Writing about sonnets Keats said
that he didn’t want to bind the language by dull rhymes, misers as they are of
sound and syllable. But his famous On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer
has a kind of inspired simplicity and directness which lends another charm to
it. This was written in October 1816 and published in the Examiner on 1
December 1816. It so happened that he was in the company of his friend
Charles Cowden Clarke, reading together Chapman's translation of Iliad
and Odyssey. Next day morning when Clarke visited Keats for the
breakfast he was happily surprised to find at the table Chapman’s Homer.
Later Clarke wrote:
A beautiful copy of the folio
edition of Chapman's translation of Homer had been lent me.... and to work we
went, turning to some of the 'famousest' passages, as we had scrappily known
them in Pope's version.... Chapman supplied us with many an after-treat; but it
was in the teeming wonderment of this his first introduction, that, when I came
down to breakfast the next morning, I found upon my table a letter with no
other enclosure than his famous sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer. We had parted, as I have already said, at day-spring, yet he
contrived that I should receive the poem from a distance of, may be, two miles
by ten o'clock.
Here is the sonnet as published:
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 demesne;
Yet did I never breathe
its pure serene
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
The seventh line in the manuscript
reads as follows: “Yet could I never judge what Men could mean” about which
Keats later told Clarke that the line was “bald”. He changed it to the present
version as in the above, “Yet did I never breathe its pure serene”. The
reference to “what Men could mean” was to the earlier translation of Homer’s
work by Alexander Pope. This somewhat disparaging comment on Pope had angered
Lord Byron who “snobbishly” dismissed Keats. But Keats also took historical
liberties for the sake of poetry, I suppose. It was not Cortez but Vasco Núñez
de Balboa who had discovered the
About
Keats Sri Aurobindo writes in The Future Poetry as follows: “Keats is
the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry,—not grandiose,
classical and derived like
Here is the
original draft of On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer in Keats’s own hand:
A Comment on Chapman’s
Homer—Keats and Amal
When Keats
changed the line “Yet could I never judge what Men could mean” to “Yet did I
never breathe its pure serene”, there was the sudden passing of “the
current”—as Abbé Bremond would say. Inspiration not only changed the substance
but also elevated the poetry to another height. The line was not only “bald”
but also was awkward with its two “could”s so close to each other. The rawness
of the first inspiration is obvious in it and only a silent reflection could
bring home what it is gifting to the receiver. With it the rhythm also
undergoes a felicitous metamorphosis. Yes, “poems are not written with ideas—they
are written with words” and one has to be aesthetically friendly with them,
indeed, we becoming a part of their soul itself. In the process the authentic
note gets discovered by a kind of conscious practice of art, art finding its
fulfilment in it. The “serene” which the poet-critic feels in Chapman and that
which hardly did he feel in Pope seems to come from some deeper regions that
are truthful and beautiful and delightful. And what a difference the use of
adjective as noun has made! Although the compulsion of rhyme might have brought
it to us, it definitely appears to have leaped like a spark from some brilliant
anvil made of diamond. Here art and inspiration have met and gone together.
Amal Kiran (KD Sethna) tells about Keats to his students of the poetry class
the following: “Keats brings a power of extreme originality in choice of poetic
words. An acute sense of beauty is ever at work in his compositions: beauty
sensuous, beauty imaginative, beauty intellectual, beauty mystical is the very
soul of him and he is in possession of an expressive instrument alive to the
demands of the inner ear which is the true maker of poetic rhythm… this comes
when one becomes a ‘miser of sound and syllable’, economical of his means, not
in the sense of niggardly sparing, but of making the most of all its
possibilities of sound… His filling ‘every rift with ore’ implies enriching of
every step of poetic expression—enriching not in the sense of glaring
ornamentation but of picking and choosing one’s words with a view of bringing
out the finest suggestion of a thing, the finest shade of an idea, the finest
stir of an experience and not allow anything commonplace, anything already
used, anything easily found: it is not enough that the conception subtle or
great in a broad manner, it must be experienced in the most artistically
original mode. A radiant artistry of rhythmic utterance is the essence of
Keats.”
And yet one starts getting worried when we hear utterances like “mortality
weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep”, or “I must die like a sick Eagle
looking at the sky.” The poignancy of our death-bound life is perfectly
understandable, and poet after poet down the centuries and across lands and
countries has bewailed it, but lamentation about it is not going to solve the
problem. Intensity of emotion is a wonderful quality which a poet must possess,
but if it tends to become impassioned emotionalism then one may have to stand
back to ask if such is the purpose of an artistic creation. Will that not take
away the breath of life itself from the piece of art when its warmth becomes
romanticized feeling and response?
In the present sonnet Keats describes his amazing discovery of Homer through
Chapman and compares it with the discovery of Planet Uranus by Herschel on 13
March 1781, or else with the discovery of the Pacific on 29 September 1513 by
Cortez mistaken for Balboa. The entire sestet of the sonnet is devoted for this
comparison which seems to disconnect itself from the theme with which it had
set off. What the discovery was, that we are not told. After getting acquainted
with Homer via Chapman he could have told us thing or two of the great
Olympians or of the mighty heroes who won or lost battles in the company of
gods and goddesses. Then, to see in Keats something of the kind that Yeats has,
such as
In
all poor foolish things that live a day
Eternal
Beauty wandering on her way,
will be too much of stretching out timeless expectations beyond our time.
Amal tells his students: “Shelley saw in Keats a soul exquisitely struggling
for expression within an entanglement of hyper-sensitive art-conscience, and he
was eager to impart him all the élan and speed through the ether that were his
own speciality.” But what is most important about both Keats and Shelley is
their being “haunted by a mystic hunger”. They were following the path of
aesthetic spirituality with the purity of mind that seems to come from the
extreme of romantic freedom. The paradox is, Romantic Poetry can give us the
gift of Pure Poetry.
But the true mystical “ecstatic and alone” comes from another source of
inspiration, from the depths of calm which holds in them “plenitudes of
consciousness”. One has at once the sense of being liberated from every source
of bondage, artistic, intellectual, aesthetic, every thing. That is true Mukti,
Freedom, Liberation. Amal Kiran has it in his following sonnet:
What
deep dishonour that the soul should have
Its
passion moulded by a moon of change
And
all its massive purpose be a wave
Ruled
by time’s gilded glamours that estrange
Being
from its true goal of motionless
Eternity
ecstatic and alone,
Poised
in calm plenitudes of consciousness—
A
sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown!
Be
still, oceanic heart, withdraw thy sense
From
fickle lure of outward fulgencies.
Clasp
not in vain the myriad earth to appease
The
hunger of thy God-profundities:
Not
there but in self-rapturous suspense
Of
all desire is thy omnipotence!
“Congratulations! It is an exceedingly good sonnet—you have got the sonnet
movement very well,”—wrote back Sri Aurobindo to young Amal in his thirties.
The draft he had sent to the Master had “vastitude” in the seventh line and he
had asked if “plenitude” would be better than “vastitude”. The reply was:
“vastitude is better than plenitude—but plenitudes would perhaps be best. The
singular gives a too abstract and philosophical turn—the plural suggests
something concrete and experienceable.” What attention to details!
Something concrete and experienceable—that’s the hallmark of spiritual poetry.
In it the rhythm and the substance go hand in hand, one elevating the other.
That is also to move in the direction of future poetry.
A brief
note about George Chapman: “1559?–1634, English dramatist, translator, and
poet. He is as famous for his plays as for his poetic translations of Homer’s Iliad
(1612) and Odyssey (1614–15). Chapman was a classical scholar, and his
work shows the influence of the Stoic philosophers, Epictetus and Seneca.”
Source,
for instance: http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/chapmanshomer.html
Chapman’s
translation of Homer’s Odyssey, originally published in folio, 1614–16,
has become so rare as to be inaccessible to the general reader, and
comparatively unknown to the more curious student of old English literature.
RY Deshpande