Keats Quick Critic

This is so not one of my better papers, but hey. :)

John Keats’s poem On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer begins its journey with the words of a traveler, world-wise and weary in the way of literature and art. “Much have I travell’d,” it waxes, “in the realms of gold” (1). Yet, this traveler is still full of wonder, amazed at the fragile beauty of the words of a Greek poet translated to English. With words and structure, with images of travel and wonder, Keats skillfully recreates and re-imagines the wonder of literary discovery.

In homage to the glorious genius of bygone era, Keats structures this poem of literary discovery and wonder in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet. In keeping with this form, the poem has two parts: a octave and a sestet. The octave begins the poem with a story of sorts, a voyage through the “realms of gold” (1), the “western islands” (3), and ends it with a transition. The structured, explanatory octave moves seamlessly to the sestet with an awestruck declaration, of “Till I heard Chapman speak loud and bold” (8). With these words, the poem transitions from a voyage of literary discovery to the musings of a contemporary scholar, a seasoned lover of literature and form struck by the wonder, the emotional implications of discovery. In contrast to the structured, orderly octave, the sestet is much more exploratory, taking the scholarly journey of the octave and making it emotional, almost spiritual in its revelation of wholeness and wonder. It is thus in the sestet that the classical form is (if only very slightly) deviated from. Some lines in this part of the poem contain an extra syllable, adding an extra, unidentified tone to the poem’s tightly-bound whole. As a whole, Keats’s structure both pays homage to the classical form and tweaks it just slightly, symbolizing the discovery of something that simultaneously very new and very old.

Also playing with the contrasting, yet intertwining present and past in the poem are the words themselves. The letter ‘l’ litters the poems opening lines, popping up in ‘travell’d’, ‘realms’, goodly’ like the masts of sailing ships. These word-ships sail in the ‘wide expanses’, ‘the pure serene’ of Keats’s broad and almost limitless imagination. It is with devices such as these, words as sailing ships, the mind as but a sea is carried on later in the poem with images of a previously undiscovered planet (the coveted English translations of Homer) “[swimming] into his ken” (10), that Keats swims the oceans of time, connecting the grand beauty of the past, of Homer and his translators, with the admirers, the watchers of the skies, that preserve their words for the future whilst simultaneously, always looking back with wonder.
All in all, Keats’s Homer uses its form as a homage, as an ode. A classical form imitates the sonnets of times gone, while tweaks, “mistakes” mark the pieces subtle, unsaid tensions between the greatness of the past and the wonder of the present. The words, the pieces of the work build together, painting a picture, of past, of present joined together by the beautiful, deep expanses of the mind.