On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

John Keats begins by placing his reader in the realms of literature, as the poem’s primary purpose is to explore the transportive power of literature. Though Keats also makes something else explicit: Poetry has the power to preserve culture. The Homeric epics celebrated a culture roughly three thousand years before Keats’s time, and the conceit of travel that he uses in the first quatrain, “Much have I travell’d in realms of gold” (Line 1), is not literal. Even if Keats had travelled through the Aegean Sea—he didn’t—the culture he would have encountered would have been vastly different than what is confronted in Homer. His claim to have seen “many goodly states and kingdoms” (Line 2), or to have been “[r]ound many western islands” (Line 3), is metaphorical, and only possible though reading the Homeric poems.

The next quatrain makes clear, however, that the beauty of Homer was only revealed to Keats through Chapman’s translation. Beauty, the aesthetic experience, is vitally important to Keats. He would later develop this in his famous conclusion to the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819)—again drawing inspiration from ancient Greek culture—and it can be thought of as a driving motivation towards Keats’s composition of this sonnet. The “pure serene” (Line 7) of Homer’s domain is revealed, and it is this that carries Keats to such depths of feeling. The notion of breathing in Homer’s “pure serene” (Line 7) is one of the few changes Keats made to the poem before publication, sharpening it from a vague statement of ignorance. Keats is using his knowledge of Latin linguistics, learned in his medical studies, to amplify the suggestiveness of the line, relying on the fact that the word “inspiration” comes from the Latin for “breath.”

The unifying aspect of art is approached with Keats’s allusion to Apollo, who, as the god to which Homer owed “fealty” (Line 4), is—for a current surgeon-in-training—double-sided, as Apollo is both the god of poetry and the god of medicine. In this line, Keats ties himself to the long tradition emanating out of Apollyonic worship, aligning himself with Homer and the ancient Greeks. This kinship is further reinforced by Keats’s use of the epithet “deep-brow’d” (Line 6) to describe Homer, making use of a poetic convention Homer employed so often that it is named after him. But Keats does not linger on fraternal jocularity, and in Lines 5 and 6, he broadens the spatial metaphor, introducing Homer’s works as a “wide expanse” (Line 5) before moving on to an archaic term that is spatially based. Keats uses “demesne” (Line 6), which retains a silent “s” from old French, to further suggest the deep antiquity of Homer’s work. The word is a version of “domain,” drawn from a medieval legal term that referred to land ownership. Given its placement in Keats’s rhyme scheme, he likely pronounced it “de-meen.”

Keats shifts the nature of his sensations in the eighth line, moving from the internal breathing in of Homer’s “pure serene” (Line 7) to the external hearing Chapman “speak out loud and bold” (Line 8). This evokes the Grecian bards mentioned in Line 4, tying Chapman to their tradition, while the rough-and-tumble syllables of “out loud and bold” (Line 8) speak to Chapman’s earthy translation, whose language is less polished than Alexander Pope’s, though it retains the evocative power that so gripped Keats. The rolling nature of Keats’s composition can also be witnessed in the repeated structural similarities of the first two quatrains in which the first three lines evoke breadth and spatial allusions while the fourth line harkens to the figure of the bard, first Homer, then Chapman, and this echoing resonance carries into the extended metaphor.

The ninth line, beginning with Keats’s transitive “Then” (Line 9), marks the transition from the thought Keats was originally developing into the differentiated, framing notions that, in this case, support the octave’s declaration. This is the volta, the turn in the sonnet that reflects the movement into the sestet. This is typically when the refutation of the octave takes place, but Keats instead doubles down on his exploration of the feeling, providing two figurative examples that underscore the revelation he feels. In each, Keats is careful to extend his spatial metaphor, first through the vastness of undiscovered space, and next, in a double intimation of vastness, situating “stout Cortez” (Line 11) on top of a mountain while laying out before him the unexplored vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

But Keats does more than simply extend his spatial metaphor. Up until this point, Keats has been relatively straight-forward with his declaration—“I didn’t know the beauty of the Homeric works until I read Chapman’s translation”—but moving beyond the volta he wades into the realm of the Italianate extended metaphor. The similes Keats employs are deliberately chosen, as each widely represents the sense of discovery and adventure that runs throughout Homer’s works. Keats ties himself to this adventurous spirit as well, as the “realms of gold” in the first line take on a different tone in the content of Cortez and the Spanish Conquistadors who sought a fabled city of gold in the Central American highlands. Keats devotes twice as many lines to Cortez than to his nameless astronomer in service to the momentum of the poem. He enjambs the last four lines of the poem, creating a rushed sensation that enacts sublime inspiration, an upswell of imagery and emotion that begins with the vastness of the unexplored skies and concludes with an excited, yet hushed, sublimity as Cortez alone has an experience that moves beyond words, beyond sound, into the vast and silent reach of the soul.