I'm unconvinced that "Cortez" is an error, possibly because I assume Keats was better educated than I at my rural schoolhouse, which had me quite clear on Balboa's feats by at least 7th grade. I think Cortez is intentional precisely because he was NOT the first to see the Pacific. Just as "some watcher of the skies" is not likely the discoverer of the new planet, merely one who had heard that one was out there, but not seen with the naked eye or through casual observation. And then by watching with great care, the planet swims into HIS ken. And this is all because Keats was hardly the first to read Chapman. He'd heard that his translation was good. And when he aimed his telescope, or when he climbed that peak way out west in his demesne, he saw at last what his betters and forbears had been carrying on about: the solar system is different than we thought; the planet upon which we stand is larger than we thought; the world is lovelier than dull sublunary lovers love, to borrow a bit of Donne. Why one earth would Keats claim to be the first to have read Chapman? He wouldn't. So why would he use a metaphor of a true first discoverer? QED.
It's interesting to me that you easily allow for Keats to have made a very elementary error, misremembering Cortez's contributions entirely, but yet you are confident that Keats *would* have known precisely where Cortez might have been when he saw the Pacific after having heard of it from other sources. Europeans traveling to America sometimes rent a car after visiting Disney Orlando, thinking they might "swing by" New York or The Alamo before a return flight back out of Orlando. I find it far easier to imagine that Keats may have not known the specific destinations of Cortez's travel, and either conflated Balboa's literal point of view with Cortez's, or his poor sense of distance in the Americas caused him to imagine Cortez might have "popped down" to Darius to enjoy the view he'd heard of.
Oh, that's an interesting insight. I too have reflexively thought that that couldn't have been simply an error in ignorance, because Keats wasn't ignorant (and yeah, I spent the second half of elementary school having the conquistadors drilled into my head. There are a lot of things I'd get wrong, but who discovered what roughly when is not one of those things). If we say, "It was Balboa, not Cortez, who discovered the Pacific," presumably we're not telling John Keats something he didn't already know.
I've mostly thought about it as a choice made by the demands of meter --- "Balboa" just doesn't fit. It would sound stupid. Even if you cut "stout," you'd still have to say "BalboAH," and that would ruin everything. And in the fight between form and fact, form is always going to win (at least in a poem). Things have to work on a literal level, but they do not have to be fideistically factual, as long as they make the right sound. In the context of the poem, because it does make the right sound and lands on some literal reality, I'm completely willing to grant Keats his Cortez and not make a big deal about it in my own mind.
But yes, your reading here is really compelling and illuminating --- it opens out the whole sense of the poem. I wish I'd thought of it, and I thank you for thinking of it.
I noticed the "listen to the poem" link at the top of the post this morning. Is that new? It was nice to be able to read, read the commentary, and then come back to hear the poem read. Thanks for that.
One other comment: the word "demesne" is an antiquated version of the modern word "domain". Keats manifestly thinks it's pronounced "de-meen" (to rhyme with serene) because he'd only ever seen it written down, not spoken. In fact it is pronounced <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/demesne">doh-mine</a> which, if we want to be sticklers, messes up Keats's rhyme scheme.
Ah --- I hadn't thought about that. I think I've been interiorly pronouncing it basically as "domain," because if there's one thing I have in common with Keats, it's having encountered that word (as far as I can recall) only in print.
I wonder if I knew the meaning 50 years ago when I studied it for A level. Or did we just declaim it and nobody understood it? Maybe everyone was just too embarrassed to ask.
I wonder whether "Darien" works so well here because of the word "Dar[e]" it conceals. "Determined, dared, and done," the last line of Christopher Smart's "Song of David" (1763), comes to my mind when I read Keats' poem. I doubt that it was in Keats' mind.
I don't remember when I first came across "Chapman's Homer," but it has remained fresh, helped rather than hindered by the comic use that P.G. Wodehouse often made of it in his Bertie and Jeeves stories.
It is a really beautiful word, just in its sounds, with that spill of vowels, so I can imagine how satisfying it might have felt as the last word in the poem. But yes, having "dare" knit up in the sound of it also seems satisfying. I love that whole last line, with its feeling of suspense and suspension --- like a door clicking open instead of shut.
I taught the First Communion classes in our parish for a number of years, and once had a boy named Darien in one of those classes --- it's a cool word to have for a name, and I'll always remember him because of it.
I realized that I had no idea what a “peak in Darien” is. I googled it and it seems to be something to do with Mexico. I wonder if the ‘Darien gap’ comes into it.
I think that must be right --- the land-bridge region between North and South America (now on the Colombia-Panama border, I think?), which Balboa did explore and which is where he saw the Pacific, in 1513. It's apparently massively wild and dangerous.
Of course I always think about the Swallows and Amazons and their "Darien" --- it's a mark of how famous this poem is that at least fictional children would have appropriated it as their name for their peak (and presumably real children would have known the reference?).
I didn't encounter Swallows and Amazons until I was a parent myself, though I'd have loved it as a child. So I must have encountered the Keats poem first. I'm sure it was in Norton's Anthology and probably on my English comps poetry list as well. Still, when I read it today I can't help but see Roger tacking up the lawn at the beginning of S&A and hear Titty's voice declaiming. And "Darien" to my ear and imagination belongs more to the Walker children and their English Lake District vacations than to any place in Central America (I mean it just doesn't *sound* like it belongs there) or to "stout Cortez". It's funny how imagination works like that.
But I read the entire series to my children and they named the big rock in our local state park Kangchenjunga. Now we are listening to the audiobooks, delightfully narrated by Alison Larkin, in the car. My husband is loving the books too!
I didn't read these as a child, either, though I wish I had. They are exactly the kind of book I loved. But then, I loved them as a parent reading aloud, and that was a gift.
And I know I first read the poem in high school, at the latest --- I can't really remember not knowing it, but I'm pretty sure I didn't encounter it in younger childhood (vivid memories of poems I did encounter). But everything takes on more life the more you revisit it, even in allusions.
I too came to Keats via 'Swallows and Amazons'. Ransome's upper-middle class characters learned screeds of classic poetry by heart as part of normal education. A plot point in 'Picts and the Martyrs' hinges on memorising 'The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" so it wasn't all of Keats quality. Lewis Caroll too could expect his young readers to know and dislike the morally improving verses like 'How doth the little busy bee' and Father William and Wordsworth's dreadful Leech Gatherer (Resolution and Independence)
I loved that their (fictional) imaginations were so well furnished --- with the great and the not-so-great alike. I don't think we ever read Picts and Martyrs, sadly.
I re-read Ransome when I'm lying ill in bed with flu or covid. Okay, it's old fashioned, with gender roles only somewhat subverted. But the storytelling is exemplary in terms of character, situation and plot.
They're worth reading even as an adult. I first read them just for myself when my children were babies. Then I read them all aloud to my children when they were old enough to enjoy them. And now we are listening to the audiobooks and my husband is delighting in hearing the stories with us as well.
I read a number of that series to my children. They were wonderful, but the first one, where the children get permission to live on an island in the lake and be explorers and map the region, is pure magic. They do name a peak "Darien" and refer to it throughout the book, as in "Let's meet in Darien."
I'm unconvinced that "Cortez" is an error, possibly because I assume Keats was better educated than I at my rural schoolhouse, which had me quite clear on Balboa's feats by at least 7th grade. I think Cortez is intentional precisely because he was NOT the first to see the Pacific. Just as "some watcher of the skies" is not likely the discoverer of the new planet, merely one who had heard that one was out there, but not seen with the naked eye or through casual observation. And then by watching with great care, the planet swims into HIS ken. And this is all because Keats was hardly the first to read Chapman. He'd heard that his translation was good. And when he aimed his telescope, or when he climbed that peak way out west in his demesne, he saw at last what his betters and forbears had been carrying on about: the solar system is different than we thought; the planet upon which we stand is larger than we thought; the world is lovelier than dull sublunary lovers love, to borrow a bit of Donne. Why one earth would Keats claim to be the first to have read Chapman? He wouldn't. So why would he use a metaphor of a true first discoverer? QED.
A nice thought, weakened only by the reference to Darien, since Cortez was never there. His first experience of the Pacific was mostly Baja.
It's interesting to me that you easily allow for Keats to have made a very elementary error, misremembering Cortez's contributions entirely, but yet you are confident that Keats *would* have known precisely where Cortez might have been when he saw the Pacific after having heard of it from other sources. Europeans traveling to America sometimes rent a car after visiting Disney Orlando, thinking they might "swing by" New York or The Alamo before a return flight back out of Orlando. I find it far easier to imagine that Keats may have not known the specific destinations of Cortez's travel, and either conflated Balboa's literal point of view with Cortez's, or his poor sense of distance in the Americas caused him to imagine Cortez might have "popped down" to Darius to enjoy the view he'd heard of.
Oh, that's an interesting insight. I too have reflexively thought that that couldn't have been simply an error in ignorance, because Keats wasn't ignorant (and yeah, I spent the second half of elementary school having the conquistadors drilled into my head. There are a lot of things I'd get wrong, but who discovered what roughly when is not one of those things). If we say, "It was Balboa, not Cortez, who discovered the Pacific," presumably we're not telling John Keats something he didn't already know.
I've mostly thought about it as a choice made by the demands of meter --- "Balboa" just doesn't fit. It would sound stupid. Even if you cut "stout," you'd still have to say "BalboAH," and that would ruin everything. And in the fight between form and fact, form is always going to win (at least in a poem). Things have to work on a literal level, but they do not have to be fideistically factual, as long as they make the right sound. In the context of the poem, because it does make the right sound and lands on some literal reality, I'm completely willing to grant Keats his Cortez and not make a big deal about it in my own mind.
But yes, your reading here is really compelling and illuminating --- it opens out the whole sense of the poem. I wish I'd thought of it, and I thank you for thinking of it.
Wonderful!
A small nugget on Homer, no other writer's works have survived through TWO dark ages.
I noticed the "listen to the poem" link at the top of the post this morning. Is that new? It was nice to be able to read, read the commentary, and then come back to hear the poem read. Thanks for that.
Yes, a new feature for paid subscribers. Glad you enjoyed it!
One other comment: the word "demesne" is an antiquated version of the modern word "domain". Keats manifestly thinks it's pronounced "de-meen" (to rhyme with serene) because he'd only ever seen it written down, not spoken. In fact it is pronounced <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/demesne">doh-mine</a> which, if we want to be sticklers, messes up Keats's rhyme scheme.
Ah --- I hadn't thought about that. I think I've been interiorly pronouncing it basically as "domain," because if there's one thing I have in common with Keats, it's having encountered that word (as far as I can recall) only in print.
Such a great sonnet. I have a theory why Keats mistook "stout Cortez" for Balboa (schoolboy error) here: https://medium.com/adams-notebook/the-sea-had-soaked-his-heart-through-dd0053592166
This is great, Adam.
I wonder if I knew the meaning 50 years ago when I studied it for A level. Or did we just declaim it and nobody understood it? Maybe everyone was just too embarrassed to ask.
I wonder whether "Darien" works so well here because of the word "Dar[e]" it conceals. "Determined, dared, and done," the last line of Christopher Smart's "Song of David" (1763), comes to my mind when I read Keats' poem. I doubt that it was in Keats' mind.
I don't remember when I first came across "Chapman's Homer," but it has remained fresh, helped rather than hindered by the comic use that P.G. Wodehouse often made of it in his Bertie and Jeeves stories.
It is a really beautiful word, just in its sounds, with that spill of vowels, so I can imagine how satisfying it might have felt as the last word in the poem. But yes, having "dare" knit up in the sound of it also seems satisfying. I love that whole last line, with its feeling of suspense and suspension --- like a door clicking open instead of shut.
I taught the First Communion classes in our parish for a number of years, and once had a boy named Darien in one of those classes --- it's a cool word to have for a name, and I'll always remember him because of it.
I realized that I had no idea what a “peak in Darien” is. I googled it and it seems to be something to do with Mexico. I wonder if the ‘Darien gap’ comes into it.
I think that must be right --- the land-bridge region between North and South America (now on the Colombia-Panama border, I think?), which Balboa did explore and which is where he saw the Pacific, in 1513. It's apparently massively wild and dangerous.
Of course I always think about the Swallows and Amazons and their "Darien" --- it's a mark of how famous this poem is that at least fictional children would have appropriated it as their name for their peak (and presumably real children would have known the reference?).
I didn't encounter Swallows and Amazons until I was a parent myself, though I'd have loved it as a child. So I must have encountered the Keats poem first. I'm sure it was in Norton's Anthology and probably on my English comps poetry list as well. Still, when I read it today I can't help but see Roger tacking up the lawn at the beginning of S&A and hear Titty's voice declaiming. And "Darien" to my ear and imagination belongs more to the Walker children and their English Lake District vacations than to any place in Central America (I mean it just doesn't *sound* like it belongs there) or to "stout Cortez". It's funny how imagination works like that.
But I read the entire series to my children and they named the big rock in our local state park Kangchenjunga. Now we are listening to the audiobooks, delightfully narrated by Alison Larkin, in the car. My husband is loving the books too!
I didn't read these as a child, either, though I wish I had. They are exactly the kind of book I loved. But then, I loved them as a parent reading aloud, and that was a gift.
And I know I first read the poem in high school, at the latest --- I can't really remember not knowing it, but I'm pretty sure I didn't encounter it in younger childhood (vivid memories of poems I did encounter). But everything takes on more life the more you revisit it, even in allusions.
I too came to Keats via 'Swallows and Amazons'. Ransome's upper-middle class characters learned screeds of classic poetry by heart as part of normal education. A plot point in 'Picts and the Martyrs' hinges on memorising 'The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" so it wasn't all of Keats quality. Lewis Caroll too could expect his young readers to know and dislike the morally improving verses like 'How doth the little busy bee' and Father William and Wordsworth's dreadful Leech Gatherer (Resolution and Independence)
I loved that their (fictional) imaginations were so well furnished --- with the great and the not-so-great alike. I don't think we ever read Picts and Martyrs, sadly.
Years ago I wrote an essay on some of the ones we did read: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/05/not-duffers-wont-drown
Well there's an easy remedy for not having read Picts and Martyrs... Nice piece about the Ransome books.
Thank you. And yes, it had occurred to me that I could perfectly well pick up that book and read it to myself!
I re-read Ransome when I'm lying ill in bed with flu or covid. Okay, it's old fashioned, with gender roles only somewhat subverted. But the storytelling is exemplary in terms of character, situation and plot.
I have not read that
It was in our school library but I never read it.
They're worth reading even as an adult. I first read them just for myself when my children were babies. Then I read them all aloud to my children when they were old enough to enjoy them. And now we are listening to the audiobooks and my husband is delighting in hearing the stories with us as well.
I read a number of that series to my children. They were wonderful, but the first one, where the children get permission to live on an island in the lake and be explorers and map the region, is pure magic. They do name a peak "Darien" and refer to it throughout the book, as in "Let's meet in Darien."