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.