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dearorpheus:

“This connection between poetry and medicine has been made for centuries – indeed it can be found in ancient mythology: Apollo was the Greek God of medicine, music and poetry. Lockhart accuses Keats of writing poetry that will act like medicines which make us weaker or which cause us to sleep. In other words, Keats’s poetry is like a drug. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, written after Lockhart’s criticism, Keats alludes to this power of poetry. Listening to the nightingale’s song makes him feel as though he has drunk ‘hemlock’, ‘Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains’ (ll. 2-3). […] The beauty of the nightingale’s song, like the release provided by the opiate, is only temporary, and the poem is dominated by ideas of human mortality and the potential, but perhaps inaccessible, immortality of poetry. In ‘Lamia’ we witness the transformation of the lamia into a woman, a scene that explicitly demonstrates the knowledge of chemistry that Keats had gained at Guy’s Hospital as well as the pain and horror he had witnessed. Lamia’s change is violent: her ‘mouth foam’d’ while her eyes, ‘in torture fix’d’, ‘Flash’d phosphor and sharp sparks’ (Part 1, ll. 148-52). The beautiful colours that had characterised her mythological, serpent body are replaced with the ‘pain and ugliness’ of human mortality and the change is horribly, physically painful ‘She writh’d about, convuls’d with scarlet pain’ (Part 1, l. 164; l. 154). Scarlet is of course the colour of blood and in his phrase ‘scarlet pain’, Keats describes the agony of Lamia’s transition to a mere mortal woman. Many other Keats poems also allude to pain and death and make us realise that the events of his life had familiarised him with such things. His poems may also contain their own medical properties, however, and work to alleviate the horrors of our world.”

— Sharon Ruston, Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University