22 pages • 44 minutes read
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
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Symbols & Motifs
Speaking/Silence
The first quatrain concludes with the image of bards, whose oral productions first carried the Homeric corpus before they were finally committed to writing. John Keats extends this forward in his characterization of Chapman, having him “speak out loud and bold” (Line 8), tying him to the traditional apparatus of Homer, while suggesting an advancement of that tradition. Once again, Keats ends his quatrain with an aural sensation, creating a repetition of speaking that concludes the octave. And while the wider context of the poem sees the sestet supporting the statement of the octave, in this sense, the stunned silence that emanates from the sestet is a refutation of the original motif. With the implied quiet of the watery universe, and the implicit “Silent” (Line 14) of Cortez’s reaction, the poem embodies the experience Keats is celebrating, first the speaking of Chapman’s hallowed words, then the rapt silence in which potential and mystery churn.
Extended Sight
In the first quatrain, Keats luxuriates in the lavishness of sight, describing travels in “realms of gold” (Line 1) before claiming to have seen “many goodly states and kingdoms” (Line 2) and rounded “many western islands” (Line 3). Through these varied sights Keats broadens his spatial metaphor. He then continues to do so in Line 5 when he uses visual terms to describe the “wide expanse” of Homer’s realm. Though at this point, Keats’s use of vague terms for the landscape without specific descriptors, is in service to his initial declaration: despite having “seen” (Line 2) such places on his previous literary adventures, it is Chapman’s translation that brings the beauty of Homer’s “pure serene” (Line 7) into sharper focus. To emphasize this, Keats twice more evokes a lengthening of vision: in the astronomer’s telescope that captures a new planet and in Cortez’s unveiling vision of the Pacific Ocean after the suffocating closeness of the Central American jungle.
The Sea
The sea is evoked in the opening quartet as a mode of travel and discovery with Keats’s use of “Round” (Line 3), suggesting the passage of watercraft between the same “western islands” (Line 3) that hosted Odysseus and Achilles, as well as the “bards in fealty to Apollo” (Line 4). In the second quatrain, the sea becomes emblematic of the vastness of Homer’s realm. The “wide expanse” (Line 4) that The Iliad and The Odyssey cover are governed by the sea and underscore the maritime setting of Homer’s works. This symbol is twice echoed in the sestet. Keats alludes to the vastness of the ocean by characterizing the planet’s motion as swimming (Line 10), transferring the vastness of the sea to the sky and the universe. The poem closes upon an evocation of the sea from the first quartet. This time the reader is prepared for its vastness, however, and is struck by the same sublimity as Cortez, sharing in his and Keats’s stunned revelation at an entirely new horizon.
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By John Keats
