Lamia

A serpent woman begs Hermes for the gift of human form, desperate to win the love of the mortal Lycius. He grants her wish, and she becomes a woman of devastating beauty. What follows is a love story so exquisite it seems to transcend the boundaries between mortal and divine, set in a palace of enchantment where the couple lives suspended in blissful illusion. But the philosopher Apollonius arrives with the cold clarity of reason, and with a single glance destroys everything. Lamia returns to her serpent shape, Lycius dies of heartbreak, and the dream collapses into dust. Keats wrote this poem to argue a dangerous proposition: that there are truths which kill the very things we love, and that some doors, once opened, cannot be closed. It is a lament for the fragility of beauty, a meditation on what is lost when knowledge arrives too soon, and one of the most emotionally devastating works of the Romantic age.