Lamia: with Isabella and Hyperion (The Lightbound Library)

The three narrative poems of Keats's 1820 volume, gathered in one book. In Lamia, a serpent "vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue" is given human form and follows the young Lycius to Corinth to be his bride - until a philosopher's cold gaze withers her away, and the bridegroom with her. With it stand Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil - Boccaccio's girl who buries her murdered lover's head in a flowerpot and waters it with her tears - and Hyperion, the great unfinished epic of the fallen Titans, some of the noblest blank verse in the language, broken off in mid-flight.

Written in his one miraculous year, these are Keats's tales: enchantment undone, love murdered, gods cast down.

This Lightbound Library edition sets all three afresh, with a full introduction, and is the exact companion to the odes-and-ballad volume La Belle Dame sans Merci - the two together holding the whole of the 1820 book.