On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer, by John Keats

On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer was the second poem that John Keats (1795-1821) had published, although it was far from being the first that he had written. It was, however, the first that brought him to the attention of the literary public.

The Poem

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-brow'd 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.

Background

The poem was written in the early hours of Saturday 26th October 1816, inspired by what had happened the previous evening.

Keats had been educated at a small school in Enfield, to the north of London, called Clarke’s Academy. He struck up a close relationship with Charles Cowden Clarke, the son of the headmaster, although Clarke was eight years older than Keats. Clarke had acted as a mentor at the school and had encouraged Keats in his studies, given that the latter had been very keen to read as much as he could in his later years at the school.

They had stayed as friends after Keats left school and moved on to pursue a medical career. At the time of Chapman’s Homer, Keats was in training at Guy’s Hospital and also worked there as a junior doctor – although it would not be long before he abandoned this calling in favour of working full-time on his poetry.

The two had been in the habit of meeting at Clarke’s lodgings in Clerkenwell for supper and to talk about literature. One such meeting took place during the evening of Friday 25th October, when the two of them paid close attention to a book that Clarke had borrowed, namely a translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey that had been made centuries before by George Chapman, a contemporary of William Shakespeare.

Clearly, there would not have been enough time for Keats to read the entire text, or even a very large proportion of it, but what he did read obviously made a very deep impression on him. It was probably after midnight before Keats left Clerkenwell to walk the couple of miles to his own lodgings, crossing London Bridge to Southwark and the vicinity of Guy’s Hospital.

We can imagine that Keats had some of the lines of his poem already fully formed in his mind before he got home – perhaps the bulk of them – but he did not go to bed until he had written the whole poem and had it ready to send by messenger to Charles Clarke as soon as this was possible. As a result, Clarke was able to read it as he had his breakfast at 10 a.m. on the morning after he had inspired John Keats to write it.

Chapman’s Translation of Homer

George Chapman (c.1559-1634) was a poet and playwright who at one time incurred the wrath of King James I by being the part-author of Eastward Ho, a play that – to James’s Scottish mind – insulted the Scots! Chapman served a short jail sentence as a result. A number of his works had classical themes, and his translations of Homer from Greek were a natural outcome of his expertise as a scholar of Greek.

What impressed John Keats and Charles Clarke was the style in which Chapman wrote his translation. Despite being written (mainly) in iambic pentameters and rhymed couplets (known as “heroic couplets), it comes across as being emotionally strong and physically direct, allowing the sense – when required – to carry on across line boundaries as the story plunges forwards. His word choices and imagery are appropriate to what is being told, with the emphasis on action and entertaining the reader.

This style was a complete contrast to what Keats was used to, namely the translation written in the early 18th century by Alexander Pope, which was the main source – up to then – of Keats’s knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey. Pope was a pre-eminent representative of the “Augustan Age” that imitated classical models to produce clever and witty verse that was often at the expense of emotion and which tended to ignore the natural world for its inspiration. The Romantic Era, inaugurated by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the “Lyrical Ballads” of 1798, was a reaction to the Augustans that took inspiration from earlier models such as those of Shakespeare and Spenser. Keats’s Chapman’s Homer can therefore be regarded as a stepping-stone on his development as a fully-fledged Romantic poet.

Discussion

The poem is a sonnet (14 pentameter lines) in the Petrarchan style, as opposed to that favoured by Shakespeare. The difference is mainly the rhyme scheme in that Petrarch (1304-74) wrote his sonnets with an ABBAABBACDECDE pattern, whereas Shakespeare’s sonnets were ABABCDCDEFEFGG. Keats uses a variant rhyme scheme for the final six lines, namely CDCDCD – there is no fixed rule here, with a number of alternatives being possible.

Another feature of the sonnet, particularly the Petrarchan style, is that the first eight lines – the octave – form one aspect of the poem with the final six – the sestet – forming another. It is as though the octave asks a question and the sestet gives an answer. The change of direction is known as the “volta”, meaning “turn”.

The sonnet in question begins with a bit of poetic licence and ends with a historical inaccuracy, but neither matter in the context of Keats’s true intention, which is to point to the revolution that is taking place in his own mind and will lead to him to where he wants to go.

The poetic licence concerns Keats “Much have I travelled”, because Keats had travelled very little at this stage in his life, and he had certainly not seen “many goodly states and kingdoms”. Indeed, he never left Britain until nearly at the end of his life, when he went to Rome in the hope of countering the effects of tuberculosis – a vain hope as it turned out.

However, this was never intended to be a reference to actual travel, despite the apparent travelogue presented here. All Keats’s “travels” had been courtesy of his extensive reading.

There may be another reason why the sonnet devotes the first five lines to this theme, and that is to establish Keats’s claim to equal status alongside the sons of far wealthier parents than his own, sons who had been able to undertake the “Grand Tour” of Europe, particularly to Italy and Greece that were the sources of the myths and legends that formed a major element of the education of the gentry classes at that time. His fellow Romantic poet George Byron, who was the same age as Charles Cowden Clarke, had naturally had this advantage and his “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, which Keats had read, was largely based on his own travels. Keats is making the point that his travels through literature put him on the same plane as people like Byron.

The implication of lines 5 to 8 is that Keats had not read Homer before discovering Chapman’s translation, only relying on what he had “been told” by better-read people. However, we know this was not the case because of him being familiar with Pope’s translation. We must therefore take this as another example of poetic licence - in other words he might as well have been virtually ignorant of Homer given the inadequacy of what he had heard up to that point.

Line 7 is not the original line in the version Charles Clarke read over his boiled egg on that Saturday morning. Keats had originally written “But could I never judge what men could mean”, which relates back to “been told” in line 5. It would appear that Keats was not satisfied with this line and changed it to what we see now when he published the poem in his 1817 collection “Poems”. It could be that the sound repetition of “mean” with “desmense” struck him as inadequate in terms of a rhyme and he needed something better.

The choice of the word “serene” as a noun is interesting, not least because there is a possibility that Keats, somewhat cheekily, actually copied the usage from the translation he despised, namely that of Alexander Pope. The latter had a line that ran “When not a breath disturbs the deep serene”, and, given that Keats was indeed familiar with Pope’s translation, it would be strange if this unusual use of the word had not been at least in the back of his mind when he was writing his sonnet.

The volta, or turn, is introduced by the strident “loud and bold” at the end of line 8. This marks a change from the somewhat archaic language of much of the octave - words such as “fealty”, “deep-brow’d” and “demesne” - to the much more direct language of the sestet, thus representing what Keats saw as Chapman’s down-to-earth voice.

The sestet contains two dramatic metaphors for the revolution that Keats has undergone through his introduction to Chapman. These are the discovery of “a new planet” and the equally dramatic revelation of the first sighting of the Pacific Ocean by a European. Keats would doubtless have learned about both these events during his time at Clarke’s Academy which, unlike the schools that Shelley and Byron attended (Eton and Harrow respectively), taught modern subjects such as astronomy and history.

The new planet would have been Uranus, identified for the first time in 1781 by William Herschel. This would have been something that stuck in the mind of pupils at Clarke’s Academy, because the school had its own telescope and boys were encouraged to view the night skies through it, much as Herschel had done through his much more powerful home-made telescope in the back garden of his home at Bath.

It has often been pointed out that the reference to “stout Cortez” is incorrect, on the assumption that this was the first sighting of the Pacific Ocean by a European. Cortez would have been the second explorer to have had this opportunity, the story of the “peak in Darien” referring to Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513. Maybe the history books that Keats read as a child were not as accurate as they might have been.

One very interesting thing that Keats does at the end of the sonnet is to relax the rhythm of the iambic pentameters that have marched with a solid beat up to this point. The last three lines, from the dash in line 12 onwards, simply do not have the stresses that constitute iambs and cannot be read in the same way as the preceding lines. By breaking the rhythm, Keats pulls the reader up short – what was expected is no longer there, the world has changed and the future is uncertain.

That is the point of the whole poem, which is as much to do with states of mind as with the discovery of a new way of appreciating Homer. In order to progress, in any activity worthy of attention, it is necessary to have an open mind and be prepared to have one’s world-view challenged so that one makes a real “volta” and turns in a fresh direction.

For Keats, this was the point in his life when he made new choices. A week before writing the sonnet he had been introduced to Leigh Hunt, who was highly influential in the London literary world, being a radical thinker who edited “The Examiner”, a journal that was greatly respected by the literary elite of the time. A week later he went to see Hunt again, taking the sonnet with him. Hunt agreed to publish it and this opened many new doors for John Keats, leading to his recognition as one of the major poets of his generation.