Inspiration and Effort

KEATS'S ON FIRST LOOKING INTO

CHAPMAN'S HOMER*

SOME CRITICAL NOTES

This sonnet, an early composition of Keats's, is one of his best and has ranked with the most celebrated sonnets in the English language, like (to mention a few) Shakespeare's Poor Soul.,., Milton's On His Blindness, Blanco White's Mysterious Night..., Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much With Us..., Shelley's Ozymandias, though it is a descriptive rather than a reflective sonnet and as such is more comparable to the last-named than to the others except that Ozymandias contains, as usual with Shelley, a wide imagination-charged moral whereas this, as mostly with the early Keats, leaves us with only a keen symbol of lofty feeling.

As far as the sonnet-mode allows, it gives brief snatches, often intermixed, of nearly all the various manners and tempers compassed by Keats in his poetic career. There is the romantic mood of wonder and exultation, the penchant for Greek mythology and the Greek spirit in its movement towards the beautiful mingled with the sublime, the distant charm of Spenser, the Miltonic majesty, the Shakespearean

* Much have I travelled 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 stared at the Pacific — and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise —

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

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swiftness and surprise, the excited energy of some of the Bard's contemporaries — and, fusing all of them, the typical Keatsian quiver of both sense and soul and intense imaginative response to Art as well as Nature.

It is a sonnet on the Italian model a la Petrarch. Its form is the simplest and most straightforward possible in that model: abba abba, cd cd cd. There is also the required sense-pause at the end of the octave, unlike in the overflowing Miltonicised Petrarch. But the continuity of theme is well-sustained and in a manner at once natural and striking. The image of travel and discovery, with which the sonnet begins, comes at the close also and finds its climax in a historical picture (though "Cortez" is a mistake for "Balboa"). In between there is a slight shift of vision — from voyaging and exploring to the adventure of astronomical observation. But it is woven into the fundamental pattern both by what precedes and follows it. For, as preparation of the "skies", we have the breathing of the "pure serene" — the atmospheric suggestion serving as the link. And as a sustaining of the sea-discovery idea we have in the astronomer-passage the word "swims". Similarly, in the sea-passage that comes after, there is "eagle eyes", the eagle-association immediately sending our mind to the sky. Again, the Cortez-incident is vivid with the use of sight — Cortez's own staring at the Pacific and the looking of his men at each other. This use of sight joins up with the astronomer's watching in the preceding simile, and the different thing seen — namely, skies — gets assimilated into the thing beheld here — namely, sea — and becomes part of the basic symbol. Another point of linkage is the peak in Darien, something that is — in Shelley's phrase elsewhere — "pinnacled high in the intense inane", a position in the sky. A less exacting view could be that the basic symbol is simply of searching and of witnessing wonders, with sea- and sky as variants. But the view which we are holding goes deeper into the details of imaginative art.

Now for some other artistic minutiae. Line 1 is rich with

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liquids — l's and m's. The word "gold" is suggestive not only of precious brightness, the opulence of poetic imagination and the light of poetic revelation, but also of the rhythm and resonance of great poetry, its golden music. Line 2 is comparatively commonplace, but, over and above the significance continuing in it, its sound connects with that of the first by the prolongation of the m's and the taking up twice of the g of "gold"; this helps the fitting of it into the uplifted and forceful expression of the rest of the piece. The next two lines are more visual and vivid and with the mention of "Apollo" and the "bard" we are made aware of what the "realms of gold" really are. Line 5 hits off very well the character of the Homeric spirit in poetry. "Wide expanse" is what Homer's epic achievement in conception and music is and the epithet "deep-browed" for Homer suggests splendidly both the majesty and profundity of his tone and the grand brooding experience and vision that were his, particularly the experience and vision of suffering that furrows the foreheads of mortals. The phrase "pure serene" is also intensely evocative of the Homeric mood and Muse that in the midst of the greatest power of poignance is yet poised, ordered, harmonised. Appropriately does Keats speak of Homer ruling his kingdom — "demesne" — that is, showing a balanced mastery in his inspiration. Line 8, on the other hand, gives us Chapman to perfection. Keats did not intend a contrast, rather thought of equating Homer and Chapman; he did not realise that Homer's energy is unlike Chapman's vehemence and vigour, it is never "loud and bold". Chapman strikes strong chords out of the jolty four-line ballad-metre converted into a striding, coupleted fourteener, but nowhere revives the surge and thunder of the multi-motioned yet sinuous and calmly controlled Greek hexameter. Yes, Keats hardly realised the difference, but some unconscious intuition brought into the three lines where he speaks of Homer something of the very accent of the Greek poet, while in the one line where he talks of Chapman we have precisely that Elizabethan's manner. The lines about the sky-watcher and

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the new planet have a combination of facility and felicity which has made them, either as a whole or in part, stock phrases almost, yet without any loss of their immediate uplifting grip. The next line is equally memorable in a different way, and the figure of Cortez in it agrees excellently with Chapman's loudness and boldness: the epithet "stout" (which, of course, does not mean "fat" here) and the noun-adjective "eagle" convey a sense of daring, keen, sturdy splendour. But the whole close which the mention of Cortez brings is far above anything Chapmanian. It is, in its own kind, a Darien-peak of poetry, wonderfully tense, the last line absolutely superb with its breathlessness, remoteness, magic and semi-spiritual strangeness. We are no longer in the world we know, the geographical reference gets transcended and transfigured, and a symbol rises before us — some eternal elevation of visionary vigil in the mind's solitude is conjured up, some hushed high point of indrawn consciousness giving the glimpse of an uncharted infinity beyond of

Force one with unimaginable rest.

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