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‘’The relationship between love and illusion is something Keats returns to again and again in his narrative poems’’ To what extent is love always linked to illusion in his poems?    

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‘’The relationship between love and illusion is something Keats returns to again and again in his narrative poems’’ To what extent is love always linked to illusion in his poems?    
Scholars of Keats agree that in terms of his exploration of love, he almost always links it with illusion. In Lamia and La Belle Dame, Keats certainly connects these two elements and indeed he seems to suggest moreover that love can only exist within the realm of illusion. Having said that, in The Eve of St. Agnes he explores a form of romantic love which transcends illusion and he reveals a love which thrives in reality.

In Lamia, the limitation between love and illusion is explored through the character of Apollonius. In Greek mythology, Apollo is the god of knowledge and truth and history has witnessed many philosophers that went by the name Apollonius. Perhaps that is the reason why Keats chose this name with all its symbolism to represent the character that destroyed the love between Lamia and Lycius. There is no doubt that Lycius has fell into the realm of fantasy as ‘he from one trance was awakening/Into another…Happy in beauty, life and love’’. Trance and love were used together showing that one only existed with the other but the words ‘beauty’, ‘life’ and ‘happy’ were also mentioned, which pushes away the undermined status of a dream and makes it seem like a better reality than the truth. But truth is the only thing that the ‘sharp eyes’ of Apollonius saw and he insists on pulling Lycius from this illusion but only succeeds in leaving Lycius as a ‘heavy body’ for the illusion disappeared under the harsh ‘fix’d’ stare of reality and took with it the ‘delight’ and ‘life’ that thrived in that illusion. Keats showed an obvious relationship between love and illusion using Lycius and Lamia but also showed its limitations and sole weakness – its mutually exclusive enemy – reason and logic through Apollonius.

Keats also showed in Lamia that love survived in the realm of illusion through the side story between Hermes and his beloved nymph. The two immortals live their love in a world of fantasy for ‘Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass
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