Today’s Poem: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

John Keats’s wild surmise

“Upon a Peak in Darien,” illustration from the 1905 Thirty More Famous Stories Retold, by James Baldwin (1841-1925) (Wikimedia Commons)

---

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

by John Keats

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 Darien.

---

In 1611, the English poet, playwright, and classicist George Chapman (1559–1634) published a complete translation of Homer’s Iliad. Thus, for the first time,  did average English readers — at least those not classically educated — hear this voice of antiquity chanting its lines, so familiar to us now, across a chasm of millennia and more. In 1651, the Presbyterian minister-poet Samuel Sheppard (1624–1655) eulogized Chapman’s achievement in verse: 

What none before durst ever venture on 
Unto our wonder is by Chapman done, 
Who by his skill hath made Great Homer’s song 
To vaile its bonnet to our English tongue, 
So that the learned well may question it 
Whether in Greek or English Homer writ? 

And so on. But by far the most famous tribute to Chapman’s achievement — the sole reason many of us in the twenty-first century remember Chapman’s name at all — is the sonnet, written by John Keats (1795–1821) in the small hours of an October morning in 1816, which we offer as Today’s Poem. 

Joseph Severn, Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath, 1845 (Wikimedia Commons)

What’s striking in this Petrarchan sonnet, especially in contrast to Sheppard’s poem, is that instead of a plodding ecomium in heroic couplets, Keats plunges headlong into the trope of reading as exploration, adventure, and discovery. To open Chapman’s Homer is to enter a new world of marvels. Even if it was Balboa, not “stout Cortes,” who first beheld the Pacific Ocean, we can’t help being struck, ourselves, at the end of the poem, by their “wild surmise,” as they fall silent on that “peak in Darien.” This, says Keats without belaboring his point — this is what it’s like. And even if we’ve never opened Chapman ourselves, we know what he means. 

Keats’s manuscript of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” 1816 (Wikimedia Commons)

---