are referred to in Homer by words that come from the same stem. So Odysseus here is tamed and unmanned by the sea. The sea has done for him. As a hero reduced to the condition of a heifer, his heroic willpower temporarily overcome, he is no better than a corpse, bloated, destroyed, owned, possessed and dominated.
Pope, encased in the language of politesse, fell short when faced with this challenge:
his knees no more
Perform’d their office, or his weight upheld:
His swoln heart heaved; his bloated body swell’d:
From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran;
And lost in lassitude lay all the man.
On a sofa? you might ask.
Others have tried and failed: ‘For the heart within him was crushed by the sea,’ wrote Professor A.T. Murray in 1919; ‘Odysseus bent his knees and sturdy arms, exhausted by his struggle with the sea,’ was E.V. Rieu’s Penguin post-war bestseller prose version in 1946; ‘his very heart was sick with salt water’, wrote the great American scholar-poet Richmond Lattimore in 1967; ‘The sea had beaten down his striving heart,’ his successor Robert Fagles in 1996.
Keats was right. None approaches ‘The sea had soak’d his heart through,’ perhaps because Chapman’s English has absorbed the vengeful nature of the sea Odysseus has just experienced; has understood that his soul is as good as drowned; has not lost the governing physicality of the Homeric world, so that Odysseus’s heart appears as the organ of pain; and is able to summon a visual image of a marinaded corpse, blanched and shrivelled from exposure to the water, as white as tripe. Chapman had understood dedmēto: Odysseus’s sea-soaked heart is a heart with the heart drained out of it.
Clarke and Keats read Chapman together all night, and at six in the morning Keats returned to his Dean Street lodgings – his ‘beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings’ – with Chapman looming in his mind. On the journey home across London he had begun to frame the sonnet which on arrival he wrote down. The manuscript, which he paid a boy to take over to Cowden Clarke that morning, so that it was on his breakfast table by ten o’clock, survives. The big, loopingly written words of that first morning text are not quite the same as what is usually printed.
On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer
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,
Which low deep brow’d Homer ruled as his Demesne:
Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,
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 wond’ring 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 –
It was the first great poem he wrote. And it is a poem about greatness, not about first reading Homer; nor even about first reading Chapman’s Homer; it’s about first looking into Chapman’s Homer and, from one or two fragments and passages, understanding for the first time what Homer meant. It is as if that big 1616 folio were a sort of aquarium into which he and Clarke had peered in amazement, looking up at each other as they found the beauties and rarities swimming in its depths. No other version had given Keats this plunging perspective into the ancient. Politeness had dressed Homer in felicity, when his underlying qualities are more like this: martial, huge, struggling through jungle, dense, disturbing and then providing that moment of revelatory release, of a calm pacific vision emerging on to what had been fields of storm or battle. Men had assured Keats that Homer possessed such a realm, but he had been unable to see it in the translations he knew. Here at last, though, was the moment when, cresting a rise, a new and deeper, ineffably broad landscape had opened in front of him. Homer might be dressed up as a cultural convenience, a classic, but in truth he is not like that. He is otherness itself: impolite, manly, cosmic, wild, enormous.
Keats made a mistake: it was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, not Cortez, who first sighted the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t correct that, but when he came to revise this poem for publication he did change a word or two, most importantly the seventh line. In the first early-October-morning version, after his night of revelation, it had been
Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,
which acts as the core of the poem, the rejection of the instruction and learning he had received, substituting it with the vast scale of the new understanding that Chapman had given him. For publication, he replaced that with
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
which is politer and not entirely concordant with what the rest of the poem aims to mean. Further than that, he had borrowed the verb and the key adjectival noun from Pope’s Iliad:
The troops exulting sat in order round,
And beaming fires illumined all the ground.
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O’er heaven’s pure azure spreads her sacred light,
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene …
Keats, on the verge of his twenty-first birthday, even as this sonnet was announcing his new discovery of Homeric depth and presence, had not shrugged off that eighteenth-century inheritance.
For all that, coursing through the sonnet is a sense of arrival in the world of riches, a sudden shift in Keats’s cosmic geometry, moving beyond the drabness and tawdriness by which he felt besieged. Keats had become everybody in the sonnet’s fourteen lines: the astronomer, himself, Chapman, Homer, Cortez and ‘all his Men’. All coexist in the heightened and expanded moment of revelation. Pope had found fire in Homer; Keats discovered scale. And scale is what then entered his poetry, as a kind of private and tender sublime, the often agonised heroics of the heart, in which, just as in Homer, love and death engage in an inseparable dance.
Homer, or at least the idea of Homer, pools into Keats’s poetry. Hostile Tory reviewers in Blackwood’s Magazine started to call him ‘the cockney Homer’, but in Endymion, the long poem he had been contemplating when he wrote the Chapman sonnet, and which he began the following spring, his experience of that night with Cowden Clarke shapes the core phrases. People remember the poem’s beginnings:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for
