Reading John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

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N.S. Thompson

Reading John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

 

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      On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

      Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
              And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
              Round many western islands have I been
      Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
      Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
              That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
              Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
      Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
      Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
              When a new planet swims into his ken;
      Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
              He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
      Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
              Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

              —John Keats

 

The reader feels an immediate empathy in this poem with the young persona who exults in his rediscovery of an author—more precisely, the discovery of a translator who (for Keats) is able to reveal more fully for him one of European literature’s foundational authors in a translation that “speak[s] out loud and bold.” Even if we do not know the sonnet was written by Keats in 1816 at age twenty, or know that he could not have written it beyond his twenty-fifth year, when he died tragically young, part of the poem’s magic comes from the freshness that we associate with youth, and part of the key to that is understanding that this is the “first” time the poet has read Chapman. It is worth remembering that by the 1810s, the Renaissance dramatist George Chapman (1559? – 1634) was probably not among the first rank of Homeric translators, since the Augustan age had produced worthy versions by Pope and Dryden which had not been bettered. In fact, Keats came by Chapman’s work in an antiquarian context via his friend and schoolmate (and the son of Keats’s headmaster), Charles Cowden Clarke, who had borrowed a first folio of Chapman’s works, and the two friends sat up all night reading the “famousest” passages, as Clarke later recalled. They finished their reading at daybreak and Clarke returned home, but by ten o’clock a copy of the poem was sitting on his breakfast table. If written in a short space of time, the poem betrays extremely thoughtful work and, despite the famous paucity of rhymes in English, it is a strict Petrarchan sonnet rhyming a b b a a b b a c d c d c d in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter.
  What I want to show here is an underlying intellectual lexis that both grounds and backs up the idea of discovery, given in several rich seams. Most obvious is the idea of an author and an author’s work being metaphorized spatially as a geographical area, those “realms of gold”; the logical follow-up to this is the equation of the literary discovery with a narrative of actual geographical discovery spelled out, if erroneously (it was Balboa in Darien) in lines 11–14. But most cleverly, almost unconsciously, Keats has worked into the sonnet a metaphorical move from the medieval or simply archaic world into that of the Renaissance, which boldly shows the sea change in his understanding from one of ancient myth—albeit splendorous—to one of modern science (astronomical observation) and empirical discovery.
  So, in the very first line the poet steps in with a flamboyant description of literature as “realms of gold,” an overblown metaphor for us today, perhaps, but one which is linked to the more common metaphor of literature as “treasure” and a literary compendium as a “treasury” (e.g., Palgrave’s Golden Treasury). Interestingly, instead of glorifying Chapman’s folio edition as container of such treasure, Keats sees Homer himself in geographical terms as a mind-expanding force, opening up new horizons for him. But the language is ancient and again rather precious, although it follows logically: the realms are adumbrated into “goodly states and kingdoms” and “western islands,” which latter—by reference to their loyalty to Apollo—can be seen as the Aegean Islands that produced so much poetry in Ancient Greece, with Delos, in the center of the Cyclades, the island that was venerated as the birthplace of Apollo, the god of poetry.
  Then something interesting happens in the diction here. Already in line 1 Keats has used the word “realm,” an archaic term still preserved today for its aggrandizing effect, to which he adds other archaic words: “bards,” “fealty” (loyalty, allegiance), and “demesne” (kingdom). Thus the “realms of gold” are ancient not only by Homeric reference, but in the words taken from medieval chivalry. Again, this may seem rather precious of Keats, forgivable as the excitement of youthful fervor. However, these associations also help to suggest a lost world, an ancient world that the poet is about to (re)discover more clearly.
  In order to make this point, Keats turns to the Renaissance and its voyages of discovery, remembering (and conflating) passages from his reading of William Robertson’s History of America (volume III, 1777) about Balboa’s first sighting of the Pacific in Panama and Hernán Cortés’s sighting of the Valley of Mexico (1519). His first reader, Clarke, pointed out this error of memory to Keats, but the poet preferred to keep the name of “Cortez” despite the historical inaccuracy; whether for metrical reasons or phonic associations is unclear. Before taking this a step further, perhaps it should be said that Keats was scrupulous in other ways about this poem and revised it for publication in Poems, 1817, after it had appeared in the Examiner shortly after its composition. From the extant manuscript we can see that Keats altered line 7, which originally expressed his dissatisfaction with the Augustan translations (“Yet could I never judge what men could mean”), changing it to “Yet did I never breathe its pure serene.” His other change was substituting “eagle” for “wond’ring” in line 11.
  And so, coming to the volta (line 9) that marks the turn from octave to sestet, we see Keats move from his description of the facts to how they affected him. He feels like “some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken” (lines 9–10). Although this could possibly refer to Sir William Herschel’s discovery of Uranus in 1781, the use of “watcher” and “swims” suggests an earlier form of empirical scientist such as Galileo, who happened to observe Neptune in 1613, although he is not credited with its discovery. I would argue the simplicity here suggests a less systematic explorer than the highly professional Herschel. Furthermore, the conquistadores who follow in the sestet suggest a Renaissance figure by association. It goes without saying, too, that for Keats the conquistadores were seen as adventurers in a positive cast, rather than as the brutal colonizers we now see.
  So, in this poem, we can observe a neatly patterned move from medieval imagery in the chivalric terms of geopolitical space mentioned above to the Renaissance discoverers of both space and, geopolitically, the New World, which lexically embody Keats’s own rebirth into Homer on his discovery of Chapman, after his unsatisfactory reading of translations such as Pope’s. The language moves from archaic medieval terms forward to the vibrant references of actual Renaissance discoveries and underpins the sonnet with a sure line of historical references that directs the reader to the wider import of the reading. The vibrancy and actuality of those references blossom into an empirical new world for Keats after the bookish kingdoms of his earlier reading which, though extensive, did not fire or stretch his imagination. The sonnet is an example of how a seemingly effortless turn of imagery is actually a carefully measured train of references to guide the reader into the excitement of discovery the poet himself felt on hearing “Chapman speak out loud and bold.”