Analyze poem: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Directions: Assume that your reader is a new student of British Literature. In an essay of at least 350 and no more than 600 words, analyze ONE of the following poems in terms of structure, theme, and context. Specifically, using only what you have come to understand from your work in the course, describe and explain for your reader how the poem fits in with the development of British literature, society, and culture in the Romantic and/or Victorian eras and how the poem may be understood in the context of the usual style and themes of the poet. Please try to include as many details from the beginning, middle, and end of the poem you have chosen (for Wordsworth's poem, for example, refer to each stanza...if you choose either Keats's or Tennyson's poem, refer to each line or at least each full clause).















On First Looking into Chapman's Homer1

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 ˚reference to the islands in the Odyssey

Which bards in fealty to Apollo˚ hold. ˚Greek god of poetry and music

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne˚; ˚deh-MEEN…domain; realm or kingdom

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˚; ˚range of sight or knowledge

Or like stout Cortez2 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˚. ˚Darien was the colonial name for the isthmus of Panama





1George Chapman (1559-1634)—translated Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey into English. Keats wrote this poem in 1816, the morning after he and a friend spent an entire night reading Chapman’s translations.

2Cortez was a Spanish Conquistador: in Keats’s ecstatic rush to write the poem he mixes up Cortez with Balboa, the Spanish Conquistador who actually “discovered” the Pacific Ocean.