Even Keats Nods

1.

One of the most famous poems in the English language is “On  First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer," composed by John Keats:

 

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 desmesne;

  Yet did I never breathe its pure sere

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.

 

Keats wrote this poem in October 1816, shortly before his twenty-first birthday. It is arguably his greatest sonnet and launched his career as a major poet, a career cut short by his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. Charles Cowden Clarke, a friend from Enfield school where they both had studied, presented Keats with Chapman’s version of Homer’s Iliad. Keats was so struck by this version that he periodically shouted from pure delight as it was read to him. The next morning, by ten o’clock, the sonnet was discovered by Clarke as he sat down to breakfast. How quickly the poem had been written only adds to our amazement at the its near-perfection.

The poem also contains one of the most famous errors in literature. It was Balboa who was the first European to “stare at the Pacific,” not Cortez.

Keats had recently read William Robertson’s History of America which included a detailed description of Balboa's encounter with the Pacific. He had ordered his men to wait for him just before the "peak in Darien", (modern-day Panama), was reached, so that he would be the first to see the Pacific. He knelt before the majestic view and gave thanks to God. This was obviously the event Keats was referring to, not to Cortez, who was busy plundering Mexico around that time.

The mistake is understandable. Keats wrote the poem quickly and referred to his memory. I am not sure he had Robertson's book with him at the time, anyway. And, of course, there was no Google in Keats's day.  It's a minor error that doesn't detract at all from the majesty of the poem.

The subject of the poem is the transcendent, overwhelming, aesthetic awe that swept over Keats after reading Chapman's Homer. This "new planet" which swam "into his ken" shook Keats to his core. It was a transcendent experience because Keats, subsumed into the new encounter, for the time being forgot he was Keats. His ego was transcended, the very definition of ecstasy. The poem has become an emblem of aesthetic delight.

Keats depicts this ecstatic experience masterfully. I love his use of "wild surmise;" "wild" because the experience of the tidal wave of ecstasy that was about to break over them was so thoroughly unexpected, "surmise" indicating that their inner beings had a premonition of what was coming. The majesty of a sunset, for instance, is a product of how the inner (the brain) interprets the outer (the sunset)--The sunset by itself is not majestic at all.; the brain by itself is just a blob of protoplasm. Cortez's men, in other words, anticipated the wave that was about to break over them and had a good idea of what it portended.

The last line is for me the best of all.  The iambic pentameter is broken with the trochee "Silent"--which is followed by a caesura, supplied by the comma.  This is a rhythmic description of the awe Keats felt. What's left to see after this? The rest of the line must be read faster and quieter--what is left is breathless majesty. Keats indicates this by a rhythmic change. Although the line is technically written in iambic pentameter, "upon a" is actually an anapest that is stopped by the stress of the word "peak".  The wonderful word "Darien" consists of a stress followed by two unstressed syllables. 

The last line is thus a striking example of Hopkins's "sprung rhythm." The stresses are on the first syllable of silent, on the word, 'peak' and the first syllable of Darien. This change from the iambic pentameter of the other lines is striking, and expresses the breathlessness that can be the result of extreme ecstasy, especially when first encountered. The three actual stresses, compared to the implied five, forces us to read the line faster, which fosters the experience of awe.

2. Chapman

Keats referred to "on first looking into Chapman's Homer"--as a well-read young man, he was undoubtedly familiar with  versions of Homer and Vergil, popular in his day. Pope's translation of The Iliad into heroic couplets was well-known in Keats's time, while Dryden' s translation of The Aeneid was the standard version of that epic. George Chapman (1559-1634) wrote his version of The Iliad a century earlier than Pope's. Pope was a great poet; writing at court during the Augustan age, (Pope lived from 1688 to 1744); his verse was highly polished, while Chapman's were, more or less, diamonds in the rough. Pope was often cynical, e.g. "Maggots half-formed in rhyme exactly meet,/And learn to crawl upon poetic feet," a quote from his satirical poem, The Dunciad.  Chapman's rougher lines tended toward immensities; they evinced a much broader emotional range.  Here is an example, the ending of "Hymnus in Noctem," from "The Shadows of Night":

So in the chaos of our first descent,

(All dayes of honor, and of vertue spent)

We barely make retrait, and are no lesse

Than huge impolisht heapes of filthiness.

Mens faces flitter, and their hearts are blacke

But thou (great Mistresse of heavens gloomie racke)

Are blacke in face, and glitterest in thy heart,

There is thy glorie, riches, force, and Art.

Pope, writing in The Age of Enlightenment, viewed night more or less as a symbol for ignorance; he was the poet of day. These powerful lines of Chapman strike us as more modern; The Age of Enlightenment, after all, failed to deliver. Chapman's night, symbolizing perhaps the transcendence of and freedom from the ego, though very black, is, however, not without a star, some form of transcendent insight. (That star, however, though always present, is unseen during the light of day.)

Elizabethan profundity was much more akin to the burgeoning Romantic movement to which Keats belonged. When lines from Chapman's Homer were read aloud to him, he broke out with shouts of joy at certain passages. Too bad we don't know which lines they were!

3. Dickinson Nods As Well?

We return to the false reference to Cortez. Erica McAlpine recently published a book entitled "The Poet's Mistake."  She correctly asserts that poets sometimes make mistakes, albeit perhaps less frequently than the rest of us. She cites Keats's error, along with ridiculous attempts by some critics to justify it. She mentions other 'howlers' as well. Among poems containing mistakes, she includes the following lines by Emily Dickinson, which were written as part of a letter of consolation to Mary Higginson in 1867:

The Flake the Wind exasperate

More eloquently lie

Than if escorted to it's Down

By Act of Chivalry.

This is certainly not Dickinson at her best. The meaning of the poem, as I see it, is that "Nature knows best" and is more eloquent (better) than what we humans can do, even with the best intentions.

McAlpine takes Dickinson to task for the apparent solecism: shouldn't "Wind" take the third person singular, that is, "exasperates"--Similarly, shouldn't "lie" in the next line be "lies?" 

I'm not sure. I think the grammatically correct addition of the letter "s" in both cases might have sounded too prosy to Dickinson's ear. Dickinson, like Hopkins, often used grammatical liberties to help create her inimical style. She might have made an error with "it's", but I doubt  that she missed the obvious failure to match a singular subject with a singular form of the verb.  The plural form of the verbs provide, for me at least, a subjunctive, conditional mood. If I were to translate the first two lines into prose, I would suggest, "(Let) the Wind exasperate the Flake, (And it will) more eloquently lie". The grammar is contorted, granted; we must not forget, however, the root meaning of the German word for the writing of poetry, dichten, is 'to condense', or to 'make thick'. Poetry is not prose!

Perhaps McAlpine would include me among those critics who justify errors of poets to the point of absurdity. Perhaps she is right; in this case, however, I think not.

Keats's error deserves a footnote; it is a curiosity that does not diminish the majesty of the poem. It remains one of the greatest short poems written in English.

How did we get into this mess? How are we going to get out of it?

1.

 It's almost a month since that misguided, frightening mob stormed the Capitol. As I write this, it's also been several weeks since Trump left office. My house is still standing. Our divided house, pace Lincoln, is still standing as well, although desperately in need of repair. 

I am writing this essay to convey a much-needed sense of relief, even optimism, for I believe the glass of our present situation is over half-full, be it ever so slightly. This coming from a person like me is saying something, for I was very worried for a while that the glass was about to fall and shatter. 

Democracy has survived! The attempted coup failed. It failed for  good reasons: the checks and balances that the Founding Fathers wisely put into the Constitution did check and balance the excesses of a sick man, who was (and is) as authoritative and as anti-democratic as the thugs he admires: Putin, Duterte, and Kim Jung Un, to name a few.

Even a padded Supreme Court didn't allow itself to be used as a footstool from which that 'very stable genius' expected, with the help of others, to proclaim victory, and to void the uncomfortable truth of having lost the election. If this were a country (like Belarus, for instance,) in which democracy is as popular as a can of beans would be in a butcher shop patronized by cannibals, Trump would still be president--I have little doubt about that.

Having won the War of Independence, the Founding Fathers, who wanted to safeguard America's future from despots, wrote and ratified a splendid Constitution; the separation of powers and the First Amendment are still very much in effect. Two Hundred years have given Uncle Sam enough time for these bulwarks of democracy to become second nature.  Lucky for us, and unlucky for those countries that lacked them, such as Weimar Germany.

2.

I proudly assert that I smelled a rat even when there were no droppings on the pantry floor.  I count myself among those who 'knew Trump's number,' a zero that would never add up even to a positive fraction; Trump and his party would reach that unifying integer, one, as quickly as a mule in Boston would arrive at the North Pole by heading south from Faneuil  Hall.

Trump is a racist, a narcissist; a mean, incompetent, lazy man who had no business being president. How could one think otherwise of a person who was the head of the 'birther movement', which claimed that Barack Hussein Obama was as American as Idi Amin? etc. Unfortunately, many did, and apparently still do.

From the day after Trump's  election in 2016 until now, I have written some thirty pieces about this nasty saboteur who has inflicted great damage on my country and on the world. These documents are all on my blog and have reached thousands of readers all over the world. Unfortunately, the prediction of the first essay, Small Hands Blues, namely, that Trump was too incompetent, too crooked and too scandal-prone to complete a four-year term, has, alas! been proven wrong.

Among the metaphors I used to describe the Trump presidency was that of 'the negative pyramid.' I asserted that if someone as ill and incompetent as Trump suddenly found himself at the apex of a pyramid, which his vanity had constructed solely out of imaginary, diaphanous bricks, gravity would know what to do with him; he would have met the same fate as a madman who jumped off a skyscraper imagining that he was  able to soar like an eagle, but who fell like Icarus, having become as important as a dead pigeon on a busy sidewalk. He did not fall on his face because he was supported by the upper third of the pyramid made up of muddy bricks, the Republican members of the House who even now support him,  Trump's pathology had brought him to the top; greedy Republicans, who love their perks and fear primaries more than they fear God, are largely responsible for keeping him at the summit of power. More problematic still is the lower two thirds,  the base of the pyramid, his base.

It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss why so many, including good people, willingly got in line behind a very needy, obese, aging piper who has lead us all into a cave of despond from which it will take a long time to extricate ourselves. Broadly speaking, however, I would like to mention three reasons why his base is so, well, base. First of all is the financial support he received from the very wealthy. The rich, who have become even filthier rich during the Trump administration, want to maintain their position as the hidden puppeteers running the whole show. Their primary concern is lowering taxes, despite the great needs of everyone else. Whether America burns or not is a matter of indifference to them. Second, Trump's support comes in large degree from undereducated whites from areas devastated by globalization. The good-paying jobs of their fathers have gone. When people lose meaning in their lives, they tend to become angry. Angry voters tend to become irrational. Angry and irrational people tend to find scapegoats--in this case, Blacks, immigrants and liberals, to name a few--groups of people who have absolutely nothing to do with their plight. The third aspect is relatively new--the rise of social media. Someone said that about 30% of voters in America are ignorant and tend to vote against their own interests. This 30% has swelled astonishingly, by at least 50% in the last election. The rise of social media is at least partially responsible for a decline in critical thinking. Many like to hear their own ideas, however irrational, enforced. The internet is the ideal platform for fanatics to share the flames of their passion until they reach a level of conflagration. Could anyone imagine the absurdities of QAnon having arisen in the age of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Morrow? (I'm old, I admit it.) How can the harm wrought by these three factors be mitigated?

3.

At the outset of this essay I asserted that there is reason for some optimism. The coup, after all, failed. We can be only slightly optimistic, however; the country remains deeply divided. Although Biden received about eight million more votes, a full 48% of the American electorate cast their ballot for an incompetent, selfish man. Yes, the  Democrats received more votes than in any other election, but the Republicans garnered the second most votes in any election. If it weren't for Trump's horrible bungling of the Covid epidemic, Narcissus would probably still be in the White House.

How will we get out of this mess? It won't be easy. I must admit that I'm no expert here, but I have come up with three factors to counter the three factors mentioned in the last section, that were pivotal in causing the current political decline. First, we must increase taxes on the rich. A simple solution would be to remove the salary limit for Social Security taxes. Second, there needs to be a considerable increase in funds for education. The amount of education one has and one's ability  to think critically are, without a doubt, directly proportional to each other. Third, we need a vigorous New Deal-like program to put people back to work. American infrastructure is in bad need of repair. Not only are bridges between people, but steel and asphalt bridges are in danger of collapse as well. The transition to green jobs, and the many positions this will create need to be vigorously supported.

There will always be a section of the country that is irrational and fond of conspiracy theories. However, if the undereducated become more educated; if most people are employed doing work they can be proud of, irrational behavior would be greatly reduced. Which also means that Republicans wouldn't have to take extreme positions, since they no longer would fear bein primaried if they did the right thing.

Yes, the glass is half full; but it is positioned at the edge of the resolute desk. A few more false moves and the glass will fall and shatter. These are still dangerous times! It is up to all of us to fight for democracy; it is true that we get the country we deserve. I hope that I will be more optimistic in the (near?) future. Let us take care of each other better, beginning now. Stay active, stay informed, and stay tuned.