How reading a translation made young Keats feel like an astronomer spotting a planet
Keats had long heard of Homer's kingdom but could never breathe its air, until a translation by George Chapman spoke to him loud and clear. His sonnet compares the thrill to an astronomer glimpsing a new planet and to explorers struck dumb on a mountaintop, gazing at an unknown ocean.
The fourteen lines split into two movements. In the first eight, the speaker presents himself as a seasoned traveller through the realms of gold, meaning literature, having toured many kingdoms and western islands whose poets owe loyalty to Apollo. One broad territory, ruled by deep-browed Homer, he knew only by report. He never tasted its clear air until Chapman's version spoke up boldly.
The last six lines deliver two famous comparisons. First the speaker likens himself to an astronomer at the moment an unseen planet drifts into sight. Then he becomes Cortez staring with eagle eyes at the Pacific, while his men exchange wild, speechless glances on a peak in Darien. The final word lands after a dash and a pause, so the silence of discovery is built into the rhythm.
The encounter behind the poem goes back to Keats's school days. At John Clarke's school in Enfield, the headmaster's son Charles Cowden Clarke became his mentor and friend, and among the Renaissance works he shared were Chapman's translations. The sonnet thus records a debt to a teacher as much as to Homer, and it remains one of the Keats poems most often read and analysed.
Keats's own origins were modest and a little uncertain. He believed he had been born at the Swan and Hoop, an inn run by his grandfather John Jennings where his father first worked as an ostler, though no evidence confirms it; the Globe pub now stands on the site near Moorgate station. Even his birthday wobbles. The family seems to have celebrated it on 29 October, while baptism records give 31 October 1795.
Source: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
