Memorization and Reflection for Keats’s Lamia
Sample Project 1 Reflection
Memorization and Reflection for Keats’s Lamia
For this exam, I decided to memorize the description of Lamia’s snake-woman appearance to force myself into a very careful close reading that would help me with the term paper for this class. This passage is the first visual impression the reader gets of Lamia, and Keats depicts her as a creature whose appearance overflows with striking sensual detail that ultimately cannot be sufficiently described in language. I began memorizing the poem two lines at a time whenever I found a few minutes to spare—the five minutes before a class began, my morning bus ride, etc. I even posted each day’s lines as my status on Facebook, so even my leisure time was inflected with Lamia for about a week. My memorization process was stolen from my childhood days of piano lessons. As a child, I would learn a piece of music by breaking it into sections, mastering a section at a time and after each section returning to top to do the whole piece as far as I had learned. Because the majority of the passage is a catalogue of her physical features, the most difficulty I had with the memorization was learning which articles and conjunctions Keats uses where. Keats’s repeated use of “a” in the multiple comparisons reiterates her variable coloration and patterns. She is not “striped like the zebra” because that would make her illustrative of a type. The zebra connotes a single understanding of what “zebra” is, but a zebra recognizes the uniqueness inherent in each creature within the species. Therefore, Lamia is her own unique rendering of a unique zebra and her features cannot be contained in the typical features of the zebra, the leopard, or the peacock. Interestingly, the word “some” works similarly to “a” in that it allows for variability and multiplicity. “Some penanced lady elf,” and “some demon’s mistress” indicate that Lamia could compare to a host of lady elves or any number of demons’
Memorization and Reflection for Keats’s Lamia
For this exam, I decided to memorize the description of Lamia’s snake-woman appearance to force myself into a very careful close reading that would help me with the term paper for this class. This passage is the first visual impression the reader gets of Lamia, and Keats depicts her as a creature whose appearance overflows with striking sensual detail that ultimately cannot be sufficiently described in language. I began memorizing the poem two lines at a time whenever I found a few minutes to spare—the five minutes before a class began, my morning bus ride, etc. I even posted each day’s lines as my status on Facebook, so even my leisure time was inflected with Lamia for about a week. My memorization process was stolen from my childhood days of piano lessons. As a child, I would learn a piece of music by breaking it into sections, mastering a section at a time and after each section returning to top to do the whole piece as far as I had learned. Because the majority of the passage is a catalogue of her physical features, the most difficulty I had with the memorization was learning which articles and conjunctions Keats uses where. Keats’s repeated use of “a” in the multiple comparisons reiterates her variable coloration and patterns. She is not “striped like the zebra” because that would make her illustrative of a type. The zebra connotes a single understanding of what “zebra” is, but a zebra recognizes the uniqueness inherent in each creature within the species. Therefore, Lamia is her own unique rendering of a unique zebra and her features cannot be contained in the typical features of the zebra, the leopard, or the peacock. Interestingly, the word “some” works similarly to “a” in that it allows for variability and multiplicity. “Some penanced lady elf,” and “some demon’s mistress” indicate that Lamia could compare to a host of lady elves or any number of demons’