Reading Keats to the letter: e.

Jones, Mark

For Karl Kroeber

 "Sweet sweet is the greeting of eyes." (1)

 "having two little loopholes, whence I may look out
 into the stage of the world" (2)

IN AN ESSAY CHASTISING TWENTIETH-CENTURY CRITICAL EFFORTS TO RECUPERATE Keats as a silenced radical, Paul Fry has remarked: Nor can the author of 'If thy mistress some rich anger shows, / Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave' ... be saved for feminism.' (3) Fry does not stick his neck out to say so; he does not even need to quote the still more notorious line with which the offending passage (from the "Ode on Melancholy") continues:

 Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
 Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
 And Feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
 (18-20)

This passage has often been lamented as a "lapse" or "false note" in an otherwise magnificent poem) But in the context of Keats's oeuvre it is more like a motif. Comparable passages featuring a masculine gaze upon "peerless" feminine eyes can be found in "The Eve of St. Agnes," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," The Fall of Hyperion, and Lamia. (5) For many, this spells sexism, to which Keats pleads guilty in a passage adduced by Fry:

 The sale of my book [writes Keats to Charles Brown, referring to
 the poems of 1820, which include the "Ode on Melancholy"] is very
 slow.... One of the causes, I understand ... is the offense the
 ladies take at me.... I am certain I have said nothing to displease
 any woman I would care to please: but still there is a tendency to
 class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats,--they never see
 themselves dominant."

The "tendency" confessed here would appear to reference the "Ode on Melancholy" directly, where "peonies," the "morning rose," and thy mistress's eyes are all catalogued together.

I am not primarily interested in exonerating Keats from charges of sexism, least of all where (being Keats) he criticizes himself. (7) But I am interested in pursuing a formal observation about the passage cited by Fry that I believe will show judgments like his to be premature. If the content of that passage has given many readers pause, the form of line 20 seems calculated to do so. "And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes": between its monosyllables, its monotone, its early caesura, and its awkward joining of words with consonants on both ends, hitting the first half of line 20 after lines 18-19 is like tripping down stairs into a bed of pea-gravel. And if the halted traveler should pause to look about, he may notice another extraordinary feature of line 20: a certain exuberance in e's. More than a third of the letters are e, and half of the syllables depend on a double e. Only at the line's end, however, do these e's appear as what they are, as eyes: the word "eyes" both announces them verbally and presents them pictorially, as in a face. Fanciful as this might seem, the iconic use of e's as eyes is a cliche in ads for eyeglasses and security systems today (figs. 1-8).

Keats's letters demonstrate his own playful awareness of the resemblance.

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Keats wrote in September 1819 to John Hamilton Reynolds, whose sisters were in Devonshire:

 Your sisters by this time must have got the Devonshire ees--short
 ees--you know 'era--they are the prettiest ees in the Language. O
 how I admire the middle siz'd delicate Devonshire girls of about
 15. (8)

This passage refers mainly to the acquisition of a local accent, but by writing "e" as "ee," which is an occasional Scots and archaic English form for "eye," and by shifting the register, with the next sentence, to the visual, Keats makes the whimsical suggestion that Reynolds's sisters must be developing pretty eyes along with their accented e's. (9) He develops the association between e's and eyes further in a letter of February 1820 to Fanny Brawne:

 I have been writing with a vile old pen the whole week, which is
 excessively ungallant. The fault is in the Quill: I have mended it
 and still it is very much inclin'd to make blind es ... (10)

Not only is this passage more explicit in imagining the e as an eye: it adds the important implication that the written e is properly and ordinarily sighted.

This implication has considerable significance for the "Ode on Melancholy": (11) what if"peerless" is not the only pun at work here? And what if the e's are not just eyes to be looked at, but eyes that look? Read literally, of course, line 20 encourages its (implicitly male) reader to imagine gazing into the objectified eyes of his mistress. But if a reader imagines this object to be "peerless" then he himself is blind, and the line that encourages him to think he can gaze unseen--"peerless eyes" and all--gazes back on his peerlessness. (12) Which is the subject, and who is the object? Which is the reader, and who is the text? And what can it mean for a text to look back at its reader?

Iconic letters in Keats's verse have been noted before. In an essay showing that "alphabetic letters have had iconic functions in mainstream literary texts in English at least since Shakespeare," Max Nanny finds the letter O used as "an icon for the eye(s)" in Keats's "Sonnet to Sleep," and again in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" as "iconiz[ing] both the round shape and the perfection of the Greek Urn." He calls these "translucent letter-icons": they appear to be "conventionally or non-iconically used letters" only until they are "pointed out," whereupon "we wonder why we did not recognize their iconic character before." (13) As much might be said, I think, of the e's in the "Ode on Melancholy." And yet the sighted e's of line 20 are fundamentally different in function and significance from the iconic O's adduced by Nanny: indeed, they are different in being significant--in signifying something beyond the verbal meaning rather than merely illustrating it. Unlike Nanny's iconic O's, they are at odds with their semantic context. What Nanny looks for as iconicity is "inherent similarity between meaning and form," a "form [that] mirrors ... meaning." (14) While this may help satisfy a formalist ideal of unity, constructing the icon as a mirror to semantic meaning also makes it redundant as a signifier. The pointlessness of such a device, if that is not too harsh a term, is in fact reflected in the disappointing conclusion to Nanny's otherwise perceptive and empirically generous essay: having catalogued scores of instances, he concedes that "the iconic use of letters in literary texts is of a rather restricted nature" and affirms only that "it is well worth considering." (15) In sum, Nanny is right to insist that "all iconicity is semantically motivated," that "the meaning of a text or the semantic context ... alone determines whether a linguistic sign or literary element has iconic force." (16) But iconicity can be "semantically motivated" by its context without mirroring it. The e's in the "Ode on Melancholy" are iconically recognizable as eyes because gazing is prominent in the sense of line 20. Yet they undermine rather than illustrate the line's meaning: while it speaks confidently of gazing on objectified eyes, the e's suggest that the gazer is watched in return.

Such counter-iconicity, as I will call it here--a second semiotics haunting alphabetic writing to the disturbance of the literal sense (17)--has a broad relevance for the reading of Keats's poetry in general. I will argue this by considering its function in other poems, but I begin by arguing its centrality to the "Ode on Melancholy" in order to explore its implication within Keatsian poetics. (18) Apprehending the e's of the "Ode on Melancholy" as eyes that reverse a masculine/readerly gaze renders line 20 isomorphic with the Ode as a whole, which turns the tables on its male quester. (19) Not only the reversal of agency but even the timing is similar: just as the e's of line 20 declare themselves as "eyes" only at the end, so too, only in the final line of the poem (and only fully in its final word) is the presumptive quester for Melancholy revealed as actually her quarry, "among her cloudy trophies hung" (30). In its tactic of encouraging an egoistic fantasy only to surprise and humble it with a last-minute reversal and recognition, the Ode (and line 20 within it) might be compared with Paradise Lost in Stanley Fish's famous account. Fish argues that the "guilty reader" of Milton's poem is repeatedly "surprised by sin"--his own sin, especially as revealed by his own readiness to sympathize with Satan and "argue with God"--and thus "asked to refine his perceptions." (20) Whereas "Milton's program of reader harassment," as Fish calls it, (21) is designed to chasten sin, Keats would seem to target the epistemological presumption of the masculine/Enlightenment subject who treats everything outside of himself as an inert object. (22) But otherwise the parallel holds: like Milton (or Fish's representation of him), Keats exploits the poem's spatial linearity, or what Fish elsewhere calls "the temporal flow of the reading experience," (23) to draw-out the unsuspecting reader's assumptions and inferences before rounding on them. And like Fish's "fit reader" of Milton, Keats's must take credit for any misreadings along the way if he is to learn from them to "see what has always been there." (24) Icons concealed in the letter of the text are, after all, in plain sight.

Then again, a reader may never learn, for icons concealed in the letter of the text are also well disguised, effectively invisible, and deniable. Or, to be fair, icons may not be "concealed in the letter of the text" in the first place. One need never see the eye in an e: "peerless" may be a word, and nothing more. The English lexicon pertaining to vision is, by some accident, full of words with double e's: eye, see, peek, peep, peer, and leer, with countless variants like peerless, eyed, and unseen. Among other words more or less associated with eyes, seeing or not seeing, are weep, sleep, seel, seem, and heed. So when English speakers write about vision, some clustering of e's is almost inevitable as a matter of orthography. This would seem to suggest that any superabundance of e's in an English text about vision or blindness may be merely coincidental and insignificant. I have in fact been told that if e's are so likely to appear when vision is at issue, it is impossible to make much of them when they do.

One response to this objection is that it is overstated. Where iconic e's seem to occur, the e's are not generally confined to the words associated with vision. In the line "And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes," most of the e-words have no necessary relation to the theme of vision. Likewise in the line "Sweet, sweet is the greeting of eyes." In both cases it is as though the poet sought to ramify the double e's. Moreover, since we know that Keats was capable of fancying this iconic identification, his playing with it on occasion may be fairly surmised even where it is not demonstrable.

A second response goes in the opposite direction. It is precisely because the iconic e is not demonstrable that its recognition or non-recognition necessarily involves and tests the reader. The iconic e belongs among what Keats calls "Things semireal, such as Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist." (25) To see an eye in an e is, like seeing a shape in a cloud, or seeing a seeing subject in the eyes of another, an act of imagination. In each case it is a matter of seeing-as, but it is not by that token illusory; in Shelley's terms, it is a matter of "imagin[ing] that which we know," or of seeing what appears only to "the adverting mind." (26) It follows that the mind may fail to advert--that the Spirit may fail to "greet"--or that one may with more deliberate denial relegate the iconic letter to Keats's next category, that of "no things." (27) But this does not make its non-existence demonstrable, either. If it is by imagination, or seeing-as, that we recognize the eye in the e, the shape in the cloud, the subject in the other, it is only by seeing-not-as, and thus also by imagination, that we deny the same. To not-see it is not necessarily to see truly, as Wordsworth suggests in his great lines on Peter Bell: "A primrose by a river's brim / A yellow primrose was to him, / And it was nothing more." (28) A firm grasp of the obvious may conceal a moral blindness.

The point, then, is not just that Keats engages in a typically Romantic play with the "semi-real" and with the imaginative "adverting" or "greeting of the Spirit" by which it is symbolically realized, but that he extends the level of this play from the thematic action within the poem to the semiotic reading of it--thus involving the reader. Keats's reader may thus be confronted by spectral eyes, much as is the Poet of Shelley's Alastor--eyes that are "semi-real" and appear by glimpses:

 only ... when his regard
 Was raised by intense pensiveness.... two eyes,
 Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought,
 And seemed with their serene and azure smiles
 To beckon him-- (29)

The status of these "seem[ing]" eyes in Alastor--whether functions of the questing Poet's self-projective vision or glimpses of an objective "Spirit"--is as uncertain as their appearance is inconstant. Yet their real function of admonishing or avenging the Poet's "self-centred seclusion" (30)--and particularly his inadvertence to the eyes of more substantial others--is not much in question. The spectral eyes of Keats's text are similar not just in their dubious appearance but also in this function: to admonish the eye that there are other eyes in the world, and to toll it back, not to but from its "sole self." (31)

The device of the iconic e thus brings together Keats's penchant for "self-quizzing" with his distrust of egoism and his apparently constitutional hyperawareness of others' selves. (32) Keats often refers, in his letters, to the mere "identity" of others--not their actions or attentions or even their demands for attention--as a virtually physical pressure: Tom's "identity presses upon me so all day that I am obliged to go out"; Fanny's "does not press upon me as yours [Georgiana's] does"; "When I am in a room with People ... the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that I am in a very little time anhilated [sic]--not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery." (33) While this pressure is clearly not always pleasant, it leads Keats neither to self-reclusion nor to counter-aggression; nor can I agree with Charles P, zepka that it fosters, even in the early Keats, a penchant for imaginative voyeurism, or "hidden watching"--at least not in any way untouched by irony. (34) While Keats's poems are admittedly apt to reflect on voyeurism, that is not the same as indulging it. Rzepka quotes, for instance, lines 15-16 from "I stood tip-toe"--"There was wide wand'ring for the greediest eye, / To peer about upon variety"--as "imply[ing] an effort at furtive observation." (35) But with its exaggerated foregrounding (both verbal and iconic) of the self-imposing eye, this is the reverse of "furtive"--in fact one is considerably more aware of this "greediest eye" than of the "variety" it surveys. (36) Though the couplet does introduce something like a picturesque prospect (lines 17-33), the prospect is subordinated throughout to the "eye" and its verbs: "To peer about upon variety ... to skim / And trace ... To picture out ... Or ... Guess ..." (16-22). It then returns to foregrounding the I more expressly--"I gazed a while, and felt as light ..." (23)--before launching into optatives that parody God's fiat:

 A bush of May flowers with the bees about them;
 Ah, sure no tasteful nook would be without them;
 And let a lush laburnum oversweep them,
 And let long grass grow round the roots to keep them
 Moist, cool, and green ...

 ("I stood tip-toe," 29-33)

In such ways Keats emphasizes the viewer's domination of the prospect. Except in being less explicit, this is no less a critique of the "presumption" and "despotism of the eye" than are the more famous denunciations by Wordsworth and Coleridge. (37)

If Keats's acute sense of the pressure of others' identities on himself implies an unusual respect for the existence of other I's (and eyes) in general, this tends to disqualify him for voyeurism, if that is defined as "furtive observation." Even his apparently voyeuristic scenes are apt to have an element of intersubjective envisioning--such as the way that Madeline fantasizes Porphyro even as Porphyro gazes on Madeline. But the ideal is a still more mutual seeing. "Sweet sweet is the greeting of eyes," begins a poem Keats sent after George and Georgiana when they sailed for Philadelphia. From this point on, they all knew, their "greeting of eyes" was unlikely to take place anywhere but through letters. (38) And so it does here: the iconic e's of this line are essentially compensatory, extending the "greeting of eyes" on paper even as the line implicitly mourns the possibility of such greetings in person.

Keats's Endymion posits a world teeming with eyes: not just a pagan world of Olympian gods and spiritus loci, but also a biological world where the "mass / Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold" (1:104-5). Like Baudelaire's "forets de symboles," where the symbols gaze upon the humans, this is a world not only to be seen but to be seen by. (39) And in various ways the poem urges upon these eyes, and between them and our own, a mutuality of "greeting" or interaction Most famously, in the passage that Keats likened to a "Pleasure Thermometer" (1:769-842), Endymion rates friendship and love above the more self-pleasing "fellowship with essence": for, as he concludes, "who, of men, can tell / That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell.... If human souls did never kiss and greet?" (1779, 835-36, 842). Even more significant than the explicit recommendation that souls "kiss and greet" is the way that the form of Endymion's statement demands a concession, a suspension of disbelief, which is a kind of "greeting," from its reader: for as a rhetorical question peddling an apparent non-sequitur, it won't work unless we strain to see the causal connection (between human greetings and the biological functioning of the world at large) that Endymion professes to find perfectly obvious. Similar to Blake's puzzler in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell--"How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of de40 light, clos'd by your senses five?" (plate 7) (40)--Endymion's question appears irrational at first, but it actually turns back upon themselves the skeptical and egoistic reasonings of those who would deny the existence of anything (including causal relations) that they cannot see. Blake answers the skeptical empiricist's "How do you know?" with "How do you know but?" Likewise, the skepticism of Endymion's question, "Who, of men, can tell ...?" commands the admission that we cannot tell, but the grammar of the negative condition ("if ... never") turns this into a negation of disbelief'. for all we know to the contrary, our kissing does make the flowers bloom. Iconic e's figure in a similar play against skeptical and egoistic seeing earlier in Endymion, where the votaries of Pan enter the scene. The shepherds who believe their stray-away lambs have always "pass'd unworried / By angry wolf, or pard" (1:76) appear to have perceptually cleansed their pastoral landscape of its co-resident "mass / Of nature's lives and wonders." And in first marking the processants, the narrator invites "us" to adopt the same attitude:

 And now, as deep into the wood as we
 Might mark a lynx's eye, there glimmered light
 Fair faces and a rush of garments white ...

 (1:122-24, boldface added)

Like the "angry wolf, or pard," the "lynx's eye" is introduced in the diction only to be excluded from the action: its presence is merely hypothetical, unlike the human processants', and even then it figures only passively, as a "mark" for our vision. This usage is the more extraordinary given that the lynx's eye is a byword for extreme keen-sightedness. (41) The narrator's presumption is undercut, however, by five pairs of counter-iconic e's and o's in two lines (deep, wood, eye, there, glimmered). By the time "we / Might mark a lynx's eye," we may thus have been marked by eyes we have not marked--eyes deeper in the wood, as it were.

Coming so early in Endymion, the lynx passage might be considered as announcing not just the poem's use of the counter-iconic e but its larger project of subduing visionary presumption in favor of reciprocity, both perceptual and erotic. Even though Endymion conscientiously rates mutual love above solitary envisioning, he is so frequently drawn toward the latter that he must confess and renounce it before any real union can occur:

 I have clung
 To nothing, lov'd a nothing, nothing seen
 Or felt but a great dream! O I have been
 Presumptuous against love, against the sky,
 Against all elements, against the tie
 Of mortals each to each ...

 (4:636-41)

Meantime the uncommonly percipient world he inhabits has seen more of him than he of it, as frequent counter-iconic e's suggest:

 Hearken, sweet Peona!
 Beyond the matron-temple of Latona,
 Which we should see but for these darkening boughs,
 Lies a deep hollow, from whose ragged brows
 Bushes and trees do lean all round athwart,
 And meet so nearly, that with wings outraught,
 And spreaded tail, a vulture could not glide
 Past them, but he must brush on every side.
 Some moulder'd steps lead into this cool cell,
 Far as the slabbed margin of a well,
 Whose patient level peeps its crystal eye
 Right upward, through the bushes, to the sky.

 (1:861-72, boldface added)

Here Endymion at least suspects being observed by what he himself cannot see: the "hollow" beneath "ragged brows" suggests an eye-socket, and he explicitly surmises an "eye" in the "well" which may not be a reflex of his own. Yet the clustering of double e's still suggests, as in the former passage, a population of eyes exceeding those he can guess at. He appears to be watched not just from above or below, but "on every side." Still, his partial surmise here foreshadows his openness to a fuller recognition. When this occurs, in the final scene, Endymion is not "surprised by sin" like a solipsistic dreamer but rather surprised by joy, and by the virtue of mutual beholding. In a dark moment, it is true, he feared his "great dream" would prove to be love of "a nothing," but it proves instead to have been an "Adam's dream" capable of dreaming him in return. (42) In fact, like "The Eve of St. Agnes," Endymion can be read as a quest from either the masculine or the feminine perspective, for it is both reciprocally. Endymion's romantic and (in the dramatic sense) comic conclusion is partly a matter of Endymion's blind luck, but it also depends on the poem's premising of a world so saturated with "lives and wonders," eyes and I's, that a unilateral gaze is possible only as delusion. Any voyeurist or subject-object relation turns out to be a subject-subject relation imperfectly recognized. The company Endymion keeps is marked, as it were, by invisible eyes. And until we can be certain that iconic e's are "no things," his quandaries figure our own relation to the letter of the poem.

The play of iconic e's is particularly crucial in Lamia, where the contests of eye and eye are not only more explicit but are figuratively heightened to a level of perceptual warfare en route to a tragic conclusion. The catastrophe, in which "the sophist's eye / Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly, / Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging" (2:299-300), is remarkably extreme in figuring the gaze as violence, but it is also a mere development of the violence implicit in the poem's more commonplace figures for seeing. Apollonius' "sharp eyes" are mentioned earlier (1:364), and even Lamia, the undeserving object of his violence, is "ever watchful, penetrant" (2:34). Her "penetrant" eye is in fact one sign among many that Lamia is fundamentally a seeing subject, (43) and hence that what the poem dramatizes is not just her decipherment as a "gordian shape" or puzzle, but rather an intersubjective perceptual contest that in the end she unfortunately loses, or appears to. Lamia is actively objectified by all of her male interlocutors--Hermes, Lycius, and Apollonius--by each in his own way. Readers, following their lead, frequently treat her as if the poem had set her forth as an object. Thus, recent interpretations present her as the quintessence of text, image, or monstrosity--primarily as an object, that is, for others' investigatory contemplation. (44) Debbie Lee, by contrast, notes the importance of Lamia's "reciprocal gaze" and of the invisibility by which "for a time she maintains ... her power." (45) Both of these are important as signs and attributes of Lamia's subjectivity, and both are marked by the invisible counter-iconic e. (46)

Though the important first appearance of Lamia (1:45-64) is ordinarily cited as objective narrative description, (47) it is better regarded as free indirect discourse representing Hermes's first impressions: (48)

 ... he found a palpitating snake,
 Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.
 She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
 Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
 Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
 Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd;
 And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
 Dissolv'd, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
 Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries--
 So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,
 She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,
 Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
 Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
 Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne's tiar:
 Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
 She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete:
 And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
 But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?

 (1:45-62)

Hermes, who happens upon Lamia while seeking a "sweet nymph" he has never seen, inflamed only by others' desire for her (1:13-30), is not just a healthy Greek god but a type of the masculine gazer. To call his initial view of Lamia superficial would do it too much credit; he blazons the outward form and markings of her serpent-body (elsewhere called her "serpent prison-house" [1:203]), and seems to go out of his way to find her eyes incapable of seeing. At first, she is "Eyed like a peacock" (1:50), a figure that emphasizes the eye's objectification as a gaudy ornament. The verbal "eyed" may well mean "viewed," thus directly designating Hermes's perceptual activity at the moment rather than any perceptual (in)capacity on Lamia's part. But even if it means "endowed with eyes," the peacock's "eyes" (in contrast with the lynx's) are proverbially made to be seen; mythologically, they are the blinded eyes of Argus, the hundred-eyed monster slain by Hermes. (49) But when the description reaches Lamia's actual eyes, six pairs of counter-iconic e's emerge in two lines:

 And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
 But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?

 (1:62-63, boldface added)

While these lines continue to deny Lamia any capacity for sight, both the clustering of double e's and the leading rhetorical question invite the riposte: what else might they do there indeed, but see? The implicit reversal of Hermes's perceptual presumption (i.e., his presumption to see unseen when he is actually being seen without seeing it) is confirmed in the space of the ensuing section-break, when Lamia abruptly addresses him:

 And thus: While Hermes on his pinions lay,
 Like a stoop'd falcon ere he takes his prey.
 "Fair Hermes, crown'd with feathers, fluttering light,
 I had a splendid dream of thee last night ..."

 (1:66-69)

This makes clear, as Paul Endo has observed, "that she has been seeing him all along." (50) The surprise--not just that "such eyes" should so clearly recognize Hermes, but that this Petrarchan picture of a "woman's mouth with all its pearls complete" (1:60) should speak--implies both recognition and reversal, and just as it pricks the hubris of Hermes it also implicates any reader who has been inadvertently assuming his gaze. When Lamia proceeds to describe Hermes's present quest, including his "sad" and "amorous" state of mind and his departure from Olympus the preceding night (1:68-80), he is surprised to the point of admitting her percipience--"Thou smooth-lipp'd serpent, surely high inspired!" (1:83)--and they proceed to treat each other henceforth as equals, subject-to-subject. Yet Lamia has clearly established her perceptual superiority: while Hermes mistook her by scanning her as a beautiful and interesting object, she has not only recognized him objectively but, in "dream[ing]" him as a subject, has seen through him.

What Hermes learns in this interchange is just as clearly limited: his next question to Lamia is "where my nymph is fled" (1:86). But his continuing presumption continues to be haunted by counter-iconic e's. The nymph he seeks remains unseen because Lamia has "her beauty veil'd / To keep it unaffronted, unassail'd / By the love-glances of unlovely eyes" (1:100-102). Therefore, as Lamia informs Hermes,

 Free as the air, invisibly, she strays
 About these thornless wilds; her pleasant days
 She tastes unseen; unseen her nimble feet
 Leave traces in the grass and flowers sweet;
 From weary tendrils, and bow'd branches green,
 She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen ...

 (1:94-99, boldface added)

As the clustering double e's suggest, the nymph is observing Hermes even as he learns why he cannot see her. She is right at hand (and continuously observing) when Lamia turns to reveal her:

 ["]Stoop, Hermes, let me breathe upon thy brow,
 And thou shalt see thy sweet nymph even now."
 The God on half-shut feathers sank serene,
 She breath'd upon his eyes, and swift was seen
 Of both the guarded nymph near-smiling on the green.

 (1:121-25, boldface added)

Her "near-smiling" in this context would seem to express her appreciation of the irony in having enjoyed the perceptual advantage over "The God," her pursuer. Morris Dickstein and Marjorie Levinson have argued that Lamia "plays the madam" or "pimp" in this scene, exchanging the nymph for her own freedom and thus participating in the nymph's commodification. (51) But by granting the nymph the power to observe Hermes unseen, a gift emphasized by the invisible eyes, Lamia has effectively empowered her as a willing and choosing subject. That the nymph continues as such is emphasized by the closing passage of the episode (1:134-45). It does not describe "a rape," as Dickstein suggests, but a reconciliation: the nymph first recoils in fear, receives reassurance from Hermes (now more suitor than pursuer), then willingly joins him. Though it acquires a slightly comical edge from its rapidity, this reconciliation is comparable, point for point, to Madeline's with Porphyro upon waking, (52) and its dramatic purpose is the same, to render the feminine role reciprocally voluntary. So far from objectifying the nymph, Lamia initially reverses Hermes's objectification and then releases the pair into a reciprocal relation; she is a matchmaker, but not a madam.

Thus two perceptual contests with Hermes, one on her own behalf and one on the nymph's, both issue in clear victories for Lamia--though not in triumphs. Rather than humiliate Hermes or simply reverse his subject-object domination, Lamia manages in each case to negotiate a more fruitful relation of subject to subject. And thus, having proven herself a seeing, speaking, wishing, thinking subject, Lamia also shows human generosity and wisdom and "becomes," as Dickstein says (if we take "human" in the positive sense), "the most human figure in the poem." (53) But this is established in the Hermes episode, not, as Dickstein suggests, after. The critical tendency to dismiss the Hermes episode as an ornamental irrelevance or as mere antithesis to the main action (54) is badly mistaken; the episode's dramatization of Lamia's percipient and generous human character is crucial for judging the perceptual contests that follow. (55)

The e's cease to function counter-iconically in Lamia after the Hermes episode, (56) for at this point the nature of the perceptual contests changes. Since Lamia appears in serpent form only to Hermes among her male antagonists (leaving the reader to one side for the moment), only Hermes makes the particular error of presuming to see her unseen, and consequently only he is susceptible to the edifying surprise of her "penetrant" reciprocal gaze. Hermes is, in other words, the type of the unintentional, therefore educable, chauvinist, which makes his episode an appropriate site for the didactic device of the counter-iconic e. (57) But the other side of the poem, part 2, treats of the other, less tractable side of Lamia's curse, the willfully despotic eye. Both Lycius and Apollonius see Lamia from the first in her "woman's shape" (1:118), so that to them her human agency is a given, and both respond as if threatened in their own; her objectification in this part of the poem is thus a matter not of misrecognition but of will. Moreover, whereas Lamia shows superior percipience and wisdom in her perceptual contests with Hermes, in those with Lycius and Apollonius she is defeated not by percipience but by forms of social power--even though the dynamic continues to be figured by the interrelation of eyes.

Lycius contrives to outnumber her. In their privacy "so complete a pair" (2:12), Lamia and Lycius gaze eye-to-eye (2:23-25, 46-47) until Lycius (already waxing plural) is possessed by "a buzzing in his head" (2:29) to expose her to the eye(s) of the public--which, since he is the native of Corinth, where she has "no friends" or kin (2:93-96), is really his public. His idea of a marriage proposal--"to entangle, trammel up and snare / Your soul in mine" by displaying Lamia as his "prize," in "triumph" "through the thronged streets," to "other men," "foes" and "friends" alike (2:52-62)--is an explicit threat to master her by rendering her an object of common view, to overpower her eye (and I) by multiplying his own. When Lycius's "dreadful guests" finally appear "to spoil [Lamia's] solitude" (2:145), the intrusion of their "common eyes," described in free indirect discourse from Lamia's perspective, is illustrated by one of the highest concentrations of double e's in the poem:

 O senseless Lycius! Madman! wherefore flout
 The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister'd hours,
 And show to common eyes these secret bowers?
 The herd approach'd; each guest, with busy brain,
 Arriving at the portal, gaz'd amain,
 And enter'd marveling: for they knew the street,
 Remember'd it from childhood all complete
 Without a gap, yet ne'er before had seen
 That royal porch, that high-built fair demesne;
 So in they hurried all, maz'd, curious and keen:
 Save one, who look'd thereon with eye severe,
 And with calm-planted steps walk'd in austere ...

 (2:147-58, boldface added) (58)

These are iconic rather than counter-iconic e's: they do not surprise, for they signify nothing new, but merely illustrate Lamia's dismayed impression. But it is important that both semantically and iconically this passage permits its reader to look with Lamia rather than at her, to share her perspective on the eyes by which she is outnumbered and may soon be overpowered.

If Keats was constitutionally hyper-sensitive to the annihilating "pressure" of another individual's "identity," his critical reception made him at least equally wary of the force of a concerted public gaze. William Hazlitt's contemporary analyses of public opinion, and of the role of the Reviews in orchestrating it, were important to Keats, and the two main points on which Hazlitt dwelt are both relevant to Lamia's plight: first, the aptitude of so-called "public" opinions to be hatched and projected by powerful interests and individuals, and second (and conversely), the impotence of a private individual to withstand these views once their acceptance has become general. In his essay "On Court Influence," probably known to Keats, Hazlitt seeks a figure adequate to describe the individual's impotence in the face of mass belief: "Who is there in his senses," he asks, "that can withstand the gathering storm, or oppose himself to this torrent of opinion ... absorbing by degrees every thing in its vortex ...? To argue against it, is like arguing against the motion of the world in which we are carried along: its influence is as powerful and as imperceptible." (59) Hazlitt's figures extend not just to influence but to the hapless outsider's annihilation and banishment:

 it is not amusing to become a bye-word with the mob.... It will
 knock down any man's resolution. It will stagger his reason. It
 will tame his pride.... If he cannot bring the world round to his
 opinion, he must as a forlorn hope go over to theirs, and be
 content to be a knave--or nothing.

 Such is the force of opinion, that we would undertake to drive a
 first Minister from his place and out of the country, by merely
 being allowed to hire a number of dirty boys to hoot him along the
 streets from his own house to the treasury and from the treasury
 back again. (237)

The key point for Hazlitt is that too often opinions prevail according, not to their justice or merit, but to the mass of their adherents. And while the contest between Lamia and Lycius with the public at his back is not a contest of opinions in a developed sense, its power dynamic is just as Hazlitt describes. (60)

If Lycius invokes the power of numbers against Lamia, Apollonius is at one level a synecdoche of that power: as an influential teacher and sophist, he is the shape(r) of mass opinion in Corinth. Indeed, some of Apollonius' actions--denouncing Lamia in public as "serpent" (2:298, 305), "Browbeating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride" (2:248)--echo Hazlitt's account of power in the context of a "mob." But Apollonius also acts as an individual engaged in a perceptual contest with Lamia. In this particular contest there is blindness on both sides--the willful blindness of power on his side inflicting a deathlike blindness and invisibility on hers. (Lamia herself broaches a similarly complex sense of blinding as affecting both parties in her earlier expostulation with Lycius for "Muffling his face" at the approach of Apollonius: "Lycius! wherefore did you blind / Yourself from his quick eyes?" [1:362, 373-74].) Though Apollonius is often regarded as the poem's truth-bearer, even by readers who are rightly uncomfortable with the violence of his witnessing, (61) the violence of his witnessing should, on the contrary, make us question the truth he bears. When he first appears amid the crowd, Apollonius is laughing "As though some knotty problem, that had daft / His patient thought, had now begun to thaw, / And solve and melt:--'twas just as he foresaw" (2:160-62). His "knotty problem" is evidently Lamia, whose serpent-form initially appeared to Hermes (with a reminiscence of the serpent in Paradise Lost 4:346-49) as "a Gordian shape" (1:47). Now that she appears as a woman, the "Gordian" figure is less justifiable--and yet it is her very appearance as woman and subject that makes her that special object in the eyes of Apollonius, a knot whose "[dis]solv[ing]" will confirm his own authority. Since the "sharp-eyed" Apollonius plays Alexander in this respect, it is important to recall that Alexander's severing of the Gordian knot was not, at least in the view of eighteenth-century sources, a proof of acumen so much as a desperate, cynical, and self-aggrandizing feat of force. The oracle had specified that untying the knot would distinguish the destined ruler of Asia. (62) As applied to Lamia, the broad implication is that Apollonius murders rather than dissects. He cannot even be said to "Unweave a rainbow" (2:237) in the sense of reducing it to light or knowledge (see 2:232)--for under his eyes Lamia is neither revealed nor explained, but "melt[s] into a shade" (2:238); the lady "vanishe[s]" (2:306). Moreover, Apollonius' application of force and sharp edges to Lamia contrasts directly, and to his disadvantage, with the analytical skills formerly attributed to her:

 Not one hour old, yet of sciential brain
 To unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain;
 Define their pettish limits, and estrange
 Their points of contact, and swift counterchange;
 Intrigue with the specious chaos, and dispart
 Its most ambiguous atoms with sure art ...

 (1:191-96)

The terms "unperplex," "estrange," and "dispart" suggest a patient and respectful gift for untangling without thereby violating or destroying what is "most ambiguous." Likewise, to "Intrigue with the specious chaos" is to negotiate with an apparent problem rather than attack it and thus make it real; even abstract problems appear to Lamia as worthy of being engaged subject-to-subject. The contrast between Lamia's patient analytical mode and Apollonius' incisive violence parallels Keats's opposition between "Negative Capability" and the "irritable reaching after fact & reason." (63) The perceptual contest clearly goes to Lamia, whatever Apollonius may proceed to achieve with his "sharp eyes."

Indeed, the point in the conclusion is not merely that Apollonius annihilates or banishes Lamia with his eye, but also that in using it for this he fails to see her with her. Unlike Hermes and Lycius, Apollonius never looks Lamia in the eye or acknowledges her seeing of him; hence, though he appears to fear her, he never recognizes her as a perceiving subject. Having approached the wedding party with prejudice--"'twas just as he foresaw"--and with his "knotty problem" already beginning to "solve and melt" (2:160-62), he comes not to observe but to execute a foregone conclusion. In the fullest description of his gaze,

 The bald-headed philosopher
 Had fix'd his eye, without a twinkle or stir
 Full on the alarmed beauty of the bride,
 Brow-beating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride.

 (2:245-48)

What this never says is that he sees her. The absence from Apollonius's eye of "twinkle or stir" suggests severity, but also blindness and death (compare 2:296). "Brow-beating" is the very word to suggest both the avoidance of eye-contact and the use of the eye as weapon rather than window. (64) And the immediate objects of Apollonius' fixed gaze, "the alarmed beauty of the bride" and "her fair form," fall just short of Lamia herself; she remains either veiled in her beauty or absent from it--possibly wandering already in "spirit" as she formerly mind-traveled beyond her "serpent prison-house" (1:202-14). Certainly from the point where Apollonius has "fix'd his eye" on her "form," Lamia is no longer at home: she no longer speaks or sees, even in response to Lycius's beseeching, until she gestures defensively and "scream[s]" before vanishing entirely (2:302-6). She is present only enough to suffer; the description of Apollonius' gaze as "stinging" (2:301) is the only other indication of the presence, before she formally vanishes, of anything more than her form.

It is at this point of Lamia's vanishing that we might hope to find, on the pattern of her interactions with Hermes, iconic indicators of her reverse gaze--signs, if not of perceptual victory, at least of her survival. But the signs are not good.

 Then Lamia breath'd death breath; the sophist's eye,
 Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly,
 Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging: she, as well
 As her weak hand could any meaning tell,
 Motion'd him to be silent; vainly so,
 He look'd and look'd again a level--No!
 "A Serpent!" echoed he; no sooner said,
 Than with a frightful scream she vanished:
 And Lycius' arms were empty of delight,
 As were his limbs of life, from that same night.
 On the high couch he lay!--his friends came round--Supported
 him--no pulse, or breath they found,
 And, in his marriage robe, the heavy body wound.

 (2:299-311, boldface added)

The e's of "eye" and "keen" (2:299, 301) might be iconic, but they are more easily construed as illustrating Apollonius' eyes than Lamia's. And the poem's bitter end, after Lamia's vanishing (2:306-11), offers no convincing iconic e's (the final three lines use no double e's at all). But one line in the narrative of action is intriguing: "He look'd and look'd again a level--No!" (2:304). The word "level" is an iconic palindrome: it resembles a face at eye-level, but it also pictures a level, balancing l-e against e-l on the point of its v. That its use in this line is semantically far-fetched or inappropriate may even suggest that "level" is iconically motivated. (65) If we view "level" as Lamia's face, the line shows Apollonius looking, looking again and glimpsing her face and eyes, and halting himself to refuse this insight and return to his former prejudice: "--No! / 'A Serpent!' echoed he." Thus, within a little more than a line, the poem dramatizes Apollonius' epistemological character, much as it did Lamia's in the opening sequence with Hermes--a comparison entirely to her advantage. What critics have granted to him as an insight into Lamia's "reality" appears here rather as a repression of insight by prejudice, authority, and vigorous counter-assertion. As a picture of balance, the word "level" also illustrates, iconically and ironically, the power imbalance by which Apollonius' truth about Lamia is imposed. Symmetrical and level as it is in itself, the "level" occurs to the far right of the line, where it makes a precarious fulcrum between Apollonius' "No!" and his six syllables of looking--or between the four iconic o's of "look'd and look'd" and the two iconic e's of "level." Together with the semantic twisting of the phrase "look'd ... a level," these effects remind us that neither Lycius nor Apollonius has been willing to see Lamia on "the level"--neither dispassionately nor without prejudice, neither one-on-one nor eye-to-eye. If Lamia is vanquished at the end, it is by superior force, not percipience, and the tragedy lies not in Lycius's death (as the last five lines suggest, quoting Apollonius' perspective), but in hers: in the defeat of percipience and wisdom by prejudice, authority, influence, and public opinion.

If the iconic or counter-iconic e is a Keatsian device, as I hope to have shown, it is an important one (however easy it may be and has been to overlook or dismiss it) since it both supports the speculative, sympathetic, and "self-quizzing" modes of intellectual being that inform his poetics, and extends them to the reader's role. Most plainly and narrowly, for the interpretation of Keats, this device means that Keatsian gazing is not always what it appears: scenes that appear to represent and even encourage a voyeurist perspective are commonly ironized by the counter-iconic e. This in itself will never "save Keats for feminism," supposing feminism wants him, but if it encourages a more patient suspension of ethico-political judgments it may open parts of his work to a more enabling criticism.

More broadly, however, this is a case in which the reader is not to judge but to be judged. I have focused mainly on how the iconic e may subvert presumptions of exclusive subjectivity in Keats's gazing speakers and protagonists, but the same thing applies to his readers as well. Insofar as readers' perspectives conform themselves to those of speaker or protagonist--which appears to be common--the subversion of one pretty much implies that of the other. But what of the reading relation per se? What can it mean (to return to my former question) for a text to look back at its reader? When books are said to "read the reader," it is generally a projective figure for the truism that readers reveal themselves in how they read. (66) Such a proposition can certainly be applied to the "Ode on Melancholy" and Lamia, but it does little justice to the startling and unsettling effect of their counter-iconic e's. There is no doubt that this is an effect, and an occasional one at that, but the effect of the effect is to cast the text, not as a mirror for the reader, but as a facing subject. And that is not merely because the e's affect a return-gaze: it is a matter also of the uncertainty they cannot help but inspire in the adverting reader as to the range of resource and intent on the part of the text (what about the next passage--and what about q's?) Keats's text is to its reader much as Endymion's world is to Endymion, or as Baudelaire's "foret de symboles" to its passer-through: the gaze that goes both ways is, even if not real, a sign against unilateral mastery. The point may be better approached through the analogy sometimes made about Lamia as an "allegory of reading"--the idea that Lamia, the work, is to its reader as Lamia, the character, is to Apollonius. This is usually taken to mean, as the object is to the subject, as the puzzle to the puzzler, as Gordian knot to Alexander. (67) Yet Lamia's own keen subjectivity, both affirmed and demonstrated in the poem, demands that this analogy take a different turn: Lamia is to the reader as Lamia is to Apollonius, as a subject is to another subject. Such a moral is not mystical but pragmatic. Lamia, as we have seen, "Intrigue[s] with the specious chaos" (1:195)--intersubjectively--whereas what Apollonius penetrates with violence vanishes. So, perhaps, even text reveals itself best when treated with the respect of a facing subject. (68)

Queen's University, Canada

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(1.) This is the first line and editorial title of a poem sent by Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, 28 June 1818, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:304, and first published in 1925. Though I cite this from the Letters', all other citations of Keats's poetry are from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978).

(2.) Keats to J. H. Reynolds, 11 July 1819, Letters 2:128.

(3.) Paul Fry, "History, Existence, and 'To Autumn,'" SiR 25 (1986): 214, 215.

(4.) As Helen Vendler writes, "as for the mistress, everyone has felt the literary impropriety of the language used in the passage concerning her," The Odes of John Keats" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 174. See also Robert Bridges, A Critical Introduction to Keats, 56, G. L. Little, "Keats' 'Ode on Melancholy,'" Explicator 25 (1967), Douglas Bush, ed., Selected Poems and Letters by John Keats (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 350, and Stuart Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 282-83. But many other critics--including Leavis, Knight, Bloom, Perkins, Bate, and Stillinger--discuss these lines without noting any impropriety, literary or otherwise.

(5.) Specifically, see "The Eve of St. Agnes," 167, Lamia, 2:256-60, 299-308, and The Fall of Hyperion, 1:266-71. Leslie Brisman compares line 20 of "Ode on Melancholy" directly with the ephebe's facing of Moneta: "There remains, as with the angry mistress, only to feed on her peerless eyes and behold, as the poet enjoins her to let him behold, 'what in thy brain so ferments to and fro,'" Romantic Origins (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 97.

(6.) August 1820; Letters 2:327; Fry, "History, Existence, and 'To Autunm,'" 215.

(7.) In "Keats and Gender Criticism," Susan Wolfson surveys varying critical appraisals and suggests that Keats's own gender commitments are too "polymorphi[c]" or "unstable" to be characterized simply. See The Persistence of Poetry, eds. R. Ryan and R. Sharp (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 88-95; quotations from 90 and 88.

(8.) To J. H. Keynolds, 21 September 1819; Letters 2:168.

(9.) Byron uses "ee" for "eye" twice in Childe Harold, both times early in Canto 1 (lines 94, 273). The only other modern poet cited for this usage in the OED is Coleridge: "And curs'd me with his ee" (Rime [1798], 207), "A little sun, no bigger than your ee" ("The Three Graves," 507-8).

(10.) To Fanny Brawne, February 1820; Letters 2:262. The OED defines "blind" in this context: "Of an alphabetic letter, written or printed with the loop closed or filled in" (def. 10.c, citing only Keats).

(11.) These passages and their relation to the "Ode on Melancholy" may also furnish a clue to the date of its composition. As Stillinger notes, "a more precise dating" than 1819 "is not possible, though most scholars routinely assign the poem to May" (Poems, 654). That Keats was joking about e's being eyes in September and the following February might suggest a later date, in fall or even winter of 1819. A corroborating consideration is the placement of "Melancholy" as the last of the odes in Keats's 1820 volume--in fact directly after "To Autumn" (which we know was written 19 Sept. 1819; Poems, 669), and thus in separation from the other poems with "Ode" in their titles.

(12.) In the only surviving holograph, now divided between the Princeton University Library (page l, with stanzas 1-2) and the New York Public Library (page 2, with stanza 3), most e's are closed, or "blind," but they are left open at "peerless eyes" (facsimiles in Gittings, The Odes of Keats, 61-63; see figure 9 above).

The parallel between the masculine gaze on a feminine face and the reading of text is implicit in Keats's source in Ophelia's speech to Polonius, as suggested by Vendler: "He took me by the wrist and held me hard; ... He falls to such perusal of my face / As 'a would draw it" (Hamlet 2.1.87, 89-90; qtd. in Vendler, Odes, 315n11; my emphasis).

(13.) "Alphabetic Letters as Icons in Literary Texts," in Max Nanny and Olga Fischer, eds., Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), 195, 187, 195, 175.

(14.) Nanny, "Alphabetic Letters," 174, 175.

(15.) Nanny, "Alphabetic Letters," 195-96. Similarly, Andreas Fischer's essay "Graphological Iconicity in Print Advertising," in the same volume, classifies and catalogs iconic advertising tactics but ends without summation (276).

(16.) Nanny, "Alphabetic Letters," 174.

(17.) w. J. T. Mitchell cautions that the icon "has proved most difficult to assimilate into semiotics" because of the huge tolerances of resemblance: "Everything in the world is similar to everything else in some respects," Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 56-57. But the iconicity of letters being limited to a few shapes and governed by semantic contexts, the range of potential resemblances is narrow; identifications (e.g. of e and eye) become conventionalized, as in hieroglyphics, where pictures do function as sigms.

(18.) One predisposing circumstance for recognizing iconic e's as a deliberate device in Keats's verse is that his usage of double e's (by which I mean two e's in sequence or separated by one other character), about once in two lines, is statistically high. The rate of incidence is 44% in "Isabella," 49% in each of Endymion, Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Lamia, 52% in "La Belle Dame" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," and 53% in "I stood tip-toe." Even in the "Ode on Melancholy," with five double e's in one line, the overall incidence is only 50%. In a few poems it goes higher--to 64% in "Ode to Psyche" and 70% in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (where it is boosted by the play on "ever" and "never"). For poems I have sampled by contemporaries, the average rate is closer to 40%: 36% in Adonais, 37% in both The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834 text, verse without gloss) and Christabel, 39% in both "Fears in Solitude" and Don Juan, canto 1; 40% in the 1805 Prelude, Books 1-3, and 43% in "Dejection: an Ode." But for a few poems the ratio is comparable to Keats: 48% for Alastor, 52% for "Mont Blanc," 55% for "Kubla Khan." I recogmize that this disparity might have other explanations, such as an assonantal preference on Keats's part for long e's. I have produced these figures using computerized counts of search/replace functions in etexts made available by Project Gutenberg and other sources; since the etexts are based on older editions in the public domain, my figures should be regarded as close approximations.

I confine my argument to the effects of double e's but assume that there may be similar play with other letters. An obvious possibility, closely related to the present one, is the double o: Nanny cites e.e. cummings's "l oo k" ("Alphabetic Letters," 173); Fischer reproduces a 1997 ad in which the "o-o" in "Pro-optik Zurich" is developed to resemble a pair of spectacles ("Graphological Iconicity," 279, figure 26).

(19.) For readings of the "Ode on Melancholy" as quest, see Vendler, Odes, 157-62 and Leon Waldorf, Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 150-51. To anticipate an objection, the similarity I have in mind here is not a matter of iconic "mirroring" of "semantic meaning" (to which I have just objected), but a consistency in tactics: the iconic e's of "peerless eyes" contradict the verbal meaning of their situation, but the contradiction is coherent with the more generally ironic turn of the poem and, I will argue, with the "self-quizzing" of Keats's poetics in general.

(20.) Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 86-87, xiii. The concept of the "guilty reader" Fish borrows for Milton, via Joseph Summers, from Henry James (Surprised, 2n, 86, 142). Several critics have discussed Lamia as a "trap" laid to educate or even punish readers; see Gene M. Bernstein, "Keats's 'Lamia': The Sense of a Non-Ending," Papers on Language mid Literature 15 (1979), especially 190; Joseph C. Sitterson, Jr., "'Narrator and Reader in Lamia," Studies in Philology 79 (1982): 304-7; and Wolfson, The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 333-44.

(21.) Surprised, 4.

(22.) Christine Overall argues m "Feminism, Ontology, and Other Minds," that the "other minds problem" is peculiar to "masculist" ways of thinking, in Feminist Perspectives: Philosophical Essays on Method and Morals, ed. Lorraine Code et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 104n5: in this light Keats's favoring of male readers may be a matter of targeting a masculine foible and less of an insult to women readers than is sometimes thought. See especially Richard Woodhouse to John Taylor, 20 Sept. 1819: "He says he does not want ladies to read his poetry: that he writes for men ..." (Hyder Rollins, ed., The Keats Circle, 2nd ed., 2 vols. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969], 1:92).

(23.) Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 26-27.

(24.) Fish, Surprised, 83-87, 345.

(25.) Keats to Bailey, 13 Mar. 1818, Letters 1:243. By "Clouds &c" Keats probably means the shapes or "figures" to be seen in clouds (see Endymion 1:880-91 or Hamlet 3.2.384-90)--a close analogue for the shapes to be seen in alphabetic letters.

(26.) Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," page 530; "Mont Blanc," page too, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 2nd ed., eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002). Further citations to Shelley's work are from this edition. Nanny says, similarly, "iconicity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder" ("Alphabetic Letters," 174).

(27.) Keats to Bailey, 13 Mar. 1818, Letters 1:243.

(28.) "Peter Bell: A Tale," in Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), lines 248-50.

(29.) Shelley, Alastor, lines 488-92, ellipses in the original. The influence of Alastor on Keats has long been recognized; see, e.g., Sidney Colvin John Keats (New York: Scribner's, 1917), 234-37 and Wolfson, Questioning, 234-37.

(30.) Shelley, "Preface" to Alastor, page 73.

(31.) "Ode to a Nightingale," 72. Apparently taking the phrase, as I do here, to designate a solipsistic mood, Paul de Man argues that "the condition of the 'sole self' is one of intolerable barrenness," "always profoundly negative" for Keats (The Selected Poetry of Keats [New York: Signet, 1966], xxiii-xxiv). But other critics construe and hence value the term differently; see Morris Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 219-20 and Charles Rzepka, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 178.

(32.) "Self-quizzing" is a term used by critics rather than by Keats (and is not in the OED), but Keats says he himself would "be apt to quiz" his "Isabella" (to Richard Woodhouse, 21-22 Sept. 1819, Letters 2: 174); a notorious example is his Preface to Endymion, apologizing for "inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt" (Poems, 102). See also Wolfson, Questioning, 203-4, 215-16. On Keats's dislike of egotism, see Keats to Reynolds, 3 Feb. 1818, Letters 1:237, and to Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct. 1818, Letters 1:387. In later statements Keats sometimes admits to egotism as pragmatically useful to an artist: to John Taylor, 23 Aug. 1819, Letters 2:144; to Shelley, 16 Aug. 1820, Letters 2:322-23.

(33.) Keats to Charles Dilke, 20 Sept. 1818, Letters I:368-69; to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 Oct. 1818, Letters t:392; and to Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct. 1818, Letters" I:387. Keats's response to a letter from Fanny Brawne suggests that this is not just a matter of the presence of the other: "I am almost astonished that any absent one should have that luxurious power over nay senses which 1 feel. Even when I am not thinking of you I receive your influence and a tenderer nature steeling upon me" (to Fanny Brawne, 8 July 1819, Letters 2:126). See also Keats to George and Georgiana Keats, 13 Mar. 1819, Letters 2:77, and Rzepka, Self as Mind, 179-83.

(34.) See Self as Mind, 165-72, 170-80. Despite my disagreement in this instance, Rzepka gives the best account I have found of the importance of intersubjectivity for Keats (see especially 190-220). Christopher Ricks offers a different critique of charges of voyeurism against Keats by pointing out a prevalent ambivalence of attraction and repulsion within the Keatsian gaze (Keats and Embarrassment [London: Oxford University Press, 1974], especially 41, 86-91).

(35.) Rzepka, Self as Mind, 171, his emphases.

(36.) Coincidentally, Wolf[son singles out "I stood tip-toe" and even quotes from the same passage (lines 25-28) to argue "Keats's willingness to submit the poet's postures to playful scrutiny" and "self-parody" (Questioning, 215-16).

(37.) In a passage comparable to this one in "I stood tip-toe," Wordsworth laments his own former "presumption" in "disliking here, and there / Liking, by rules of mimic art transferred / To things above all art," his "love / Of sitting thus in judgment," and more generally the power of "the bodily eye, in every stage of life / The most despotic of our senses" (The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill [New York: Norton, 1979], 1850 Prelude, 12:109-12, 121-22, 128-29). "Despotism of the eye" is Coleridge's phrase (Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. [Princeton: Princeton University Press/Bollingen, 1983], 1:107). See also David Simpson, Irony and Authority (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979), 147-50.

(38.) See note I above. Writing to Bailey of George's departure and Tom's sickness, Keats notes that "I have a sister too and may not follow them, either to America or to the Grave" (10 June 1818, Letters 1:293).

(39.) "La Nature est un temple off de vivant piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; / L'honnne y passe atravers des forets de symboles / Qui l'observent avec de regardes familiers" ["Nature's a temple where the pilasters / Speak sometimes in their mystic languages; / Man reaches it through symbols dense as trees, / That watch hint with a gaze familiar"] (Baudelaire, "Correspondances," in Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Joanna Richardson [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978], lines 1-4, my emphases).

(40.) In William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David Erdman, rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1988).

(41.) See OED, "lynx," def. 4. The Wikipedia article "Lynx (mythology)" begins, ironically, "The Lynx is an elusive, ghost-like animal that sees without being seen" (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(mythology), accessed 29 Sept. 2008).

(42.) Keats illustrates his "favourite Speculation" that "The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth"--with the "little song" to Sorrow from Endymion 4:146-81 (Letters 1:184-85; see also 1:181-82); Endymion's waking at 4:433-36 furnishes a clearer instance, though as a waking "within dream" (1:633) it is merely a rehearsal in simplified form of his imminent and more enduring fulfillment.

(43.) She also speaks, dreams, feels "compassion," desires Lycius, and wields an analytical, "sciential brain" that makes her a counterpart and rival to Apollonius (1:106, 191). On her rivalry with Apollonius as Lycius's mentor, see Walter Evert, Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 280; Bernstein develops the parallels between the two ("Keats's 'Lamia,'" 184-85, 186, 187, 189, 190).

(44.) On Lamia as text, see Wolfson, Questioning, 333-43 and Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173-75; on Lamia as image, see especially On'in N. C. Wang, "Lamia and Cinematic Sensation," SiR 42 (2003): 483, 485, 486. Denise Gigante views Lamia as "the consummate Romantic monster," "a monstrous object of ... the science of life," and likens her to a "galvanic experiment" and to electric eels dissected in the later eighteenth century by John Hunter and others ("The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life," PMLA 117 [2002]: 435, 439-41).

(45.) "Poetic Voodoo in Lamia: Keats in the Possession of African Marc," in The Persistence of Poetry, 144, 146.

(46.) On the poem's linkage of invisibility and power, and on the struggles of power and authority implicit in the gazing activity of its narrative, see also Paul Endo, "Seeing Romantically in Lamia," ELH 66 (1999): 115-17, 121-22.

(47.) E.g., Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry, 242, Bernstein, "Keats's 'Lamia,'" 179, Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 116, Sitterson, "Narrator and Reader in Lamia," 303, Wolfson, Questioning, 337.

(48.) A good deal of what is usually taken for neutral narration or even as Keats's perspective in Lamia appears to be an unannounced and unemphasized use of free indirect discourse; for instance, the description of the lovers' abode as a "palace of sweet sin" (2:31) seems to express an awakening Puritanism in Lycius's viewpoint and may have nothing to do with the narrator's view; the rough handling of the public as a "gossip rout" and a "herd" (2:146-56) probably expresses Lamia's view; and even at the ending, the pride of place given to Lycius's death, which gives it rather than Lamia's disappearance the tragic emphasis, seems to reflect the gravitational pull of Apollonius' viewpoint. Some, though not all, of the narrator's apparent inconsistencies might be attributed to this cause.

(49.) In Lempriere's account, "Mercury, by order of Jupiter, slew him, by lulling all his eyes asleep with the sound of his lyre. Juno put the eyes of Argus on the tail of the peacock, a bird sacred to her divinity" (Bibliotheca classica, 3rd ed. [London, 1797], s.v. "Argus").

(50.) "Seeing Romantically in Lamia," 121.

(51.) Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry, 240, Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 263-66.

(52.) See also Rzepka, The Self as Mind, 215-16.

(53.) Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry, 241.

(54.) Earl Wasserman finds the Hermes episode "irrelevant to the subsequent action" (The Finer Tone: Keats's Major Poems [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953], 158) except as antithesis; for similar views see David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 264-65; Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 553-54; Evert, Aesthetic and Myth, 283; Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 117-18; Waldorf, Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination, 171. Bernstein disputes such views and argues the episode's "organic connection" ("Keats's 'Lamia,'" 181-84); see also Donald Pearce, "Casting the Self: Keats and Lamia," Yale Review 69 (1980): 229-32. It will not do, though it has often been tried, to consign Lamia's interaction with Hermes to "myth," "imagination," or dream, while reading her interactions with Lycius and Apollonius as realism; for the whole tale is set "Upon a time" that still belongs to "the Dryads and the Fauns" (1:1, 5), and all of it represents real social dynamic with a veneer and admixture of romance; even Apollonius' anti-romance banishment of Lamia is magical.

(55.) A dramatic demonstration is also particularly crucial in a poem whose erratic narrator, perhaps testing our own percipience, sometimes calls Lamia "the serpent" and sometimes "a lady" and says here that "she was a maid," elsewhere that she was just "playing woman's part" (1:113, 146, 171, 185, 337).

(56.) Iconic e's continue to appear: see especially 1:205-12, where Lamia, though still trapped "in the serpent prison-house," sends "her spirit" out to reconnoiter, and 1:233-41, where she observes Lycius approaching unawares on the road to Corinth; in both of these cases iconic e's illustrate Lamia's seeing but unseen eyes.

(57.) On the didactic aspects of readerly "surprise," see Fish, Surprised, 1-22. Keats is generally considered to oppose didactic poetry, of course; see especially his letter to Reynolds, 3 Feb. 1818, Letters 1:223-25. But a distinction must be made between a dogmatic didacticism that supposes an obedient reader, and one that engages and surprises expectations.

(58.) See also 2:209-17. The incidence ratios are 15/12, or 125%, for lines 147-58, and 12/9, or 133%, for lines 209-17. By "highest concentration," I mean for passages of comparable length. Some short passages, such as 1:61-62, cited above, have higher ratios.

(59.) Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930-1934), Vol. 7, 236. Hazlitt's "On Court Influence" was first published ill John Hunt's The Yellow Dwarf, Jan. 3 and 10, 1818. In February 1818 Keats was reading in The Yellow Dwarf, or was at least aware that his friend Reynolds was writing for it (Letters 1:228), and it published his "Hymn to Pan" in May 1818 (Letters 1:41). See also Hazlitt's A Letter to William Gifford (1819), which Keats quotes at length to George and Georgiana in March 1819 (Letters 2:71-73).

(60.) Though there are many allegorical readings, none that I recall have presented Lamia as a figure of the artist. For discussions of her as art or poetry, see Bate, John Keats, 557 and Richard Harter Fogle, "Keats's Lamia as Dramatic Illusion," in Nineteenth Century Literary Perspectives, ed. Clyde de L. Ryals (Durham: Duke University Press, 1974), 72.

(61.) Rzepka argues that Apollonius "bears witness to the reality, the facts of the matter" (The Self as Mind, 220). Waldorf writes that "Though not a sympathetic figure, he is right about Lamia" (Keats and the Silent Work of Imagination, 175), Wolfson that "What unsettles us ... is that our perspective is exactly that of Apollonius.... One cannot deny that he alone is 'right' about Lamia's hidden identity" (Questioning, 341-42). Orrin Wang claims that Apollonius sees Lamia "as she really is and always will be" and "unmasks Lamia as an image," though he also discusses "Apollonius as predator" and monster ("Lamia and Cinematic Sensation," 483, 496, 498). Among critics on the other side of the question see Bate, John Keats, especially 559-60, and Lee, "Poetic Voodoo in Lamia," 132, 142, 145, 147.

(62.) In Sarah Trimmer's account, Alexander "made many vain attempts to disentangle" it, until "his patience (of which he had but a small share) was worn out; and he drew his sword and cut it" (A description of a set of prints of ancient history [London, 1795], 44-45). In Lempriere's account, "a report was ... spread that the empire of Asia was promised by the oracle to him that could untie the Gordian knot. Alexander, in his conquest of Asia, passed by Gordium; and as he wished to leave nothing undone, which might inspire his soldiers with courage, and make his enemies believe that he was born to conquer Asia, he cut the knot with his sword; and from that circumstance asserted that the oracle was really fulfilled, and that his claims to universal empire were fully justified" (Bibliotheca classica, s.v. "Gordius"). An earlier source comments: "Upon this occasion Alexander doth not appear to me, to have discovered as much judgment as I could have wished.... As he made use of force, where the oracle demanded nothing but address, he could have no authority from that quarter to promise himself that he should be the conquerer of Asia, though he really proved to be so in the event" (August Friedrich, Critical reflections on the character and actions of Alexander the Great [London, 1767], 59-60).

(63.) Keats to George and Tom Keats, 27 Dec. 1817, Letters 1:193. Others have found the "negative capability" passage applicable: Wasserman finds Apollonius "incapable of remaining Content with half-knowledge" (The Finer Tone, 153, 173), while Paul Endo associates kamia with "negative capability." Yet Endo finds more to compare than to contrast between Lamia's and Apollonius' analytical modes ("Seeing Romantically in Lamia," 118, 117).

(64.) The OED's primary definition is "To bear down, discourage, or oppose, with stern, arrogant, or insolent looks or words; to snub, to bully," etc. In early usage "the brow in question was that of the beater, not of the beaten party." While the very need to clarify this reflects the term's ambiguity, it seems clear that on one side or the other an eye makes contact with a "brow" in lieu of another eye.

(65.) The OED quotes this line as the only illustration of what it calls a "rare" sense of the adjective "level": "Plain, point-blank" (OED, 2nd ed., "level, a. and adv." [sense A.8]). While "point blank" is an appropriate definition for the context (Apollonius is truly shooting more than looking), this sense seems to be generated by the context rather than by the word; outside of this context, for instance, one could not say "he shot again a level" and be understood as meaning "'he shot again point-blank." It might be objected that the difficulty derives from the aposiopesis rather than from the word "level," but one would be hard pressed to suggest any proper way of completing the phrase "looked again a level--."

(66.) Some books, as Fish puts it, "draw out what is in a man." With reference to Paradise Lost, he says "The idea that books (sacred or profane) read their reader is not a novel one" (Surprised, 84). But if so, it is unfortunate that he cites no instances. He may have Lionel Trilling in mind, who in turn recalls "W. H. Auden's remark that a real book reads us." Applying the phrase to himself, Trilling makes it a figure for the (in)adequacy of his own reading capacities: "I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past.... Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings" (Beyond Culture: Essays oH Literature and Learning [1955; London: Secker & Warburg, 1966], 8; cited by Kicks, Keats and Embarrassment, 188-89).

(67.) For versions of this argument see Fogle, "Keats's Lamia as Dramatic Illusion," 70-72; Bernstein," Keats's 'Lamia,'" 175, 186, 190; Wolfson, Questioning, 336-43; and Bennett, who surveys and reflects upon them (Keats, Narrative and Audience, 173-75). As Bennett generalizes the case, "while Lamia (and 'Lamia') figure the desired (textual) object, Lycius, Apollonius, and the public, or Lycius's friends, each figure different ways of reading" (174). Wolfson likewise presents Lamia as a "puzzle" whose difficulty "uncomfortably aligns us with the relentlessly busy brain of Apollonius" (Questioning, 338).

(68.) Keats often plays in other ways with conceits of animate text: see, e.g., Letters 2:191, 238, 196, 205, 272.