the male power of transformation from the pursuing god and vested it in herself; through the series of figures or metaphors she uses she declares her own identity, even if it is merely to

36 31 declare herself as ugly as a bear (Weller 72). Helena gradually becomes a poet figure in her own right, meta-poetically dramatizing the struggle to create her own voice and poetic identity by adapting, learning from, and deviating from her poetic ancestors. A Midsummer Night s Dream meditates on the relationship of poetic voice and unconscious vision, and the poet s responsibility to reshape imaginative reverie into a new aesthetic form. The play takes place in a land controlled by dream, where the Duke s anti-rationalism requires Athens s inhabitants to expand their poetic language proficiency in order to affect change in others and themselves by accessing imagination rather than reason. But a land consumed in vision allows others of high poetic power to influence one s own imagination and compositions. While Puck s actions with the love-juice (III.2.37) literalize this theme of influence, Shakespeare addresses it subtly with the Athenian lovers. This influence is seen most clearly in Lysander and Hermia s relationship, where Lysander s poetic competence often makes Hermia obsess over love, beauty, and illusion (all of which could be considered Lysander s graces ) rather than reflect on her own desires. On the other side of this influence by a muse that does not represent one s interests is Helena, who strives against adversity to expand her own poetic powers. Helena appropriates and adapts the poetic words of others to construct a stronger and more unique voice than the other characters in the play and attempts, with this new voice, to counter Hermia s simulacrum state in pursuit of her own desires. Shakespeare s play anticipates many of the authorial concerns Keats considers over his own vocation.

37 32 It is in the dream-controlled world of A Midsummer Night s Dream, where characters depend upon imaginative language to fulfill their desires and curb the persuasive poetic words of others, that Keats finds inspiration for his own struggle of creating a poetic identity. Keats s ode follows the development of its poet speaker just as Shakespeare shows the poetic development of Helena. Like Helena, Keats s speaker adopts the language of other poets while aiming to make a voice that is uniquely his own and that allows him to follow his aspirations. The nightingale s inspiring song assumes the same mental shape as the lover s consciousness: dreamlike obscurity severed from rational thought and mindful effort; this consciousness is the creative world of the unconscious poet which is in constant danger of infiltration by other poetic voices, like the dream world of Athens embodied by Theseus and the lovers. Keats takes up Shakespeare s meta-poetical dramatization of creating a separate identity in a dreamlike world and transforms it into the internal debate over the poet s process and voice. Just as other identities constantly press upon Hermia,12 the speaker of the ode questions the value and merit of letting the nightingale influence his identity and his poetics, resolving, like Helena, to reshape the input of others and create an identity he finds challenging, yet satisfying. Of course, there are many intertextual echoes of A Midsummer Night s Dream 12 A phrase commonly used by Keats throughout his letters. For example, Keats s explains his brother Tom s sickness to C. W. Dilke (20, 21 September 1818): His identity presses upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out {Letters 1.369). And when Keats thinks about being surrounded by people all day without a moment alone (Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 17 March 1819): to have nothing to do, and to be surrounded with unpleasant human identities; who press upon one just enough to prevent one getting into a lazy position [...] is a capital punishment of a capital crime (.Letters 11.77).

38 33 in Nightingale, as well, that justify this pairing. Willard Spiegelman sees A Midsummer Night s Dream as a major source for the ode with two major resemblances : their equivalent temporal prestidigitations and their deep alliances of the imaginative and erotic impulses within a natural framework and a paradoxical sense of dreaming wakefulness (354). James O Rourke also sees the ode s repeated echoes of A Midsummer Night s Dream (33) as well as Hamlet s soliloquies, and criticizes Spiegelman for ignoring Milton s influence, as well as the Yale critics for making Milton the single precursor of the ode (8). While there have been many studies on intertextual echoes, critics have not looked at the direct path of poetic identity-making between A Midsummer N ight s Dream and Ode to a Nightingale. While my own reading of Nightingale is indebted to those scholars who have also listened for Shakespearean and Miltonic echoes in Keats, the remainder of this chapter works to show how Keats s own ideas on poetic voice generate from Shakespeare s play. A close attention to individual words can profoundly shift interpretation of the ode and reveal Keats s meta-poetic objectives. On one hand, I focus on Shakespearean influences with darkling (a word commonly read as directly, and exclusively, Miltonic) to highlight Keats s willing loss of agency as he seeks to metaphorically blind himself. On the other hand, I concentrate on death, a word seen as so traditional, even conventional, that it need not be interrogated by critics. Informed by some of Keats s letters, this chapter shows how Keats layers a highly idiosyncratic meaning of death that of losing one s poetic/authorial voice in addition to the

39 34 traditional meanings more familiar to critics. To listen darkling is to lose authorial agency in the hopes of receiving compensation in the form of heightened sensibilities, since Keats suggests that the poet may need to put himself in uncomfortable positions to grow. Keats s unusual additional resonance for the idea of death suggests that the lure of the nightingale is to substitute his own poetic voice for the nightingale s, to lose his poetic identity. My reading is guided especially by the influential critics Walter Jackson Bate and Harold Bloom as well as the lesser-known, though no less nuanced work of G. L. Little. Bloom s reading of Nightingale terminates with the question: is the act and state of creation a heightening or merely an evasion of the state of experience? As he suggests by having Keats answer Do I wake or sleep? Keats never really provides an answer, and it is instead the heart of my reading to look at the meta-poetics of the ode: what the poem says about the act of creating and all that creation entails (imagination, perception, etc.), how the dream world of A Midsummer Night s Dream informs the dumb enchantment of the nightingale s song, and how Helena s literary tenaciousness anticipates the speaker s capacity to fight the muse s sable charm. The poem begins with the speaker hearing the nightingale s song and desiring to make contact with the potential muse, to greatly expand his perceptive faculties toward a closer apprehension of the nightingale s consciousness. This expansion of perception is not an oppressive attempt to print the speaker s identity on another being in the manner of Egeus or Lysander, but an endeavor to know what the nightingale knows by absorbing the faculties of another through close observation and intellectual receptiveness, as

40 35 Helena learns Hermia s tongue s sweet air. Bloom s analysis of the stanza traces the speaker s heart ache[] (line 1) to the nightingale s song, the effect of which is dual and strongly physical, indeed almost deathly (398). Bloom finds causation not in the song alone, but in the speaker being too happy in the nightingale s happiness, unable to sustain his own negative capability in this case; he has yielded his being too readily to that of the bird (398). While Bloom is correct in seeing Keats s speaker engage with the nightingale s being in viewing its melodious plot of shadows numberless, the speaker has not yet yielded his being, nor even attempted it in this first stanza. Bate sees the opening more accurately: Identification with the bird is not really complete; awareness of self is still partly present ( My heart aches ) (503). Bate, rather than seeing the speaker identify immediately with the bird, notes that self-consciousness is not yet lost but in the process of being lost, and the hope of identification is rising (503). He is undoubtedly right in noting that the speaker has yet to merge with the nightingale, but the speaker never actually desires to exchange self-consciousness for nightingaleconsciousness. Instead, the speaker explicitly states in the second stanza that he wants to fade away with thee, to enter the natural world with the nightingale, not as the nightingale (20). The speaker wants to experience the realm and consciousness of the bird, but he wants to retain his identity; he desires to learn how to, as a human poet, learn to sing in full throated ease rather than in an apathetic, animal cheerfulness (10). Commonly seen by many critics as an escape from human consciousness through intoxication, the speaker s request for a draught of vintage is actually a first attempt to

41 36 expand consciousness by accessing the noumenal nightingale, the full-throated poetic muse (11). The poet calls for a beaker full of the warm South that he might drink, and leave the world unseen (15, 19), which Bloom interprets as the speaker s effort to sustain the drunkenness caused by the nightingale s song (398). But this announcement is not a call for literal drunkenness a supporting intoxication, Bate echoes (504) it is a series of classical references to writing and inspiration.13 It is a call to drink from the poetic fountain, an invocation to an unnamed muse to leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim (19-20). The speaker here is neither drunk or in need of a supporting intoxication, as he is single-mindedly invoking the muse for the purpose of composing poetry; he is, rather, requesting a metaphysical drink from the natural well from which a pastoral poetry oozes, a poetry as happy and uncaring as that of the bird s song (Little 45). I mentioned this stanza s final lines in my introduction as depicting the nightingale as the ideal poet, but they also foreshadow the darkness that the speaker encounters in stanza five, a darkness that cooperatively works with the poet s draught to prepare him for creative vision. Unseen, fade away and forest dim all together evoke images of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the charm of separation from civilization; these images conduct the poet through the fruitful dream world of Athens s 13 The Norton Critical Edition has an excellent gloss for this stanza that shows the classical references to poetic inspiration: Keats offers a series of figures for a glass of wine, from a draught of vintage, which tastes of, among other things, Flora (the Roman goddess of flowers mentioned in Sleep and Poetry, 1.102, as embodying the world o f romance) and Provence (in the south of France and famous for the love songs of the Troubadors), to a beaker filled with all the warmth and vitality o f Mediterranean culture as well as of the waters o f the Hippocrene (a fountain sacred to the muses on Mount Helicon) (458).

42 37 wood but they also describe a space that exists independently of visual stimuli. If the nightingale is the apotheosis of poetry creation, then its position in darkness is an entry point for the speaker; just as Helena questions Hermia to begin her pursuit of acquiring Hermia s poetic aptitude, the speaker of Nightingale aims to place himself in darkness as the starting position for perceiving as the nightingale perceives. Keats s darkness is often interpreted as a deathly depression, but the darkness of the forest dim has an imaginative hopefulness, revealing a friction between meditations on darkness and death later in the poem, or at least a critical uncertainty. Bate claims these lines betray the inevitable return to self (504), but the speaker seems no less joined to the bird here than when he requests the draught at the beginning of the stanza. Instead of a return to self, these lines show the poet s preparation for creative vision and a departure from self through his suspension of optical perception and invocation of a pastoral muse. Even though the speaker prepares to join in the nightingale s experience, he marks his spatial and temporal location in the third stanza, which indicates where his experience of the nightingale is superseded by his contemplation and writing of the experience. The poet continues to move meta-poetically to Here, the world devoid of the nightingale, Where but to think is to be full of sorrow (lines 24, 27). Where Bloom ignores the stanza, Bate sees it as having the direct urgency of drama where those wishes to leave the world are seen both as massively justified and yet in so compelling a context as ultimately helpless (505). Bate s view defends Keats from critics who see these lines as a lapse or stagger in the poem (505), but it neglects the

43 38 importance of Here and think which identify the speaker s location inside the writing process and outside his perception of the nightingale. Here situates the speaker clearly in the painful real world rather than the imaginative realm of the bird, and think shows a rupture between experiencing and reflecting on a poetic vision or identification with the nightingale the poet is instead thinking of the harshness that occupies the space outside his creative worlds. Stretching the boundaries of the lyric form, Keats s poem, rather than narrating the poet s hearing of the nightingale s song and the feelings it generates, follows the mind of the poet through a series of revisions: the speaker reacts to the nightingale as well as his own thoughts, modifying his writing around these adjustments of consciousness and creating an interiority that is a step removed from the conventional lyric. Little perceives this separation of sensation and thought (46), though he attributes it to the lines: Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies (25-26). This rupture certainly recalls Keats s O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! letter to Benjamin Bailey on 22 November 1817, which continues: a complex Mind one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its Fruits who would exist partly on Sensation partly on thought to whom it is necessary that years should bring the philosophic Mind (Letters ). Critics have generally focused on the first part of the letter, characterizing Keats as a poet of Sensations who is unconcerned with Thoughts rather than a poet trying to negotiate the two operations of the mind. The cognitive interruption in the imaginative vision of the poem correlates to the digestion of

44 39 sensation and thought together, and there is a sense in the poet s early return to Thoughts of the mortal world that Keats will be dropping what little amount of truth a Life of Sensations could have held for him and grasping Thoughts more forcefully by the end of the poem. The poem dramatizes the cerebral movement from sensation to thought to cultivating both sensation and thought simultaneously. The poet gains the ability to evaluate the muse, to reflect on its influence; he is left with the potential of being a real artist with a unique voice instead of a vessel for another s voice. Once the poet combines sensation and thought in his perception of the nightingale, he must move on and find a writing process after the decay of his muse, supplanting mimicry with reflective composition. As the speaker decides he will fly to the nightingale on the viewless wings of Poesy (line 33), he has put aside the last aid to invocation and launched himself into writing (Bloom 398), Though the dull brain fights his close-to-breaking ( tender ) night vision (lines 34-35). It is at the moment of being conscious of Poesy (line 33) that Keats enters the inner world of his poem, that highest state of the imagination, according to Bloom (398). But Bate finds that the speaker s call for Poesy used solely in this way for escape or illusion results only in two lines of futile ornament (the Queen-Moon attended by her starry Fays ) (505), before he admits that he is not really with the nightingale in a poetic vision, but here again: But here there is no light, / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways (38-40). Bate thinks at this point the separateness of the poet and the bird is presupposed (506) but that does not mean

45 40 poetic vision is unavailable to him. In fact, though he remains here on earth, the speaker is still able to receive light from heaven, though indirectly creativity is no longer the effortless imitation of the nightingale s song, but begins in the poet s darkened mind, aided by the outside world s winding inspiration, which is already channeled through memory. While the speaker no longer seeks the nightingale in his reverie, he does explore the natural world he hoped to escape to, noting through senses other than sight: Fast fading violets cover d up in leaves; And mid-may s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. (47-50) Bate appropriately calls this fifth stanza the acceptance of process which involves the acceptance of death (506). The speaker no longer wishes to be transported to another physical or mental realm, nor does he fear but to think is to be full of sorrow since he is thinking here in guess[ing] each flower sweet. These lines, allusions to A Midsummer Night s Dream and Lycidas, show potentiality in a season of decay.14 The violets communicate their fading, though they are hidden under fallen leaves, and the muskrose nears its rebirth for the enjoyment of the flies that, though they cannot sing like the 14 The Norton Critical Edition glosses stanza five: see Shakespeare, A Midsummer N ight s Dream, : I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, / Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine, / With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine ; and Milton, Lycidas, II : The glowing Violet. / The Musk-rose, and the well attir d Woodbine (459).

46 41 nightingale, murmur[] on dark, summer nights. The speaker still finds the murmuring inspiration in his mind and in process as, sightless, he remembers and immortalizes this scene of nature, Shakespeare, and Milton through verse. The separation of poetic vision from the nightingale is what leads to the true poetic vision as the speaker accesses his imagination to create the lyric beauty of process in stanza five. It is his contemplation of process that leads the speaker to consider death in the sixth stanza, the turning point in the speaker s consciousness of the nightingale, which transforms from the ideal muse to the embodiment of blind imitation of another s language. Both Bloom and Little see an allusion to Milton s invocation to holy light in Darkling I listen (line 51), though neither notice that this pattern in which the speaker positions himself as the blind poet first takes place earlier in the poem when he realizes here there is no light (38). Bloom and Little see the allusion as a distinct echo to Book III of Paradise Lost (Bloom 400), which may be the strongest and most verifiable reference, but both critics ignore the echo of A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Helena says to Demetrius O, wilt thou darkling leave me? (II.ii.92). Perhaps the most important link between the two allusions is agency. For Milton, the bird has agency as it Sings darkling, while the poet finds it necessary to request Celestial Light to Shine inward so he may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight (III.51-52, 54-55). Similarly demonstrating lack of agency is Helena s use of darkling, which proceeds from Demetrius s commands to leave him. Keats s Darkling I listen shows his speaker in league with these figures, waiting for the nightingale to utter again, though he, unlike

47 42 Milton and Helena, will remain unfulfilled. Keats modulates Helena s lack of agency early in the poem to the plight of the poet dependent on a muse to create. Through identifying the speaker s situation with Helena s gradual construction of poetic voice and agency, Keats renounces the speaker s original, ideal joining with the nightingale: the passive, thoughtless approach to composition. The speaker s original desire to hear and employ the nightingale s song temporarily returns as he carefully listens for its voice again. The listening process opens up a stream of consciousness in which the speaker contemplates the consequences of successfully mimicking the song: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain To thy high requiem become a sod. (51-60) Bloom thinks that As he has called upon Death in many a mused rhyme, this exhaling is equivalent to the act of uttering and composing his poem, and we are reminded that

48 43 spirit means both soul and breath, and that the poet invoking his muse calls upon a breath greater than his own to inspirit him. Death, then, is here a muse (401). Bloom is mostly right in noting the ambiguous meta-poetics of the stanza, but Keats has a sometimes idiosyncratic way of using death that I think is at work here, which turns Bloom s explanation on its head. In a letter to George and Georgiana Keats on 24 September 1819, Keats writes, I have but lately stood on my guard against Milton. Life to him would be death to me. Miltonic verse cannot be written but it [.s/c] the vein of art I wish to devote myself to another sensation {Letters ). Death in this letter is the death of his poetic voice, as John Rosenberg obliquely notices: He had become convinced that Milton s very sublimity, were he to continue to imitate it, would impose upon him a definite constraint of imagination and artificiality of language (90). To give life to Milton by imitating his poetics is to destroy the poetics of Keats. The stanza reads much differently to think of the speaker as half in love with letting the nightingale s song flow through him easeful[ly], to take into the air [his] quiet breath rather than endure the much more difficult task of speaking with his own voice. To cease here would be to substitute his poetic identity with that of the nightingale, take its voice for his own while it is strong and effortless, which would leave his own voice, his own style, his own poetic identity dead, a lamented corpse for the nightingale s high requiem. This death of poetics recalls the lack of visual stimuli in stanza five s Unseen, fade away and forest dim. The speaker previously wished to be unseen in the service of creating a poetic vision, but, in creating the vision from darkness, he sees that the formerly wished

49 44 for visionary dependence leaves the poet uninvolved and unknown. Little observes a warning in leaving the world unseen in that reality will be unseen, ignored, or that the poet himself will be simply unrecognized, forgotten, as he fades into the pastoral dream (45). The inability to be recognized as he fades into the pastoral dream is exactly the fear the speaker expresses in allowing himself to die as the nightingale pours its soul abroad. This is the danger Hermia faces in allowing either Lysander or Egeus to write their identities upon her: by allowing Lysander to speak through her, in blindly obeying outside voices, Hermia risks losing her life or that which she previously called a heaven. Through his being unrecognized, the poet suffers a death similar to the dominant interpretation of the word he is mortal because he is cut off from poetic immortality. In contemplating the life of his own poetry, the speaker returns to a vision of the nightingale in the seventh stanza, evaluating the bird s, or rather its voice s, immortality, and comparing it to the potential immortality of his own voice. Bate describes the stanza as illustrating the range that this music can touch or haunt, moving gently from the actual past ( emperor and clown ), through the realm of possibility and Biblical story, to the remote world of fancy or rather to the mere thought of it, imagined from a distant shore (509). The poet begins to see the voice move through space and time as well as through other works like the Bible and the faery lands of Spenser. His imagination traces the song s influence through other writings just as Shakespeare and Milton sing through him. The stanza shows the potential immortality of poetry by seeing the

50 45 nightingale s song pass through the works of others, the song engaging his fancy, as it has done with most living people for all time. However, apart from this potential immortality, the speaker also notes the song s ability to create melancholy when it passes Through the sad heart of Ruth and leaves her in tears amid the alien corn (66, 67). The speaker posits that the song s independence from hungry generations, instead, saddens those who are searching for their own form of immortality; apart from the danger of dumb enchantment, the song also carries the reminder of mortality to the perceiver. The speaker would be continuing the poetic lives of others by utilizing the nightingale s and Milton s voices, but his own immortality seems suspect if even he cannot produce his own voice. While the dominant interpretation of this passage asserts that the song empathizes with human suffering, this stance is complicated by the nightingale s inability to know the weariness, the fever, and the fret of human existence described in stanza three (23). Now that the speaker has abandoned the ideal of the nightingale s pastoral, escapist poetics, he can return to the human suffering that has intermittently materialized throughout the poem, becoming more in line with the latter part of the path Keats establishes for himself in Sleep and Poetry, which, interestingly, comes after he passes the realm Of Flora, and old Pan (102): And can I ever bid these joys farewell? Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life, Where I may find the agonies, the strife Of human hearts[....] (122-25)

51 46 Keats explains that, after he spends time composing pastoral poetry, he knows he must mature and take on tragedy to become a fully rounded and immortal poet. This final reverie of the speaker considers the immortality of poetry while revealing both an anxiety over his ability to realize a similar accomplishment and a hope that he can surpass the nightingale s power by leading a nobler poetic life, as A humanist, physician to all men {Fall o f Hyperion 1.90), who tends to human hearts. In his stream of consciousness, the speaker halts when his mind comes to the word forlorn (70), which, though normally seen as a devastating remembrance of mortality, actually solidifies the speaker s desire to take control of his own poetic destiny. Bloom provides the dominant interpretation in his reading, noting that, as the speaker reacts to forlorn in the final stanza (repeated in line 71), the nightingale s song becomes a requiem for the shattered communion between poet and song, as it rings the poet back to the isolation of his sole self (402). But this break in communication is not tragic, as Bloom suggests. The repeated adieu (73, 75) is hardly as painful an absence as stanza three s leaden-eyed despairs (28), or, especially, as the desperate yearning for the subject of To (commonly seen as Fanny Brawne): The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone (line 1). Little correctly notes that Paradoxically, the recollection returns him to his identity, and therefore away from the descent to Lethe (49). The break from the nightingale prevents the speaker from suffering a poetic death. At this time, the poet uses his own imaginative vision to lay the nightingale s song to rest:

52 47 Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hillside; and now tis buried deep In the next valley glades (75-78) Returning to full consciousness after the vision of the nightingale s immortality leaves him forlorn, the poet enters one final lyric surge in which he psychically buries the nightingale s song and its plaintive influence. It is now the speaker s task to remember the vision, to assimilate it, and to transform it in a manner similar to Keats s opening meditation in The Fall o f Hyperion, saving his voice from dumb enchantment (1.11). Bate asks, Was this short greeting of the Spirit and its object a genuine heightening of experience, with something of vision, and is he now returning to unawareness or sleep ; or is he waking to reality from what was only subjective half-dream? (509). The speaker s reaction to forlorn should indicate to us that, even in the penultimate stanza, he is more concerned with his own language than the vision he has tried to describe. Bate s queries may be questions that the reader asks of the speaker s experience, but the quick cessation of the last stanza, the end of the vision only two lines before the end of the poem, provides little evidence of the speaker being as concerned with the veracity of the dream as we are. The poet is fully awake and ready to translate the vision (Little 50). He has traveled far and considered his locations in the painful, mortal world, in the air, on the page, and ended his journey with his inward sight. And perhaps the poem

53 48 begins where it ends, attempting to modulate the vision of the nightingale into an aesthetic artifact. Both Shakespeare and Keats write about the sable charm of imagination, the danger of another s poetic influence taking over the poetic output of the composing writer. Keats s speaker in Nightingale launches his internal debate over poetic process and voice from Shakespeare s meta-poetical dramatization of creating and maintaining identity in a dreamlike world. Theseus sets up an illusionary state in A Midsummer Night s Dream where communicating complex thoughts and feelings is difficult, and so leads to a population willing to let skillful poetic voices overpower its less-adept ones. Helena must develop her own poetic proficiency to negotiate the dreamlike world of Athens or risk parroting the poetics of others and relinquishing her agency to the patriarchal powers that are all too willing to manage her in the same way they manipulate Hermia throughout the play. Lysander s poetic manipulation of Hermia s psyche leaves her without a voice and compelled to follow many of the impulses of her favored suitor. This disabling of identity is exactly the fear that Keats has over the nightingale s influence in Ode to a Nightingale. The speaker of the ode recognizes that, though the nightingale s song seems to provide the power for composing a beautiful poem that could potentially live a life as timeless as the nightingale s anthem, the process of direct inspiration actually leaves him uninvolved, his authorship uncertain, nor a miserable and mighty Poet of the human Heart like Shakespeare whose days were not more happy than Hamlet s who is perhaps more like Shakespeare himself in his common every day

54 49 Life than any other of his Characters (To Sarah Jeffrey, 9 June 1819) {Letters II ). The poet would have given up his poetic identity to the nightingale just as giving life to Milton would have been death to Keats. Instead, the speaker learns to appreciate reflective composition the thoughtful effort required to craft a poem, as opposed to ventriloquism or mimicry to write a song as lasting and universal as the nightingale s song by his own hard work and ability. Like Helena, Keats s speaker does not exist in a vacuum, but uses the language of other poets while aiming to make a voice that is uniquely his own and that allows him to follow his aspirations. Since poetry operates on the imagination, Shakespeare s and Keats s poetics can truly be considered of imagination all compact, committed to the construction of identity through imaginative poetry.

55 50 Half in Love with Easeful Death : Dreaming and Identity Creation in Lamia and Paradise Lost Darkling, the speaker of Ode to a Nightingale listens for the bird s song, the murmurs of clustered flies, and all else that his shut eyes have veiled from ocular perception. The speaker willfully blinds himself and invokes Milton s call for divine inspiration in preparation for his own inward vision. As the nightingale sings in shadiest covert hid, tuning her nocturnal note (Paradise Lost, ), the speaker closes himself in darkness, tuning his poetic power by alluding to Milton, ready to unleash his creative voice as Milton and the nightingale have done before him. Awaiting inspiration and also recalling Shakespeare, the speaker proclaims that he is half in love with easeful Death (52), an equivocal desire to let the nightingale, Milton, or Shakespeare sing through him and constrain his own poetics. Lamia further explores Keats s half-love of easeful Death, and, like the nightingale, the eponymous character embodies this obscure yearning. But through the freedom of a longer and more dramatic form (which, unlike the lyric, provokes fewer biographical readings), Lamia reveals the other half of the equation that critics never ask, that which opposes Keats s half-love of annihilation: his half-love of philosophically complex and intellectually rigorous verse, as represented by the scholar Apollonius. Despite the rich, complex literary relationship between Keats and Milton, critics continue to focus almost exclusively on issues of diction and style when assessing

56 51 Keats s assimilation of Milton, while the philosophical concepts regarding the poets representations of dreams, and, consequently, reality, have not been given as much thought. In both Paradise Lost and Lamia, dreaming can hold the power of augury and serve as a tool for acquiring knowledge, either through prophetic vision or communication with a higher being. In Paradise Lost dreams are not controlled by the perceiver, but can be manipulated by outside sources; Milton complicates analysis of poetic dreaming by having characters describe their dreams after the fact, indirectly, further distancing them from reality by their separation from time and human memory. Conversely, Lamia controls the visions she experiences in her dreams without interference and explains her dream to Hermes directly, but the narrator takes over the explanation of her dreaming power, linking the power of dreaming in Lamia to Paradise Lost by its ex post facto account. However, the initial directness of the dream and its disclosure place Lamia in a more active role than Adam or Eve, positioning her in a world where she must rely more on her own agency. Both poems rely on an expanded dramatic mode within the epic and romantic forms to explore the conflicting experiences of the subjective characters and the similarly subjective narrators. Through these discordant perspectives, the poets show an ambivalence about dreaming, arguing both in support of dreaming for Milton, the dream is often another venue with which to commune with God; and for Keats, the dream, properly sustained by ignoring the outside world, surpasses external reality and against dreaming to Milton, dreaming is not without its own set of dangers, like manipulation by outside entities or meditation on evil

57 52 thoughts; in Keats, dreamers dread returning to reality, and, for those who do return, dreams interfere with and problematize the real world. The poems argue very different things about dreaming: Paradise Lost places value on dreaming as a space of learning and meditation, but a space ultimately inferior to reality; and Lamia contends that the imaginative world is the potential site in which to discover truth, insight, and happiness. These differences between philosophies on dreaming show the differences between the poets poetics: Milton s attempt to look higher and, through verse, justify the ways of God to men (1.26), and Keats s confrontation with his own imagination and poetics to fully understand his proper trajectory as a poet. Lamia uses Milton s portrayals of dreaming as a starting point for developing Keats s own anxieties toward unconscious imagination, and expands upon them to dramatize his own authorial anxieties. The connection between Keats and Milton has been discussed at length, particularly Milton s influence on Keats s two Hyperion poems. The Hyperion poems are seen almost universally to be either imitations of Milton or heavily indebted to him. Claude Finney alone states both claims: Hyperion is a conscious and direct imitation of Milton s Paradise Lost but Keats had too much creative imagination [...] to make a literal and mechanical imitation, suggesting that he is heavily influenced by Milton, but ultimately creates something unique (506). In his investigation of Keats s debt to Milton, which was larger and more pervasive than generally thought in 1947, R. K. Gordon writes that It has not been considered necessary to discuss Hyperion, in which Milton s sway needs no emphasis (434). Stuart Sperry also notes that in reworking Hyperion into

58 53 The Fall o f Hyperion, Keats broke free of his dependence on the action of Paradise Lost and eliminated many of the Miltonic devices and mannerisms that fill the earlier version (77). Critics also see Lamia as particularly Miltonic, but not as a direct imitation. Finney comments on this poem: Lamia, which comes at the end of the Miltonic period of Keats s poetry, is almost as Miltonic in style as Hyperion. There are nearly thirty examples of Miltonic inversion such as blossoms blown, brilliance feminine, gardens palatine. [...] There are also several examples of Miltonic repetition. (669-70) Finney s counting of the Miltonic inversions in Lamia is surely accurate, but to frame The Fall o f Hyperion and Lamia as merely Miltonic is to ignore the overt influences of Dante and Dryden, respectively, as well as the other sources to which Keats is indebted. By reconsidering Milton s influence on Keats s portrayals of dream and altered consciousness, this thesis proposes a more unified metaphysics of perception and identity in Keats s work, detailing how sentient beings see the external world and perceive their internal vision, and how these perceptions affect or even create their identities. In this chapter, I thoroughly investigate the dreams and dream states of Paradise Lost and Lamia, looking at how the characters in both poems construct their identities, how they are manipulated by outside sources, and how Keats turns this phenomenon into a poem about the construction of his own poetic identity. Without question, Milton s portrayals of dreaming in Paradise Lost are complex. Dreams, which are visionary states of enormous creative potential, are shown to be

59 54 potentially dangerous because they may convey temptation to humans. Significantly, however, Milton s text suggests that God exploits this potential in order to create genuine temptation for Adam and Eve because without true temptation there is no true obedience. Keats later will adapt the tragic conflict caused by Adam s experience of authentic temptation in Lamia. Eve s vision of the Tree of Knowledge is the first depicted dream in Paradise Lost, and quickly relates the possible dangers of dreaming, problematized further by Satan s attempted influence of the dream in the preceding book: Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve, Assaying by his devilish art to reach The organs of her fancy and with them forge Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams, Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint The animal spirits that from pure blood arise Like gentle breaths from rivers pure, thence raise At least distempered, discontented thoughts, Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires Blown up with high conceits engendering pride. (IV ) Satan s taking advantage of an unconscious Eve negatively anticipates the first description of dreaming in the poem, showing the unsettling possibility that human dreams are penetrable. Yet the influence is not too far from those in A Midsummer Night s Dream. Satan is forg[ing] / Illusions for his own purpose, like the poet figure

60 55 exemplified in A Midsummer Night s Dream. The scene at Eve s ear describes the dangers of dreaming, with outside forces influencing subject matter, as evidenced by the dream s alien ideas and images. But it is here, and later in the dream, unclear as to what extent Satan succeeds; Milton shows Satan merely Assaying to reach / The organs of her fancy rather than definitively manipulating her fancy directly. Wm. B. Hunter, Jr. sees Satan s tactic as one described by Thomas Aquinas, in which a demon, unable to control consciousness directly, can change the inferior powers of man, in a certain degree: by which powers, though the will cannot be forced, it can nevertheless be inclined (qtd. in Hunter 261). The interiority of organs also suggests a forced penetration by Satan, which cannot help but recall to the reader the perpetual rape of Sin by Death in Book II. However, Hunter also identifies the organs of [Eve s] fancy in the operations of imagination as described by the 17th Century philosopher and writer Thomas Glanvill: sense is primarily caused by motion in the Organs, which by continuity is conveyed to the brain, where sensation is immediately performed: and it is nothing else, but a notice excited in the Soul by the impulse of an external object [...] But imagination, though caused immediately by material motion also, yet it differs from the external senses in this, That tis not from an impress directly from without, but the prime, and original motion is from within our selves [...] there is little doubt, but that Spirits good, or bad can so move the instruments of sense in

61 56 the brain, as to awake such imaginations, as they have a mind to excite [...] and allure, though they cannot compel, our wills. (263)15 Hunter suggests that Milton consciously uses a common contemporary view on the functions of the imagination and the influences upon it (though the functions of the mind cannot be attributed to Glanvill directly, as his work was not published until seven years after the second edition of Paradise Lost). Hunter s search for contemporary viewpoints on demonic manipulation in sleep testifies to the ambiguities located in Milton s portrayal of influence on Eve s dream. Equivocation and omission mark Milton s narration of Satan s influence on Eve s dream in Books IV and V. Robert Wiznura identifies the scene s murky point of view, as the narrator joins us, outsiders, in trying to read the event (110). Wiznura sees Or if as the hinge between the narrator s own two interpretations: whether Satan uses his devilish art or inspir[es] venom. Consequently, the narrator makes us aware that we are interpreting [...,] disrupting] the certainty of any interpretation built on this passage (110). Wiznura concludes that it is impossible to determine to what degree Satan successfully influences Eve s dream because the narrator is outside of earshot and dependent on conjecture. Though it is difficult to determine the influence her dream has on her future decision making, the content of Eve s dream is clearly influenced by Satan s methods, as seen in Book V when Eve describes the dream to Adam in great detail, revealing ideas that could not have been influenced by their everyday, Edenic 15 This quotation comes from Glanvill s Saducismus Triumphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions (1681).

62 57 lives. The dream depicts Eve waking and following what she thinks is Adam s voice in a scene that seems to closely mimic reality in sound and scenery. She follows the voice to an angel picking and eating the fruit from the Tree of interdicted knowledge. The angel tempts Eve with the fruit, asking, Is knowledge so despised, / Or envy, or what reserve forbids to taste? (5.60-1), then soars Forthwith up to the clouds with her after she consumes the fruit (5.86). Louise Flavin claims that Eve s dream could be interpreted as prophetic since events in the dream do come to pass (135).161 agree with Flavin that the dream acts prophetically, but in this case, under mediation, although the extent of this influence is yet unclear. As any reader knows, Eve will eventually be tempted by the serpent to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, resulting in her and Adam s expulsion from Paradise. Milton does not reveal what, specifically, Satan whispers into Eve s ear or to what extent she internalizes it though the dream s preoccupation with ambition and godhead reveals that Satan s influence is present. Satan s sway on the content of the dream reveals the absence of control in dreaming, demonstrating the manner in which dangerous concepts can enter a defenseless unconscious; precarious ideas that have never been thought can generate, or existing ideas strengthen their influence on the mind, as noted above in the writings of Aquinas and Glanvill. While the dream introduces sinful thoughts, Milton s narrative strategy highlighted in that significant meta-poetical word methought separates Eve from absolute sinful guilt. Part of Wiznura s rationale for defending Eve s dream from hasty 16 The occasion o f her dream was Satan whispering in her ear; but the dream itself, in its manifest content, was a Freudian wish-fulfillment dream (Northrop Frye, The Return o f Eden, p. 75, qtd. in Fish 219).

63 58 interpretation revolves around the argument that Eve is already in a state of sin at the moment of her dream. John Diekhoff provides one of the best reviews of this argument over the state of Eve s soul: Tillyard s example of feelings incompatible with innocence is the dream. And if the dream has disturbed Eve so much, she has really passed from a state of innocence to one of sin. Arnold Stein says that Eve's feelings in the dream represent a will already in the state of partial perversion, ready to dabble in selflove through pride in knowledge. More recently C. A. Patrides has observed that Both Milton and his contemporaries regarded Eve as prejudiced toward Satan s arguments, as partly fallen before she actually ate the forbidden fruit. (5) Though Wiznura cautions against concluding that Eve s dream has left her more vulnerable to falling (112), it is difficult not to conclude this after seeing Satan attract her with similar enticements o f putting off / Human, to put on gods in Book IX s temptation scene (713-14). But this vulnerability is further problematized by Milton s omission of an actual tasting by Eve in the dream. The angel holds the fruit up to Eve s mouth:...the pleasant savory smell So quickened appetite, that I, methought, Could not but taste. Forthwith up to the clouds With him I flew and underneath beheld The earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide

64 59 And various, wondering at my flight and change To this high exaltation; suddenly My guide was gone, and I, methought, sunk down And fell asleep. (V ) Stanley Fish thinks that Satan is unable to make Eve go through the motions of disobedience even in her fancy, just as hypnotic suggestion cannot induce actions contrary to one s moral code (222-3). Additionally, as considered in my analysis of A Midsummer Night s Dream and Ode to a Nightingale, Milton uses methought twice, the use of which in the poem Eleanor Cook thinks introduces a complex layered effect into Eve s dream narrative (36). Methought introduces and concludes the dreamwithin-a-dream in which the unstaged tasting occurs. Therefore, the dream of sin inhabits a space another stage removed from her recounting of the dream to Adam, further separating her from culpability. But the dream still affects Eve, who slept With tresses discomposed and glowing cheek / As through unquiet rest (V ) and consciously knew of the offence and trouble, which [her] mind / Knew never till this irksome night (34-35). Because of the similarities between Eve s dream and the actual temptation, Satan s assaying does affect Eve, and the dream functions as a seed for the future sin that will grow to fruition later in the poem. In this manner, dreaming can be seen not necessarily as evil or good, but as possessing the potential for evil or good, which still presents a dangerous possibility for corrupting a blank consciousness, such as the new and inexperienced Eve.

65 60 Still, there are several critics who think Eve is cleared not only of sin, but of any influence of her dream; they conclude that the dream is powerless based on Adam s heartening words after Eve confesses. Fredson Bowers believes the dreams that [Satan] had then formed we must believe Eve rejects based on the tears she sheds after recounting the dream to Adam and singing a hymn with him (268-69). Diane McColley argues similarly: Whether she tastes or not, there is no reason to think that the dream corrupts her. Her own response assures us that her waking will has not been infected by a desire to act out Satan s scenario, for, after describing her flight and high exaltation, she exclaims, O how glad I wak d / To find this but a dream (McColley 99). At least in part, Bowers and McColley conflate Eve s purging of the dream with Adam s consolation. Adam explains to Eve that the imagination takes over when reason sleeps, and Evil into the mind of God or man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No spot or blame behind (V.l 17-9). Adam believes evil in Eve s dream leaves her reality untainted, so long as Eve does not attempt to actualize anything from the dream but the reader is engaged with the dramatic irony, knowing that Eve will fall, and attributing some of the blame, at least, to the dream. Stanley Fish cites So all was clear d, and to the Field they haste (line 136, his emphasis) as the unequivocal comment of the epic voice (224). But the judgment by Adam and the narrator (or epic voice to Fish) may not be read as absolute, once we apply Wiznura s comment about Adam, the narrator, and the reader being outsiders and interpreters of the event rather than authorities on demonic dreaming.

66 61 The narrative complexity signaled by Adam as an outsider is only one problem with an argument that relies on Adam s consolation about dreaming; a greater problem still emerges when one considers Adam s shortcomings involving reason, of which he is reported to have greater command. Adam here is like Theseus in A Midsummer Night s Dream, often reported as perfectly reasonable, but seldom displaying proof of perfect understanding. In these early sections of the poem, Adam conveys a confident rationality, which makes him seem qualified to judge Eve s dream and advise her. But when the couple comes into contact with Raphael, it becomes clear that Adam does not know everything and that he may be bluffing regarding some of the information he provides Eve. For example, in Book IV Eve asks Adam, But wherefore all night long shine these [stars]? For whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes? (657-58). Adam confidently responds, Ministering light prepared they set and rise, / Lest total darkness should by night regain / Her old possession and extinguish life (664-66), and the stars light Millions of spiritual creatures [that] walk the earth / Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep (677-78). But at Adam s opportunity to probe Raphael s intellect, he asks: How nature wise and frugal could commit Such disproportions with superfluous hand So many nobler bodies to create, Greater so manifold, to this one use...? (VIII.25-29)

67 62 Adam asks Raphael the same question that he answers for Eve, calling into question all of the instruction that he has provided his wife as well as his position as Eve s guide and head (IV ). Christopher Eagle brings up a similar point in questioning Adam s naming of all the animals in Eden, whether or not Adam knew the creatures names a priori, as Raphael recalls: The rest are numberless, / And thou their natures know st and gav st them names, / Needless to thee repeated (VII ). Eagle concludes that Adam s knowing-naming (or naming-knowing), then, would seem to be a matter of process, of coming-to-know, of knowing by naming, and not a priori at all (186) This would make Adam, then, neither the first philosopher nor our very first zoologist, but a 17 poet (187). The immediate implication of Eagle s argument is that Adam is a creator of fictions, but it also suggests that Adam has access to a muse, and further still, and meta-poetically, Adam has access to a Heavenly Muse (III. 19). Nevertheless, even if Adam has access to higher knowledge, he sometimes fails to use it, as he reveals to Raphael, All higher knowledge in her presence falls / Degraded (VIII ). Adam s consolation and Eve s purging of the dream seem to be one and the same, but as Bowers puts it, If Adam undervalues his wisdom and exalts her beauty above it, guided by him she will do the same (266). Critics tend to ignore Raphael s disciplining Adam for his irrationality when they want to use him as a source of absolute knowledge on 17 Potential meta-poeticism aside, the implications of Eagle s conclusion are striking, if not more obscuring than illuminating. If Adam knows by way of naming, then, by extrapolation, he potentially knows the ways of God by naming them. Through this logic, all of what he says to Eve is true, and he is in the position to absolve her o f her worries. Unfortunately, Raphael never confirms whether Adam s explanation of the stars is correct or not, so we cannot completely verify the accuracy of Adam s intuitive knowledge.

68 63 Eve s dream. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that his love for Eve would interfere specifically with his explanation of her dream: illogically, he asserts that her dream Affects [him] equally (97) because he is so pained to see her discomfort. Adam s inability to consistently utilize reason along with his own diffidence regarding his judgment show that we cannot reliably depend on him to interpret the effects of Eve s dream. Though we cannot determine to what degree Eve is affected by her dream, we can agree with Wiznura that She has been altered by it and entered the domain of internal chaos, of possibilities beyond those restricted by the harmony of Eden (116). McColley interprets the dream as uncensored by God, who permits an experience that reveals and sets in motion the operations of reason and imagination, and the responses of Adam and Eve illustrate the distinction between a blank virtue and a pure one (4.311) (McColley 100). So what seems ambivalent the dream is prophetic, and therefore potentially instructive, but it is also realistic in its deceit, so therefore very tempting is really a maneuver to test Adam and Eve s true obedience to God. Eve s dream anticipates for readers the Fall, but it is also an important psychological stepping stone for Eve. Without the dream, she would not have considered higher knowledge and the power that comes along with it (by the time of the Fall), so it would not have been a true test of obedience through temptation. Manfred Weidhorn thinks In providing the first temptation, Satan unwittingly cooperates with God s plan of giving Adam and Eve every possible anticipatory knowledge of the consequences of their action [s/c] (150). Analysis

69 64 of the remaining dreams will help elucidate God s involvement in them, whether they are understood as warnings or conditionings. Adam s dream similarly introduces the temptation of the Tree but in a fashion more typical of the poem s remaining dreams, illustrating communication with God. Even though Adam s dream is inspired by God and not Satan, it is, nevertheless, more analogous to Eve s infernal dream than is typically thought. Weidhorn rightly notes that the dream parallels Eve s in several respects: the dreamer experiences the sense of flying; he comes to a lovely place where there are lovely trees; his appetite is aroused. Both are supernatural, objective dreams one diabolic, the other divine (152). Adam describes the dream to Raphael as occurring after his sudden creation when he questions his formation by, likely, some great maker (VIII.278). Having received no answer, Adam wanders aimlessly until sleep overcomes him, which he fears is a threat of returning to nonexistence. But when he can no longer resist, he dreams of one, methought, of shape divine (VIII.296) carrying him to the garden of bliss (VIII.299). Here he waked and found / Before [his] eyes all real as the dream / Had lively shadowed (VIII ). Adam s dream, while being lively shadowed, foretells of the actual near future of being in the garden; or as Weidhorn sees it, the dream, reflecting the actual incident taking place concurrently, is readily translated into reality (152); or as Keats explains in a letter, Adam awoke and found it truth (Letters

70 65 I.185).18 The dream is prophetic in the sense that Adam learns of future events by dreaming it. Adam s vision, like Eve s demonic dream, similarly and surprisingly shapes Adam s desire for the Tree; while some critics agree that Adam s dream is markedly similar to Eve s they do not recognize the ways Adam s dreams condition him to experience dangerous desire. Adam has never before seen, at the point of his dream (which is very early in his life), the garden or trees loaded with an overabundance of fruit. Like Eve s dream, Adam s begins as naturalistic, seeming neither evil or good, until his troubling observation of the fruit-laden trees, which Tempting stirred in [him] sudden appetite / To pluck and eat, presents the temptation (VIII.308-9). Not only does the introduction of the Tree sound strikingly similar to Eve s vision, presenting the fruit of the tree as one of his earliest desires, but it similarly foreshadows the Fall. There are differences between the dreams: Eve s dream associates the tree with increased knowledge and power, while Adam s dream neglects to emphasize those attributes of the tree; and Eve s comes about by the actions of Satan, while Adam s is inspired and directed by God. Weidhorn sees the differences among the dreams like he views Pandaemonium, paralleled by the [Council] in Heaven - the many points in common merely enhancing the important differences between good and evil (152). Weidhorn s point is helpful, but he ignores the specifics of the differences, including the diction of the dreams. Tempting and To pluck and eat recall the language of desire found in 18 The Imagination may be compared to Adam s dream he awoke and found it truth (Letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817).

71 66 Eve s dream and the temptation scene, and Adam s sudden appetite matches Eve s quickened appetite (V.85). Interestingly, the language God directs toward Adam is somewhat similar to the language of subjection the serpent uses toward Eve in the temptation scene. God says, Thy mansion wants thee, Adam [...] called by thee I come thy guide / To the garden of bliss, thy seat prepared (VIII ), at which point He raises him as in air / Smooth sliding without step (301-02). God s diction is more implicit than the serpent s flattering words: God arrives as Adam s servant ( thy guide ) to bring him to thy seat in Thy mansion, demonstrating a mild sense of obedience toward Adam. Satan s words are analogous, but noticeably more blatant and ingratiating, calling Eve sovereign mistress (IX.532), Empress of this fair world (568), Queen of this universe (684), and Goddess humane (732) each epithet growing consecutively in divine tenor. The parallels in language are similar in quality though different in degree, but it is not yet clear what effect these differences will have on each dreamer. The parallels between Adam s and Eve s dreams show that it is God s intention for Adam and Eve to encounter the temptation of the Tree in their unconscious minds, and it is the differences in their unconscious experiences that hold an important influence over their abilities to forego temptation. Unlike Eve, who sees the effects of the fruit before she awakes, Adam wakes immediately after encountering the temptation, bending toward God s feet, Submiss (VIII. 316). At this point, Adam relates that Sternly God pronounced / The rigid interdiction, which resounds / Yet dreadful in mine ear,

72 67 though in my choice / Not to incur (333-36). God pairs the tempting dream with His decree of abstaining, and Adam easily identifies it and obeys. If God insists on implanting the dream in Adam s mind and allowing Satan to influence Eve s unconscious mind, the suggestive dream must be an act towards fulfilling God s plan to elicit true obedience by introducing genuine temptation. But the message of Adam s dream is clear: here is the Tree that quicken[s] appetite (and one of the first things Adam will see in his life), but do not eat from it. Eve, on the other hand, is not taught the interdiction of the Tree at her birth; she learns of it from Adam, and does not receive the unconscious prohibition Adam receives from God. Her unconscious encounter with the Tree comes in her Satanic dream, where she is tricked into thinking that the Tree grants powers to make her Adam s equal, or sometime / Superior (IX ). Eve has the real temptation regarding the Tree, and God does not intervene like he does with Adam. It is Adam s second dream that introduces his real temptation, while continuing to illustrate dreaming s qualities of prophecy, communion, and manipulation by outside influence. Adam tells Raphael, God Mine eyes he closed but open left the cell / Of fancy, my internal sight, by which / Abstract, as in a trance, methought I saw God remove his rib and create Eve from it (VIII ).19 Adam believes the creature created (the Eve he sees in his dream) makes That what seemed fair in all the world seem[] 191 do not have the space to address Roberta Martin s interesting comment on God s creation of Eve, which adds to the ways God manipulates Adam: Adam asks belatedly for someone who can give him collateral love, and dearest amity (8.426). God, who has had Eve in mind all along, seems to respond, not to Adam s wishes, but to his own. His promise to Adam that [w]hat next 1 bring shall please thee, be assured,/ Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,/ Thy wish exactly to thy heart s desire ( ) does not stress companionship and intellectual exchange. Instead, the Father s response betrays narcissistic Desire (62).

73 68 now / Mean (VIII ). He explains that all on a sudden, She disappeared and left me dark; I waked / To find her or forever to deplore / Her loss and other pleasures all abjure (VIII ). Like his other dream, this one shows Adam a brief glimpse of the future in a way that seems to reveal what is happening in real time. Perhaps it is due to the events of his first dream coming to fruition that makes him believe this one is true as well, but Adam takes the glimpse of Eve in his dream as proof of her existence in the real world. While he correctly assumes she does exist, it is striking that he is willing to forgo any pleasures because of his glimpse of a shadow of reality. This belief in her existence is even more notable because Adam sees her disappear in the midst of the dream, not after he has awoken. If Adam can use the dream to prove her existence, he should be able to use it to prove her dissolution, but instead he chooses to believe she is real and to search for her upon waking. Additionally, his belief in Eve s authenticity, and subsequent depression over her disappearance, contradicts the words he uses to console her after her dream, of fancy forming imaginations while reason sleeps (V ). He insists that Eve s dream is all imagination with no trace of the sleeping reason to accommodate it, but maintains that his dream was populated by real entities, such as herself and God. Adam equivocates over and questions reality, being unsure of who or what is real. Apart from his equivocation, Adam also intends to act on the events of his dream by denying all pleasures until he can have Eve again, whether in dream form or real, preferring an illusion to a reality lacking her. It is here that Adam faces his real temptation, (though not God s interdiction) which he immediately fails to govern.

74 69 This second dream of Adam s involves less communing with God, as Adam lies passive while God rips him open, with no words spoken between the two, presenting a far different experience than the clear didacticism of Adam s first dream. Because his first dream so clearly instructs Adam to abstain from the Tree s fruit, the contrast between the dreams begs the question: does this second dream function in the same manner as Adam s first dream, as an instrument for instruction and for bringing about God s will? Weidhorn sees Adam s two dreams as very similar, as objective, celestial, literal, and reflective of present actuality in which no action results because, after the sudden stir of appetite, Adam awakens as reality interrupts his normal response. His dreams have no ill effect on him, while Eve s may in some way have tainted her fancy (153). But Adam s dreams do differ in the way they affect him; moreover, the dream of Eve s creation may in some way have tainted [his] fancy. God allows Adam to watch as He removes a part of his body a somewhat intimate encounter. Then, after Eve infuse[s] / Sweetness into [his] heart unfelt before, she disappears (VIII.474-5). The intimacy of Eve s creation coupled with her immediate removal shows that God wants Adam to feel this separation from Eve as profoundly as possible. To fully consider God s intentions in this scene, it is necessary to think about the result of Adam s dream in the following book the Fall itself. When Adam learns of Eve s transgression, the two of them discuss the possibility of Adam living again in these wild woods forlorn, or God creating] another Eve to replace the fallen one (IX ). How else can Adam respond but in the manner to which God conditioned

75 70 him in his dream? Adam has already experienced a taste of separation from Eve and its commingled anxiety, and the revelation of her transgression and possibility of her expulsion threatens to repeat this pain, a pain he will likely try to avoid a second time. The dream is very much like Eve s dream in offering an object of desire: unlike his didactic dream, God does not offer Adam instruction on how to interpret the vision of Eve and her disappearance. God wants Adam to possess a real temptation, as he does Eve, but this one seems built to set Adam up for failure. The narrator, who we know can only interpret God s intentions like the poem s readers, supposes God, who, in all things wise and just, / Hindered not Satan to attempt the mind / Of man (X.7-9). Based on the evidence he has been witness to, the narrator concludes that God allows Satan to originate Eve s demonic dream, Just as Satan lightly leaps the hedge of Paradise (McColley 97). McColley thinks It is not God s way, [Milton] shows, to enclose his garden in a manner that isolates his people from trial and choice (97). But, importantly, God does not simply allow Satan to corrupt the humans; He helps equalize their 90 temptations by giving Adam a similar type of temptation dream that Satan gives Eve. God s own words reveal his passive participation in Adam and Eve s Fall. He tells his angels (who have been vainly patrolling the earth): I told ye then [Satan] should prevail and speed On his bad errand, man should be seduced 20 This evidence will be particularly meaningful to readers because it occurs chronologically before Eve s dream, though strict chronology is capable in a human-only rather than God-like perspective.

76 71 And flattered out of all, believing his lies Against his maker, no decree of mine Concurring to necessitate his fall [...] (X.40-44) Here God discloses his foreknowledge of the Fall, but also defends his position, having done nothing to guarantee their sin, but giving them free will to obey or defy his one proscription. There is no question that God does not necessitate the Fall, but He does condition Adam as to make it extremely painful, if impossible, for Adam to obey, thus at least seeming to collude with Satan. God s conditioning of Adam ensures authentic temptation because, without it, there is no real obedience. It is not until the end of the poem when Eve, after going to sleep while Michael shows Adam visions of the future, explains God s work through dreams. She explains that she knows where Adam has been because God is also in sleep, and dreams advise, / Which he hath sent propitious, some great good / Presaging (XII ). To what extent God participates in dreams is likely indeterminable: either God was not present in Eve s temptation dream and only participates in postlapsarian dreams, or God has always been in dreams, but it is only after truly knowing God s will and power (unfortunately, through His punishment) that Eve has developed consciousness of His presence the latter seems more in line with Milton s ideas and perhaps illustrates the paradise within that Michael heralds (XII.587). What Adam s dreams do give us, though, is a glimpse of God s methods of communication through dreams, which can be interpolated onto Eve s dream showing the prophecies of Michael. While the dreams in Paradise Lost are

77 72 sometimes puzzling, their messages are more discernible, and more relevant and applicable to the real world than those in Lamia, which create dissonance between the imaginative world and the real world as the site of satisfaction the phenomenon that leads to Adam s resolution to abstain from all pleasures when Eve disappears from his dream. In this sense, it is more precisely Adam, rather than Milton, who prefigures Keats; Keats responds to Milton s depiction of Adam s tragic conflict as he adapts these ideas within Lamia. Keats commandeers Adam s consciousness during his anxiety dream, and positions it in the sentient snake that will become Lamia, combining Adam s compulsive faithfulness with the metamorphic, illusive, and rhetorical faculties of Satan to create his eponymous protagonist. So it is not unthinkable that dreaming in Lamia works similarly to dreaming in Paradise Lost, ruminating on how dreams teach and influence, and how to appropriately assess them, though Keats writes in a more enigmatic manner than Milton as he adapts Milton s meditation to grapple with the form of his own poetics. A common thread in Lamia criticism is the conclusion that it is probably impossible to know with certainty what Keats s actual intentions were in the poem (Watkins 155), it being a puzzle to the imagination (Bloom 378). Indeed, Bloom thinks the basic theme of the poem is, unlike the fixation on illusion versus reality in the body of Keats s work, actually of two illusions or two realities in conflict (379). Bloom is correct, though he says very little else about the poem: like the Ode to a Nightingale, Lamia dramatizes the easeful death the nightingale represents, embodied by the eponymous illusionist

78 73 and standing in for the appeal of easy creation as opposed to a more demanding model of poetic production. Lamia charms the poet figure, Lycius, and keeps him away from the outside world, the world he is supposed to, as a physician to all men, pour a balm upon with his poetry (Fall o f Hyperion 1.190, 201). Keats transfigures Milton s meditation on the value of imagination versus reality to a contemplation of his anxiety over his own poetics, whether to write easy illusions or demanding works of human importance. The opening phrase Upon a time (1.1) signals Lamia as a romance, and it may appear that Keats is taking the easy path. Immediately we are shown the clairvoyance of Lamia s dreams, a type of vision not unlike Adam s dreams in Paradise Lost. Lamia tells her first dream to Hermes when he finds her, still in the form of a beautiful snake, while searching for a nymph to whom all hoofed Satyrs knelt (1.14). In her dream Lamia sees, faithful to reality, Hermes leave his throne of gold, Among the Gods and Break amorous through the clouds [...] for the Cretan isle (1.70, 77, 79). When the God approaches for real, Lamia asks, Too gentle Hermes, hast thou found the maid? (1.80). Like Adam s dreams, Lamia s seem to take place in real time, with Hermes arriving on earth shortly after Lamia s dream of him searching for the nymph. Unlike the dreams in Paradise Lost, however, Lamia s dream does not function as a communication device, as she does not speak to Hermes in the dream. However, she can, in her dream, clearly view Mount Olympus, see all the Gods sitting there, hear Apollo sing, and watch Hermes s journey to Crete, where she resides. This raised view recalls the elevated point

79 74 of view saturating Adam and Eve s dreams. Just as Paradise Lost reveals information to its dreamers that would remain outside of their normal experiences, Lamia s dream functions as an instrument for viewing people, places, and events that cannot be seen away from Olympus, and so operates as a portal to other lands and knowledge unobtainable to her in her everyday experience. Lamia has a more exaggerated version of this learning of foreign things and places, seeing the activity of the Gods in the mythic Olympus, perhaps the equivalent of Raphael s stories of Heaven, but related without interpretive mediation. As Hermes confirms, calling her surely high inspired, Lamia possesses the means to acquire direct knowledge, specifically pertaining, in this case, to things involving the divine; what she sees is actually happening and lets her see into the lives of humans and Gods. And she is able to use this knowledge to her advantage. Knowing Hermes s intention, through her prophetic dream of finding the nymph, whom Lamia has turned invisible with her magic powers in an effort to protect her from unlovely eyes (1.102), Lamia makes a deal with Hermes to Give [her her] woman s form, and place her where Lycius is, in exchange for revealing the nymph to the lusty God (1.120). Lamia gains knowledge through her foretelling dream, which shows her where Hermes is going and what he desires, and avails Lamia of the means of acquiring what she desires. Yet Keats inserts ambiguity into nearly every line of the poem, introducing uncertainty into character s identities and motivations from the beginning. Like A Midsummer N ight s Dream, the opening of Lamia contains a sort of overture or

80 75 microcosm of the themes found in the poem as a whole, but in, perhaps, the most equivocal manner possible. What does it mean that Lamia can make the nymph s womanly beauty visible to Hermes but is powerless without his aid to make visible her own? asks Garret Stewart (9). Barry Gross offers a sort of answer in arguing that Lamia represents the union of the imagination in that her parts are not separate and distinct but are in constant flux (54). That is, on top of being a figure that paradoxically embodies abstract imagination, she also, in a way, does not have a real form to make visible. Gross believes the narrator when he describes Lamia as at once, some penanced lady elf, / Some demon s mistress, or the demon s self (1.55-6). The narrator further promotes this type of indescribability when he depicts Lamia as full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, / Dissolv d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed / Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries ( ). In both of these descriptions, Lamia is multiple things and no thing all at once, her identity completely indefinable by the narrator, comprised of a chain of paradoxes. If Lamia is, as Gross suggests, a representative of the union of imagination, then Stewart appropriately points to the nymph s rich gifts, unknown to any Muse, / Though Fancy s casket were unlock d to choose as the narrator s uncertainty regarding the limits of imagination ( ). He sees these doubts about the imagination s power and autonomy thus carefully scheduled for the start of a poem about the failed dream of poetic as well as sensual self-sufficiency (10). The opacity of the introductory episode alerts us to Keats s questioning of the nature of imagination, dreaming, and identity that he will tackle throughout the remainder of the poem.

81 76 A closer look at Lamia s physical identity is necessary to establish her motives and maneuvers in attempting to actualize her dreams. The species of Lamia s original form is likely interpreted as snake by the reader early in the poem due to her associations with the serpent from Genesis and Paradise Lost, Milton s monstrous personification of Sin, and Lamia s clear exploitation of the nymph for her own gain, but, by the end of the poem, the proliferation of snakelike attributes in Lycius and his mentor Apollonius casts doubts in the reader s mind. Keats s careful allusions to Eve, however, point to Lamia as perhaps more serpent than human. When Hermes goes to take his prize, the narrator describes the nymph reacting in fear to the God s advances: But the God fostering her chilled hand, She felt the warmth, her eyelids open d bland, And, like new flowers at morning song of bees, Bloom d, and gave up her honey to the lees. ( ) Though initially daunted by Hermes, when the God takes the nymph s hand, she responds positively, just as Eve does when she meets Adam for the first time:... With that, thy gentle hand Seized mine; I yielded, and from that time see How beauty is excelled by manly grace And wisdom, which alone is truly fair. (IV ) Of course, the happy departure of Hermes and the nymph Into the green-recessed woods they flew; / Nor grew they pale, as mortal lovers do ( ) becomes

82 77 questionable in view of the allusion to Adam and Eve s relationship, though Keats seems to associate Adam and Eve s anguish with their eventual mortality, as he signals the coming sorrows of the mortal lovers in his own poem. Keats also makes sure to emphasize the nymph s burgeoning sensual equality as opposed to the patriarchal castigation Eve sustains in yielding her beauty to Adam s wisdom. In effect, Hermes and the nymph actualize the poet s vision in the Ode to a Nightingale, of fad[ing] away into the forest dim, of annihilating and recombining their identities (19-20). Stewart sees their union as making full sense only as an idealized contrast to the botched affair of Lycius and Lamia (9). And that is the main point of the allusion as well, to differentiate between the levels of love and happiness the nymph, Eve, and Lamia experience. Keats builds a hierarchy of happiness through his comparison of Eve and the nymph, to show that the nymph s immortality allows her happiness to continue unabated, that Eve s happiness will continue throughout her life even after God s punishment, and that Lamia will not have happiness but may have immortality stuck inside the body of a snake. The nearly generic ending of the pair s departure should signal to us the end of the fairy tale (initiated by Upon a time ), and it does by immediately focusing on Lamia s painful transformation from serpent to woman. The transformation scene itself provides important clues to Lamia s true identity, which, in turn, informs us of her motivations. Once Hermes and the nymph have departed, Lamia s elfin blood in madness ran (1.147) as the serpent now began / To change (146-47) to Nothing but pain and ugliness (164), the transformation emanating

83 78 a liquid waste product that is both sweet and virulent (149). She continues to dissolve until only her voice crying Lycius! gentle Lycius! remains, until that, too, dissipates (168). Elfin provides the only ambiguous clue, apart from her humanlike eyes and mouth (and her clearly human consciousness), to Lamia being originally human, perhaps meaning fairylike, and thus having at least a humanlike body. Bloom sees pain and ugliness as Lamia s truth her most reductive stage but coupled with sweet and virulent, her reduction suggests a native serpent form, at least in terms of the negative qualities of vindictiveness, venomousness, and subtlety with which snakes are often associated. After this metamorphic stanza, the narrator reveals Lamia s name as if we have heard it before: Whither fled Lamia, now a lady bright, / A full-born beauty new and exquisite? (171-72). In reality, this is the first time her name is mentioned in the poem, and it is done so to describe one who is now a lady bright and a beauty new. Keats makes a clear distinction between the serpent and Lamia, the lady bright, the verse paragraphs bifurcating Lamia s two identities. On top of this distinction between names and stanzas, the narrator prematurely congratulates happy Lycius! for she was a maid / More beautiful than ever twisted braid (185-86). Keats s pun on maid for made, which then rhymes with braid, fuses Lamia s origination with a hand-wrought creation of braiding fabric or hair, thus calling attention to the constructed nature of Lamia s human form. And, importantly, Lamia s transformation is excruciating, especially compared to the nymph s easy reappearance, signaling how unnatural the transformation is. Once she is fully transformed, Lamia s first action is to look at her

84 79 reflection in a pool, not for any narcissistic purposes like critics often claim for Eve, but because she passioned / To see herself escap d from so sore ills, / While her robes flaunted with the daffodils ( ). Her escape from the serpent body recalls Eve s birth, where she, startled at first by her reflection in the lake, quickly returns to find it has returned:...with answering looks Of sympathy and love. There I had fixed Mine eyes till now and pined with desire Had not a voice thus warned me [...] ( ) Both women feel a desire to see themselves, but for very different reasons: Eve is attracted to her own beauty, while Lamia is attracted to seeing herself freed and surrounded by the beauty around her Eve delights in capturing her portrait within the lake, while Lamia savors the landscape and her newly-acquired agency. Nevertheless, the allusion recalls Eve s narcissism, which, arguably, could be attributed to the expulsion from Eden: Eve s narcissism informs Satan s temptation; Adam s uxoriousness proceeds from seeing himself in Eve, though that sentiment originates from God preparing Eve for he / Whose image thou art (IV ) and Adam for thy other self, thy heart s desire (VIII ); and Roberta Martin even sees the overwhelming and repressive narcissism of the omnipotent God himself (58). Keats differentiates between Eve s narcissism and Lamia s love of the external world, having escaped the ineffectual and internal world within the snake. Ultimately, Lamia s original form is

85 80 indeterminable, though I find Keats s bifurcation of her forms arguing for the serpent. As Eve s sense of identity helps Satan determine the content of her dreams and the temptation, Lamia s sense of identity determines the content of her dreams and her goals, which, unfortunately for readers who are not negatively capable, remain vexingly nebulous. Unlike Milton, who places the challenge of real experience above dreams, Keats posits the possibility of dreams superiority over reality, allowing desire to be fulfilled through the imagination rather than in the physical realm. In the opening episode, Lamia s incarceration in her wreathed tomb (38) is clearly inferior to her journeying dreams, the space where she feels the bliss of loving a youth of Corinth (1.119). Yet, while her dream is magical and informative of others actions, it cannot alter anything her psychic bliss is not enough to satisfy her. The dream is passive, and Lamia s fortunate and timely exchange with Hermes relies on taking in data, learning information found in the real world through her visions. From this perspective, Lamia s power is double-edged: she has the ability to see things nearly omnisciently but her visions only allow her to desire things, not acquire them. Lamia can see far and fall in love through her dreams, but without Hermes s divine intervention, she remains powerless, and her dreams offer shadows for her to desire but continue to go without. And unlike God s presence in the dreams of Paradise Lost, Lamia must negotiate with a God in real life to make her dreams come true. Until then, dreams are merely pretty pictures, unrealizable, unobtainable, although they are somewhat pleasurable in and of themselves. Lamia

86 81 craves the bliss of loving Lycius, but she only knows the imagined version of him and her love for him; she has never experienced the real version of this love she has imagined. Dreaming offers pleasure, but not the full consummation of pleasure; in the pursuit of real pleasure comes real risk much like God submits Adam and Eve to real temptation to show real obedience and Lamia and Lycius s relationship cannot avert this risk. In this way, dreaming for Keats is always paradoxical: dreaming is superior in its ability to sustain psychic fulfillment but only for as long as desire for physical fulfillment remains deflected. And even when Lamia gives Lycius potentially unlimited fulfillment, physically and mentally the union of the divine and erotic, bliss without its attendant pain, order instead of chaos, complete consummation, in the words of Gross (55) Lycius can only sustain such a dream for a short period of time before his mind returns to earthly cares. Keats continues to problematize the disjointed relationship between dreaming and reality by further differentiating between the dreams of Gods and humans. As soon as Lamia reveals the nymph to Hermes, the narrator interjects, declaring: It was no dream; or say a dream it was, / Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass / Their pleasures in a long immortal dream ( ). The narrator assures us that Lamia destroys the illusion by hiding the nymph rather than creating an additional illusion for Hermes. These dreams of Gods insinuate that Gods content themselves with illusion or that their dreams are outside human comprehension and so seem like illusion to us, but the crux of this quotation revolves around long immortal. The redundancy of long immortal calls

87 82 attention to itself, stressing the pleasures that Gods have infinite time to uncover and sustain, instead of worrying about mortal necessities and worries. It is unclear whether the narrator limits this interjection to Hermes s perception of reality, or applies the possibility of passing pleasures smoothly to all three characters present. Lamia plays an integral role in actualizing Hermes s desire, and the nymph is involved in the realization of Hermes s (and, ambiguously, her own) happiness, but does the interjection apply to all characters, grouping all of these mythic entities together as Gods and commenting on the nature of all Gods dreams? The poem ending in tragedy reveals that Lamia is not included with the Gods and their ability to realize their dreams, but cast into the realm of human fate and unattainable dreams. Lamia s mortality or immortality is indefinite, as she simply vanishes at the end of the poem (11.306), but, even if her disappearance means a reversion back to her original form rather than death, her human form is transitory, is mortal. If Real are the dreams of Gods, then shadows are the dreams of humans, being as close to the consciousness of Gods as humans can experience. Dreams can potentially precipitate higher consciousness, but are evanescent like human life. Keats situates Lamia on the spectrum between mortals and Gods she is ambiguously mortal, yet capable of creating illusions, or ephemeral metamorphoses. The layers of ephemera increase as Lamia seems more human to express the transience of life, dreams, and love, and differentiate between the lives of humans and the lives of Gods. But it is her very vulnerability and the impermanence of her pleasure that links her with humans, which allows readers to better empathize with her.

88 83 The narrator takes a moment to explain the nature of Lamia s dreams after her encounter with Hermes and subsequent metamorphosis, detailing what she has given up in order to pursue Lycius, and how her new skill of charming helps her attain her goal. The narrator reveals that Lamia, while in the serpent prison-house, could muse / And dream [...] Of all she list (1.203, 202-3). The diction of this explanation provides some interesting clues and introduces additional mysteries to the subject of Lamia s dreaming powers. Muse associates Lamia s dreams with meditating, reflecting, and learning, which connects Lamia s educational aspect of dreams (taking in information to exploit later) to Adam s didactic dreams in Paradise Lost. Muse also, considering the poem s Greek and Roman influences, links Lamia to the Muses, and she either becomes a vessel for the Muses to inhabit like Milton in his invocation to holy light in Book III of Paradise Lost, or her dream functions as a Muse, sending ideas into the minds of others. Curiously, the narrator explains Lamia s dream powers after her metamorphosis, when she no longer possesses them. In exchange for her loss of dreaming power, Lamia asks Hermes to restore her power of charming for revealing the nymph (1.118). The explanation occurs after the loss of the power to show that the bliss of dreams never fully nullifies the temptation of the real experience. Instead, Lamia creates a living dream for Lycius while she attempts to experience what to her was previously only a dream. Using her power of beguiling, Lamia, according to Paul Endo, narrows Lycius s visual field and controls his access to information; keeping him in her purple-lined palace of sweet sin (115). From Endo s quotation, Lamia appears to be a Muse for Lycius, sending ideas into his mind,

89 84 but these ideas are self-serving and mystifying, rather than benevolent and enlightening. Much like Satan s sitting at Eve s ear, introducing new concepts to her, Lamia s influence on Lycius introduces limitations in making him obsess over her, temporarily neglecting everything else in his life. Hermes gives Lamia the opportunity to live her dream as the Gods do, no longer confined to the lonely form of the snake, and gives her the power of illusion that humans lack, but, as the narrator presages, Lamia s beguiling powers cannot sustain Lycius s captive love, which, like all mutable things, can only become cinders, ashes, dust (II.2). Many critics have argued that Lamia functions as the symbol of the poetic imagination (Pearce 220), but she is only one component in a complex system of Keats s authorial anxiety. Even though the narrator explicitly identifies Lycius as a scholar, specifically a student of Apollonius, the poem also implicitly labels him as a poet figure, leading to tension between the poetics and approaches each character represents. When Lamia and Lycius first meet, Lycius is immediately charmed by Lamia s sung words, even before he turns to see her Orpheus-like at an Eurydice, that It seem d he had lov d them a whole summer long ( ). Lamia s language produces the same effect the poetry sung by the lovers in A Midsummer Night s Dream elicits, functioning as a spell to control the object of affection. But, in the quotation, the narrator compares Lycius to the famous poet figure, Orpheus, challenging Lamia s poet role. Keats presents both Lycius and Lamia as poets, inserting dissonance into their relationship and what each represents as a meta-poetic figure. Under Lamia s spell, Lycius recalls Adam s fear

90 85 of losing Eve, afraid Lest she should vanish ere his lip had paid / Due adoration, thus began to adore ( ). Lycius feels compelled to compose a lover s complaint, and, in doing so, foreshadows his own death, claiming, Even as thou vanishest so shall I die (1.260). Through following his poetic inclination, Lycius fuses his identity with Lamia s, guaranteeing his death when she disappears. But Lamia takes advantage of Lycius s surrendered identity and, in kissing him, removes him from the trance of her song and Into another trance (1.297). She then assures him that she is a real woman with no more subtle fluid in her veins / Than throbbing blood (307-08). But Lamia s assurance follows a second song of love, too sweet for earthly lyres (299). Because Lycius is initially enthralled by Lamia s sung words, another song indicates an additional trance; Lamia s song hypnotizes Lycius within a second trance, one conveying vague celestial substance. After Lamia sings, describes her humanity, and tells Lycius of her love for him, Lycius from death awoke into amaze (322). He awakes from one trance, but, importantly, the multiple levels of trance leave him in a state of death. It is within this deathlike state that Lamia assures Lycius her essence is human and that she was content / Till she saw him (314-15), not unlike Hermia s Before the time I did Lysander see / Seemed Athens as a paradise to me (A Midsummer Night s Dream ). But unlike Hermia s lamenting of her situation, Lamia takes advantage of Lycius s trance-within-a-trance, manipulating him to convince him of her humanity and his responsibility for her misery. As God conditions Adam to acutely feel the pain of losing Eve, Lamia conditions Lycius to credit her love for him as the thing that saves him from

91 death. Lamia s placing Lycius in multiple trances begins the process of fusing the characters identities together. If Lamia does represent imagination or poetry, then she is annihilating Lycius s poetics by forcing her poetics onto him, leaving him in a state of death not unlike Keats s speaker in the Ode to a Nightingale. Donald Pierce also sees the poem as dramatizing Keats s authorial anxiety, interpreting Lamia and Apollonius as more indicative of Keats s poetic struggles than critics often credit them for. Pearce considers Lamia the birth of a new poetic awareness within [Keats], clearer-eyed, more unblinking than heretofore; an awareness that will supersede the earlier (and easier) melopoeia by implication dismissed as the work merely of a dreamer, not of a true poet (216). To Pearce, Lamia represents Fancy verbal ornateness, opulence, imitativeness (221). He calls Lycius a no longer valid because superseded poetic self, and I think he might also represent another side of the dreamer, walking through the poem in a trance. Pearce is undoubtedly correct in his understanding of the poem as, in part, a meditation on Keats s own poetic voice, but his conclusion that Apollonius stands for that aspect of his genius, for whom [...] Lamia s charm had by now become anathema (222), that of more deliberate beauty, clearereyed poems (223), is difficult to accept in a poem as inconclusive as Lamia. According to the narrator, Apollonius represents cold philosophy (11.230), detached, unfeeling puzzle-solving, remote from any of Keats s poetic ancestors, and difficult to imagine as a

92 87 place Keats would want to isolate himself.21 Instead, we should see the poem as a theater for Keats s poetics, where different voices compete for dominance. Lamia and Apollonius are both fighting for control, and Lycius finds Lamia s effortless illusions more desirable to Apollonius s cold and difficult path. Apollonius s cold philosophy survives Lamia s illusions and Lycius s day dreams, but it does not have a real place in the poem; it is only a vague evil inhabited by a character with much less presence and personality than the protagonists. Pearce claims that the maturing poet simply must discard, or renounce an insufficient muse; die to her or else die from her (223) this is the reason for Keats s ambivalence throughout the poem, his reluctance to discard Lamia. But Lamia is not a poem that ever hints at a cold philosophical poetics in either of its two books; rather it marks Keats s return to romance, parodic and problematic as the poem may be. And the poem s problematic qualities only help shield it from cold philosophy : cold philosophy opposes negative capability, a tenet Keats has clearly not abandoned when considering the poem s enduring mysteries. At least in the logic of the poem, Apollonius cannot be the ideal poet figure, as Pierce argues. But the type of poetry he represents is necessary and desirable for Keats to see through the illusions Lamia embodies and come closer to truth. Stewart points out the usefulness of Apollonius s poetics: Apollonius will unweave, the scientific mind recognizing and dissecting the 21 There is no question that the narrator is often misguided, but Apollonius offers no sympathy or pity for either Lamia or Lycius, seeming detached from humanity and obsessed only with uncovering the mystery, regardless of who is harmed in the process. Also, Pearce conveys annoyance with the established interpretation of Apollonius as the stock romantic enemy o f the creative, yet he only cites Lamia s perfectly clear [...] sinister and deceptive characteristics as proof o f Apollonius s virtue (220).

93 rainbow-sided (1.54) snake in her new incarnation just as philosophy can Unweave a rainbow and dispart its multiple, layered beauty (30). Keats needs both characters to become Keats the poet, to exploit all his potential and uniqueness, though he signals here a move toward Apollonius, critical of his own work and able to dispart the layered beauty of his own illusions. Lycius s death only helps defend the need for the balanced poetics of both Lamia and Apollonius, as the type of poetry embodied by Apollonius alone is equally, if not more, destructive. Stewart argues that Lycius, rather than Apollonius, destroys Lamia by uncovering and speaking her name when Apollonius s visual attack leaves her paralyzed and mute (11.261). He echoes Harold Bloom when he asserts, When names are demystified into brute facts, it seems, their reduced truth will out. Twice more repeated, the name seems to be used by Lycius in an unwitting ritual of exorcism (34). In hearing her name repeated, Lamia undergoes an annihilation by language, in which the privacy of love is violated when the magic name is used to designate only a lamia (34) It is somewhat true that once her name is exposed, Lamia begins to disappear, but Keats writes in a manner here that conveys a more causal relationship between naming and annihilating that Stewart misses, linking Adam s naming of the animals and fragmentary commitment to rationality to Apollonius s rational poetics. While Lamia is already in her paralyzed state, Apollonius asks of Lycius, And shall I see thee made a serpent s prey? (11.298) this is the line which causes Lamia to breathe death breath (11.299). When Apollonius again calls her A Serpent! it is no sooner said, / Than with a

94 89 frightful scream she vanished (305-06). Stewart rightly sees Lamia enduring an annihilation by language, but Apollonius s naming is more convincingly associated with her destruction than Lycius s disclosure of her name. Serpent seems to be Lamia s most reduced truth, the epithet that leads most directly to her disappearance. Apollonius does appear to be the hero here, as Pearce affirms, casting off Keats s insufficient muse, except that he is also Lycius s destroyer by the same method. Apart from the circuitous way Apollonius is responsible for Lycius s death (by destroying Lamia who has merged Lycius s identity with her own), Apollonius also identifies Lycius s reduced truth and repeats it until he dies. While Lycius defends Lamia, Apollonius identifies him as a Fool! (11.291), which a death-nighing moan / From Lycius answer d (292-93). Exactly like Lamia when called a serpent, Lycius breathes death breath. Apollonius repeats, Fool! Fool! and we hear no more about Lycius until Lamia disappears and the narrator finds Lycius s arms empty of delight / As were his limbs of life (307-08). If we can believe that a fool is Lycius s reduced identity, which is plausible in considering him the dreamer of the narrative and the only major figure (counting the reader) to not understand his victimhood, then we can blame Apollonius for the deaths of Lamia and Lycius as well as the termination of the poem itself by destroying illusion. Apollonius cannot be the true hero of the poem, as Pearce suggests, because he is an unequaled engine of destruction: he destroys the poem; he destroys the lovers, which the reader feels as tragic, not triumphant; and he destroys the reader s chances of uncovering the mysteries of the poem and Lamia, even though Keats

95 90 implicitly suggests they could be revealed through Apollonius s philosophical prowess. Rather, we already knew from the beginning the answer to the riddle Apollonius has solved, that of Lamia s true serpent identity, but Apollonius s solution has left us wondering whether the vanished Lamia has died or reverted back to her snake form in the woods, and has not answered questions about her powers or motives that were raised earlier. The poetics of Apollonius alone, the poetics of cold philosophy, which takes over the final lines of the poem, provides fewer answers than the imaginative, antirational sections, and leaves us as unfulfilled as the Cold Pastoral Grecian urn leaves that ode s speaker (45). An early reflection on Keats s vocation exists in Sleep and Poetry, a meditation and manifesto on composition and the role of the imagination, in his earliest, 1817 book of poetry, which antedates the themes examined in Lamia and Ode to a Nightingale. Early in the poem, Keats s speaker describes sleep as awful, sweet, and holy, / Chasing away all worldliness and folly (25-6). Passive imagination here offers a respite from the folly of the world, and the descriptions of sleep as awful and holy mark imagination as divine, a vision from God or as close as mortals can get to real, immortal dream[s] {Lamia 1.128). Anticipating Lamia s visionary powers, the speaker of Sleep and Poetry believes poetry, twill bring me to the fair / Visions of all places: a bowery nook / Will be elysium (62-4). As Lamia possesses the ability to will her spirit to faint Elysium, the poet possesses a similarly wide expanse of vision, only his exists within his mind. And like the poet, Lamia may be able to visit Elysium or Pluto in her dreams, but

96 91 once she exchanges that imagination for human reality, she loses the ability to acquire what she desires, just as the poet cannot retrieve the vision. Partway through Sleep and Poetry, the speaker describes a poetic vision of a charioteer flying through the night; when his poetic vision begins to fade, he laments: The visions are all fled the car is fled Into the light of heaven, and in their stead A sense of real things comes doubly strong, And, like a muddy stream, would bear along My soul to nothingness: but I will strive Against all doubtings, and will keep alive The thought of that same chariot, and the strange Journey it went. (155-62) Within this vision-within-the-poem lies the heart of Keats s artistic goals. Like the visions of the nightingale and Lamia, the vision of the chariot provides the speaker with the illusion of composing a poem. He does not yet discriminate between translating a dream and consciously and reflectively crafting a poem. And like the other visions, the vision of the chariot, too, must come to an end, terminating the speaker s uninhibited compositional reverie. The speaker views this disappearance of the dream as his return to nothingness, the loss of his poetic identity, but it is actually, as seen later in Lamia and Ode to a Nightingale, what saves him from nothingness, the descent to Lethe (Little 49). The need to keep alive / The thought of that same chariot glimpses the

97 92 effort required to compose immortal poems that Keats recognizes in later works, but here, in this early moment in his career, it does not indicate any sense that the termination of the vision should signal the beginning of conscious composition. In his letter of 30 April 1819, Keats acknowledged this shift in his later writing: I have, for the most part, dashed off my lines in a hurry; this one I have done leisurely; I think it reads the more richly for it, and it will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit {Letters ). Here Keats does not reject visionary power, but mediates it with conscious, healthy construction. In Lamia, even though Apollonius embodies a poetics that opposes negative capability, his presence in the poem, Keats s clearer-eyed approach to writing, leads to Keats s most puzzling work, the one that most necessitates a reader s negative capability to appreciate. It is Lamia s effortless spell that creates and Apollonius s meticulous appraisal that refines Keats s best writing, as displayed in Lamia. The poem dramatizes Keats s understanding of his powers, considering the creative easeful death examined by the speaker in Ode to a Nightingale and embodied by Lamia, and the sharp, instant poetic death offered by Apollonius. Keats has borrowed Milton s philosophies on dreams and reason to achieve this drama, and has reduced Milton s universal meditations on obeisance to God and the experience of temptation to the interior creative temptations of the poet, just as he transforms the development of poetic voice to battle arbitrary reason in Shakespeare s dreamlike world into a portrait of his own developing voice. And although Keats seems more concerned with his own interiority, his own vocation, his

98 93 poems are not without a sense of addressing the universal truth that resides in Milton s and Shakespeare s works: relying on visions without consideration to reason sets one up to experience only half-truths. As James Joyce has said, in the particular is contained the universal, and in Keats s meditations on his particular vocation, he hits on the universals of identity, voice, imagination, and reason (Ellmann 505).

99 94 Conclusion Study of Keats s metaphysics in particular, examination of the ways Keats appropriates Shakespeare s and Milton s philosophies on dreams and reason sharpens the image of Keats s poetic ambitions and achievements. While many readers have heard the echoes of Keats s favorite early modern writers in his work, they have not often recognized that Keats uses these intertextualities actively, engaging in verse that specifically meditates on the complexities of poetic influence, inspiration, and voice. Not passively obedient or a mere mimic, Keats reimagines Milton s universal conflict as creative strife within the poet, empathizing both with Adam s desire and with Eve s fear of inadequacy. In Shakespeare, Keats attends to the complexities of influence and control over poetic agency, recognizing in the Athenian lovers a struggle to develop an authoritative voice and the fear of being left darkling. As his letters reveal, Keats spent the final years of his life concentrating on the contributions of fellow poets like Shakespeare and Milton and meditating on his poetic drive and the distractions and temptations that might interfere with those goals. Seeking to become a chameleonic poet as negatively capable as Shakespeare and as rigorous as Milton, Keats displays striking ambition. Given a career as long as Shakespeare s (not to mention Milton s forty years as a published poet), Keats might have been widely recognized as having achieved all of his poetic ambitions. And yet, his short career, compressed as it was by financial cramping,

100 95 pressure to apply his medical training, and his own looming mortality, is marked by some of the best poetry about poetry written in English. In the popular consciousness, Keats s youth, mortality, and sensitivity often overshadow his titanic ambitions. In the most recent biography on Keats, Andrew Motion describes a Keats who is often seen as a supersensitive soul, brought to an early grave by the hostile reviewers of Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly Review (Motion, xii). But, even if this personality portrait were entirely accurate, his metaphysical poetryabout-poetry reveals a life consumed with ambition both poetic and philosophical that, at least, complicates this view. In many of his poems, Keats s speaker attempts to perceive the noumenal properties of exterior beings. This attempt to experience entities independent of sensory perception often leads to self-knowledge, or, as Alan Grob calls it, an ontologically conceived self-transformation (311). The When I have fears that I may cease to be sonnet (1818) begins this process with the speaker trying to perceive the noumenon of inspiration and its unreflecting love ; and Ode to a Nightingale (1819) shows the speaker s attempt to perceive the noumenal bird, his consequent understanding of the craft of poetry, and his role in a poem s construction. In this thesis s introduction, I compare the speaker s temptation in When I have fears to trace cloudy symbols (6) with the magic hand of chance (7-8) to the allure of the nightingale s creative, easeful Death in the ode (52). I argue that the partial love for easeful Death and the other speaker s relish in the faery power / Of unreflecting love are the same thing (11-12): an undemanding, poetic ventriloquism that leaves the

101 96 poet s mind disconnected from the writing process. And although Keats s speakers initially wish for an overwhelming muse to guide their pens, they eventually reveal Keats s dissatisfaction with easy mimicry. In the sonnet, when the speaker feels he no longer requires the faery power / Of unreflecting love, he begins to fortify his psyche toward relying on his own poetic power: then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink (12-14). After he allows the majority of the poem and his poetry to be acted upon by his pen (2), books (3), and the hand of chance, the speaker moves from merely fearing and thinking of his fears to physically standing and thinking about his potential. The speaker unyokes his mind and stands apart from the faery power until his love for the unreflective, easeful Death, and the possible fame achieved by its usage, become nothing [] in comparison to selfsprung imagination and poetic rigor. M. A. Goldberg sees this personal isolation and thinking as triggers to carry the protagonist beyond the shore into pure essence, and seemingly toward self-annihilation, and ultimately death : through death the speaker annihilates the ego, destroys the self, projecting his individuality into the totality of the experience (130-31). Goldberg understands what Keats s speaker initially sets out to do: annihilate the self to reach his consciousness outwards into another entity and the totality of the experience the nightingale and Grecian urn are examples of these entities in other poems. But Goldberg misreads nothingness as the ultimate goal of a poet trying to escape from human consciousness to enter a transcendent state. One cannot oppose the faery power / Of unreflecting love by reflecting on nothingness.

102 97 Reflection depends on the poet s consciousness of his experience and his ability to consider his relationship with that experience. So the speaker, rather than annihilating his ego, actually becomes more aware of his ego by recognizing the differences between the entity whose consciousness he is trying to reach and himself. Ode on a Grecian Urn deals with these exact themes of attempting to understand the noumenal and transforming and reinforcing the self instead. The speaker does so in the third stanza of Grecian Urn, in a moment that readers normally perceive as Keats at his most sentimental: Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy d, A burning forehead and a parching tongue. The speaker idealizes the statically happy figures on the urn, seeing their immortal passions transcending earthly cares, and trying to access the same feelings. As in the Nightingale ode, the earnest attempt to experience what the figures on the urn know

103 98 leads the speaker to create a clear demarcation between his mortality and the figures For ever warm, For ever panting, and for ever young immortality. The figures end up leaving the speaker and others with a heart high-sorrowful and cloy d at perceiving the fissure between mortal and immortal experience. Interestingly, the state of being For ever warm and For ever panting is the state that Lamia offers to Lycius. When Lycius returns home with Lamia, we see him enthroned, in the even tide, / Upon a couch (17-18) in That purple-lined palace of sweet sin (31). Lycius, too, has momentarily accessed the noumenon of strife-transcending, immortal passions, established in Lamia s empery / Of joys (36-37). But Lycius s temporary transcendence is the state of the Lotus Eaters, of apathy-causing illusion. Lamia s palace causes him to forget his roles as a poet, scholar, and humanist. And this state is always self-replicating: the Lotus Eaters must continue to eat the flower to maintain their indifference; the speaker of Nightingale must continually re-invoke the muse through different methods in order to forget the leaden-eyed despairs of human existence (28), while the bird enjoys its pastoral world eternally; and the speaker of Grecian Urn must continually refocus his gaze because each figure reminds him of his mortal constraints, while the figures know only passion throughout all time, an infinite stasis. It is no wonder, then, that the urn apotheosizes its fiction in a phrase that could potentially repeat infinitely: Beauty is truth, truth beauty (13) The Norton edition punctuates the final lines of this poem as:

104 99 As seen in my analysis of Keats s poems, Lamia and the nightingale play similar roles in relation to their respective poet-figure, offering similarly magical states that pleasurably supersede consciousness. Lamia offers a world of pleasure, so long as Lycius gives no thought to another subject but perpetually indulges in her sensual gift; and the nightingale offers a pastoral pleasure, separated from the consciousness of human pain. But, in so providing a similar alternate consciousness, Lamia and the nightingale also offer the same type of poetics. Both entities temporarily entice the poet-figure into abandoning his consciousness in exchange for the pleasure of forgetting human suffering. Like the lover s (mostly) inexplicable enslavement to love in A Midsummer Night s Dream, Adam s uxorious attitude toward Eve, and Eve s fear of inadequacy, and all the temptations that stem from these impulses, Keats s poet must also balance his desires with his responsibilities as a poet, as a physician to all men. Where Keats s poets differ from Shakespeare s and Milton s characters is his aspiration not to love and be loved, but to escape: Lycius seeks love, but Keats s tale removes him from human society and places him in the arms of empty, sensual delight; and the speaker of Nightingale initially hopes to escape the weariness, the fever, and the fret of humanity by adopting Beauty is truth, truth beauty that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. I agree with others who see the last two lines as one continuous message from the urn that insists that beauty (Lamia, the nightingale, the urn) is ultimate truth, ignoring humanism as a truth or artistic goal. This, of course, does not change my interpretation of the lines, but, instead, strengthens my convictions.

105 100 a nightingale-like perception. But the poets in both poems cannot help but remember their love for humanity, even in the midst of their respective illusion. The poet is constantly reminded of his responsibility as a poetic physician, his duty to society, and, in both poems, curtails the temptation of sensual elation in exchange for humanistic concerns, of addressing human hearts. His perhaps reluctant love for humanity, and his responsibility, as a poet, to lead a nobler life and write for humanity are the ultimate goals in Keats s search for his own poetic voice in Ode to a Nightingale and Lamia. Keats sets up Shakespeare and Milton as his poetic mentors in the best sense: they are teachers who want a poet-student that actively engages with the philosophical and aesthetic challenges they lay before him.

106 101 Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare, Imagination, Romanticism. Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986: Print. Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading o f English Romantic Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc Print. Cook, Eleanor. Methought As Dream Formula in Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and Others. English Language Notes 32.4 (1995): Print. Creaser, John. John Keats, Odes.' A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford, UK; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999: Print. Bowers, Fredson. Adam, Eve, and the Fall in Paradise LostT PMLA 84.2 (1969): Print. De Almeida, Hermione. The Ambiguity of Snakes. Romantic Medicine and John Keats. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991: Print. De Man, Paul. Critical Writings, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Print. Dent, R. W. Imagination in A Midsummer Night s Dream. Shakespeare Quarterly 15.2 (1964): Print. Diekhoff, John S. Eve s Dream and the Paradox of Fallible Perfection. Milton Quarterly 4.1 (1970): 5-7. Print.

107 102 Ducasse-Turner, Milagro. Far-Off Mountains Turned Into Clouds (A Midsummer Night s Dream, ): Mountains of the Mind in Shakespeare s Drama. Mountains Figured and Disfigured in the English-Speaking World. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, Print. Eagle, Christopher. Thou Serpent That Name Best : On Academic Language and Obscurity in Paradise Lost. Milton Quarterly 41.3 (2007): Print. Ellman, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, Print. Endo, Paul. Seeing Romantically in Lamia. E L H 66.1 (1999): Finney, Claude Lee. The Evolution o f Keats s Poetry. Vol. 2. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., Fish, Stanley Eugene. The Interpretive Choice. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. London; Melbourne; Toronto: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin s Press, 1967: Print. Flavin, Louise. The Similar Dramatic Function of Prophetic Dreams: Eve s Dream Compared to Chauntecleer s. Milton Quarterly 17.4 (1983): Garber, Marjorie. Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, Print. Goldberg, M. A. The Fears of John Keats. Modern Language Quarterly 18 (1957): Print. Gordon, R. K. Keats and Milton. The Modern Language Review (1947): Print.

108 103 Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics: The Case of A Midsummer Night s Dream. Shakespeare Quarterly 59.3 (2008): Print. Grob, Alan. Noumenal Inferences: Keats as Metaphysician. Critical Essays on John Keats. Ed. Hermione de Almeida. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., Print. Gross, Barry. The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia; Paradise Won, Paradise Lost. The Bucknell Review 13.2 (1965): Print. Hunter, Jr. Wm. B. Eve s Demonic Dream. ELH 13.4 (1946): Print. Jackson, H. J. Romantic Readers: The Evidence o f Marginalia. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, Print. Keats, John. Fall o f Hyperion, The. Keats s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox. New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Print.. Lamia. Keats s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: Norton: Print.. Letters o f John Keats, The, vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Print.. Ode on a Grecian Urn. Keats s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: Norton: Print.. Ode to a Nightingale. Keats s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: Norton: Print.

109 104. On first looking into Chapman s Homer. Keats s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: Norton: Print.. Sleep and Poetry. Keats's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: Norton: Print.. When I have fears that I may cease to be. Keats s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: Norton: Print Kitson, Peter. Milton: The Romantics and After. A Companion to Milton. Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Print. Little, G. L. Do I Wake or Sleep? : Keats s Ode to a Nightingale. Sydney Studies in English 11 (1985). Print. Martin, Roberta C. How Came I Thus?: Adam and Eve in the Mirror of the Other. College Literature 27.2 (2000): Print. McColley, Diane Kelsey. M ilton s Eve. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Print. McGinn, Colin. A Midsummer Night s Dream. Shakespeare s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006: Print. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. David Kastan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Print. Motion, Andrew. Keats. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Print. O Rourke, James. Keats s Odes and Contemporary Criticism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, Print.

110 105 Pearce, Donald. Casting the Self: Keats and Lamia. The Yale Review 69.2 (1979): Print. Rosenberg, John. Keats and Milton: The Paradox of Rejection. Keats-Shelley Journal 6 (1957): Print. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night s Dream. The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: W. W. Norton, Print. Sperry, Stuart. Keats, Milton, and The Fall o f Hyperion. PMLA 77.1 (1962): Print. Spiegelman, Willard. Keats s Coming Muskrose and Shakespeare s Profound Verdure. ELH 50.2 (1983): Print. Stevens, Paul. Introduction: Milton s Renunciation of Shakespeare. Imagination and the Presence o f Shakespeare in Paradise Lost. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985: 3-8. Print. Spurgeon, Caroline. Keats s Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study Oxford: Clarendon Press, Stewart, Garrett. Lamia and the Language of Metamorphosis. Studies in Romanticism 15.1 (1976): Print. Trott, Nicola. Milton and the Romantics. A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford, UK; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999: Print.

111 106 Watkins, Daniel P. This Might Cost and Blaze of Wealth : Lamia. Keats s Poetry and the Politics o f the Imagination. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London; Cranbury, N.J: Associated University Presses, 1989: Print. Weidhorn, Manfred. Milton. Dreams in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. The Hague; Paris: Mouton, 1970: Print. Weller, Barry. Identity Dis-Figured: A Midsummer Night s Dream. The Kenyon Review 7.3 (1985): Print. White, R. S. Keats as a Reader o f Shakespeare. London: Athlone, Print. Wiznura, Robert. Eve s Dream, Interpretation, and Shifting Paradigms: Books Four and Five of Paradise Lost. Milton Studies 49 (2008): Print. wood, adj., n., and adv. OED Online. March Web. Oxford University Press. 4 April 2012 <

112 107 Works Consulted Burwick, Frederick. Shakespeare and the Romantics. A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford, UK; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999: Print. Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, Print. Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History o f Dreaming. Ed. David Schulman and Guy Stroumsa. New York: Oxford University Press, Print. Faflak, Joel. Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden o f the Mystery. Albany: State University of New York Press, Print. Fermanis, Porscha. John Keats and the Ideas o f the Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Print. Fleece, Jeffrey. Leigh Hunt s Shakespearean Criticism. Essays in Honor o f Walter Clyde Curry. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1954: Print. Godshalk, W. L. Hamlet s Dream of Innocence. Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): Print. Godwin, Joscelyn. The Pagan Dream o f the Renaissance. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, Print.

113 108 Greenfield, Thelma. Our Nightly Madness: Shakespeare s Dream Without The Interpretation of Dreams. A Midsummer Night s Dream: Critical Essays. New York; London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998: Print. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Spectral Symbolism and the Authorial Self: An Approach to Keats shyperion. Essays in Criticism 24.1 (1974): Print. Jones, James Land. Adam s Dream: Mythic Consciousness in Keats and Yeats. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, Print. Keats Circle, The: Letters and Papers, vols. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Print. Kroker, Kenton. The Sleep o f Others: and the Transformations o f Sleep Research. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, Print. Lau, Beth. Keats s Paradise Lost. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, Print. Levine, Carole. Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Print. Murry, John Middleton. Keats and Shakespeare: A Study o f Keats Poetic Life from 1816 to London: Oxford University Press, Print. Norris, Edward T. Hermes and the Nymph in Lamia. ELH2A (1935): Print. Ou, Li. Keats and Negative Capability. London: Continuum, Print. Peterfreund, Stuart. The Truth about Beauty and Truth : Keats s Ode on a Grecian urn, Milton, Shakespeare, and the Uses of Paradox. Keats-Shelley Journal 35 (1986): Print.

114 109 Petty, Jane M. The Voice at Eve s Ear in Paradise Lost. Milton Quarterly 19.2 (1985): Print. Pollard, Tanya. Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Reading Dreams: The Interpretation o f Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Ed. Peter Brown. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, Print. Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors o f the Night. Ed. Katharine Hodgkin. New York: Routledge, Print. Skrip, John. Intellect, Imagination and the Poet; An Interpretation of Lamia. Journal o f Evolutionary Psychology (1986): Print. Stratham, Christopher. Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, Blanchot. New York: State University of New York Press, Print. Totaro, Rebecca. Securing Sleep in Hamlet. Studies in English Literature (2010): Print. Whale, John. John Keats. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.