Explore how Keats presents writing and reading poetry in ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear
Once Again’ and ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’?
INTRO:
Keats establishes through his poems ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ and ‘On
First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ to demonstrate the poignant power of writing and reading
poetry as an art form, and its ability to create an epiphany from the acknowledgement of its
greatness to its beholder. ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’, through its blend of
both the Shakespearean and petrarchan sonnet form, encapsulates both Keats’ fascination with
the drama, King Lear, and Shakespeare himself, elevating the story to the status of embodying
true tragic perfection in its genre, and setting it alongside himself to reflect both his struggles
and the Romantic Movement’s contemplation over existentialist questions over human life and
the afterlife. Keats uses the occasion of the rereading of this play to explore his seduction by it
and its influence on himself and his ways of looking at himself and his situation in spite of his
negative capability. However, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, through being
constructed as a petrarchan sonnet, celebrates the works of the Greek poet, Homer, and his
writing of ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’, weaving the voyaging aesthetics from the Odyssey
specifically as a microcosm of the world of literature, epitomizing the enjoyment to be gained
from reading Homer in English translation of George Chapman, and extending it to his
appreciation of other literary icons, like Petrarch.
P1:
● ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ and ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer’ exhibits Keats’ appreciation for the poetic art form and reflects his attempt
through his writing to permeate the reader’s mind with his similar euphoric experience of
reading the stories. ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ illustrates his
indulgence in the story ‘King Lear’, written by Shakespeare, the ‘once again’ in the
poem’s title constructing the belief to the reader that Keats is reading King Lear, not only
to rekindle the feeling of his enjoyment from reading the poem, but as now as an
academic study, a review of the story through his exaltation of it to now reflect his
understanding of it and his application of it to his life experiences.
● From the first few lines, Keats alludes to the great romances of the previous ages as
opposed to William Shakespeare’s great tragedies. While it could be discerned that
Keats is referring to his previous poem, “Endymion”, which is a Poetic Romance, the
underlying meaning of the poem to reflect Keats’ appreciation of poetry in the lines
remains. Keats writes "O golden tongued Romance, with serene lute!/ Fair plumed Syren
Queen of far-away!/ Leave melodizing on this wintry day,/ Shut up thine olden pages and
be mute."
● Through Keats’ homage to King Lear, he personifies poetry as an art form to be a
feminine figure of beauty and the multitude of poems deriving from it, made to be either
internalized or interpreted to be “golden-tongued Romance”; the “Romance” capitalized
being made to sound attractive, ‘golden tongued’ reflecting poetry to be rare and unique
of art and ‘Queen’, a status of power, associating poetry, to Keats as a poet, to be
paramount in literature and the development of the literary world. However, poetry being
linked to romance and being called a ‘Fair plumped Syren’, associates poetry with
deception; with the Siren in Greek mythology being beautiful but dangerous, being
human like beings with alluring voices that lead sailors to their deaths in another piece of
literature that Keats appreciates, being the Odyssey, by Homer. Perhaps, this is Keats’
way of romanticizing the poetic form, making poems, which can be interpreted in
different ways depending on the reader, seem enigmatic.
● With the poem being written in 1818, when Keats was nursing his brother, Tom who was
dying, Keats himself—contrasts Shakespeare’s great tragedy King Lear with chivalric
romances, legends, and fairytales. While such fantastical stories offer the speaker an
escape into a pleasant dreamworld, the dark beauty of Shakespeare’s play strikes him
as more powerful and more meaningful. By capturing the “bitter-sweet” reality of life,
King Lear transforms pain into something profoundly moving and even pleasurable. King
Lear is special, the poem suggests, because it makes beauty out of life’s senseless
sufferings rather than merely offering a vacation from them.
● Before he can sit down to “read King Lear once again,” the poem’s speaker must bid a
firm “Adieu” to “Golden-tongued Romance”—a personification of fantastical medieval
tales full of knights, ladies, and magic.
● Instead, the speaker wants the pleasure, pain, and challenge of Shakespeare’s King
Lear. This is the altogether unromantic story of a selfish old king who falls out of power
and into a terrible madness. After much suffering, he’s forced to face the fact that kings,
like all other human beings, are just frail, fallible little animals at the mercy of an
arbitrarily cruel universe. The argument “betwixt Damnation and impassion’d clay” (that
is, between cruel fate and suffering mortals) the play presents is so grand and so awe-
inspiring that the speaker can only approach it “humbly,” hoping to learn something from
it.
FORM:
● - broadly iambic= measured and elegant, appropriate to the subject
● - rhyming couplet at end= mixing petrarchan and shakespearean styles
FORM:
- blend of petrarchan and shakespearean= not chaining himself to literary convention but freeing
his creativity and creating his own legacy
Immortality through poetry (3):
"thine olden pages"= poetry is immortal and a persistent theme (letter to reynolds: "I feel I
cannot exist without poetry")
"chief poet!"= regal, poetic apostrophe shows idolisation of shakespeare by R poets= K also
desires artistic legacy
"new phoneix wings"= connotations of immortality and deathlessness "wings"= freedom
Mortality and vulnerability (4):
- shutting out idyllic romantic notions he cannot cling to due to ever present spectre of death
- fire, hellish semantic field= intense passion, connotes pain
pain= inspiration (keatsian paradox) (tragedy is cathartic, suffering's virtuous nature, encounter
our pure form)
- "impassion'd clay"= human mortality, we are clay with passions and will return to dust, Nihilism
- wanders through metaphorical forest, comparing himself to lear who lost his mind from grief
‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’
Context/Summary
First appeared in the London newspaper The Examiner, in 1816, and then again a year later in
Keats' first collection, Poems
Keats has wide experience in the reading of poetry and is familiar with Homer's Iliad and
Odyssey, but not until now has he had the special aesthetic enjoyment to be gained from
reading Homer in the translation of George Chapman. For him, the discovery of Homer as
translated by Chapman provides the same kind of overwhelming excitement felt by an
astronomer who has discovered a new planet or by Cortez when he first saw the Pacific from a
summit in Central America.
Style/Form/Structure
Petrarchan sonnet
Octave (the first eight lines) and the sestet (the last six lines)
The rhyme scheme of the octave is almost always the same (ABBAABBA—where the letters
correspond to the end rhyme of each line), while the sestet scheme can vary. In this sonnet, it is
simple alternating rhymes (CDCDCD)
Every sonnet has a turn—a shift in the poem's thinking, also called a volta—and in Petrarchan
sonnets, this turn usually occurs at the end of the octave.
Iambic pentameter- lines of ten syllables with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables
Celebrate a classic work, and its translation, by expressing oneself in a classic form, which has
also been borrowed from an older, foreign writer- Keats is propping up three writers in one:
Chapman, Homer, and Petrarch.
"Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen"
First-person speaker- his experience reading the book.
Metaphor- "realms of gold"- realms of literature and art
Read a lot of books but nothing compares to Chapman
Imagery of an explorer- new world was the place explorers went to seek fortunes, particularly on
the look-out for precious metals.
Verb "travell'd"- a great book, a great movie does have the power to take us to a whole new
place.
Descends in scale from entire realms, to states and then to kingdoms- generally, poets use lists
(often lists of three) to convey a wide range + metaphorically, then, he is telling us that he's read
all kinds of poetry.
"Round many western islands have I been"
If he's talking about islands that have anything to do with Apollo, he's talking about islands on
the Aegean Sea, the islands from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey- imagery of explorers heading off
to the new world (and the West Indies)
Islands where amazing things happened to Odysseus and his crew on their long journey home-
Cyclops, the lotus-eaters, men turned into pigs
"Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold"
"Bard" is a poet, usually one who spoke his poems for entertainment- particularly associated
with the epic tradition- Keats felt called to write epic poetry and adored bards such as Homer,
Shakespeare and Milton
"Fealty" is a medieval term for loyalty, referring specifically to tenants owing fealty to their lords-
in this case, the bards owed loyalty to the god of poetry who governed these poetry-inspiring
isles.
Keats' respect for the Greek exaltation of poetry- once, he and his friend Leigh Hunt fashioned
and wore laurel crowns for an entire evening + young Keats even wrote a poem about the
occasion
"Oft of one wide expanse had I been told"
"Wide expanse"- a metaphor for Homer's sprawling epic poems- Keats obsessed, almost
immediately, with writing a long epic poem (most of his famous sonnets deal with this desire to
write longer poetry)
Only "been told" of Homer's work- by age twenty-one, he would have almost certainly have read
a version of Homer- probably serves as another indication of how highly he values Chapman's
translation (George Chapman, an English dramatist of the Renaissance period.)
Before reading Chapman's Homer, all those other versions seemed tragically secondhand-
more literally, though, Keats probably knew some Latin, but couldn't read Homer in his original
Greek.
"That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne"
Homer "deep-brow'd"- epithet, something commonly used by Homer to identify characters-
because poets would speak their poems aloud to the audiences, they would attach certain
identifying labels to their characters, such as 'gray-eyed Athena' or 'wily Odysseus.'
Epithet is more metaphorical like this one- called a kenning
"Deep-brow'd"- Homer's wisdom, shown by the deep furrows in his forehead
"Demesne"- domain- Homer reigning supreme over the epic tradition
"Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold"
Volte- shift in the poem's logic, moving from one point to the next.
Everything he's read and the amazing realms he's seen- nothing compared to Chapman's
poetry.
First really physical detail- seen realms and kingdoms and talked about Homer and Apollo, but
here we "breathe" air, actually feel something real from the abstract (what Chapman's Homer
did for Keats)
Unusual syntax—ought to read: "Yet I did never breathe..." but instead begins like a question-
draw the reader in and put something at stake
"Serene"- ironic because Homer writes of monsters and battles, not at all "serene"-shows how
focused Keats is on the beauty of poetry- not the content of the story that makes a poem sing,
but the language itself
Verbs "heard" and "speak"- important because epic poets were meant to be heard, words
meant to boom and echo in the ears of the audience.
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies"
Petrarchan sonnet- after the octave, the poem turns at the beginning of the sestet (the last six
lines)- a shift in time
Key word there is "Then"- emphasizes what his life was like before this event and what he is like
after
"Watcher of the skies"- more ancient and, naturally, more poetic, than "astronomer"
Looking at the whole universe- moving beyond realms and kingdoms- epic poem inspires Keats
to more and more ambitious goals
"When a new planet swims into his ken"
To say that the planet "swims" into the astronomer's "ken" (range of sight)- example of extreme
metaphorical language called catachresis, a radical misuse of a word- application of the verb
"swim" to an entire planet.
Something new swimming- found a new planet, totally new world no one has ever seen before
Only a few decades before this poem was written, a new planet had been discovered by a
British astronomer- the first new planet that had been unknown to ancient astronomers (Uranus)
"Ken" for a moment- contrast here between the narrow scope of vision we see in a telescope
and the huge amounts of space we see in that small window- could apply that further to reading
a book- it's just words on a page, yet whole worlds unfold before us
"Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men"
Famed Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés- wasn't Cortés who discovered the Pacific for the
Spanish, it was Vasco Nuñez de Balboa
Poem was written in one night- he had been reading the translation of Homer with his friend the
night before and, by the next morning, the poem was completed- might not have checked
Not about being the first to discover something, but about your personal discovery- the
Romantic impulse
Epithet "stout" for Cortez- "stout" here means bold or daring, effect that Chapman's Homer has
on Keats- feels bolder, more inspired, having seen this new world
The "eagle eyes" are echoed in a poem Keats will write a year later on another piece of art, the
Elgin Marbles in the British Museum- in that poem, though, the ancient works and the wide
world cause Keats to worry that he will never achieve his dream before he dies + he feels like a
"sick eagle" looking at the skies- interesting contrast using the same image
Balboa was selfish- story goes that he and his men had heard that they were close to the
rumored ocean (the Pacific) and had been told by natives that they would be able to glimpse it
from the summit of the next mountain. They trudged up, but Balboa stopped his men short and
went up alone, wanting to be the first to see it. The dash gives us a strong break, contrasting
Balboa (or for Keats, Cortés) on top alone, and "all his men" below
"Look'd at each other with a wild surmise"
Balboa/Cortés is up on the mountain, seeing the Pacific for himself, and having this incredible
moment of rapture while the men sit below and have to imagine it
"Wild surmise"- surmise is to suppose something is true, even without evidence- sitting around
trying to imagine for themselves what this new ocean would be like.
What Keats believed was so great about being a poet- a poet's job (in his mind) was to
scramble up the mountain ahead of everyone and then to report the wonders and beauties he
had seen. That's what Chapman had done for Keats- couldn't "see" the vast "ocean" of Homer's
work, because it was in Greek so he needed a "stout" explorer to help him visualize it and
experience it- poets are mediators of impossible beauty
"Silent, upon a peak in Darien"
Darien is a province of Panama (Keats was really thinking of Balboa- Cortés never travelled in
Panama)
Final line brings us back to the main clause of the sentence- led away from Balboa/Cortés
staring at the Pacific to hear the men chatting with each other down below, but now we are
called back to the peak
Word "Silent" breaks the iambic meter of the poem- instead of a normal da-DUM beat, we get
SI-lence, DUM-da- more forceful, calling us to attention, telling us to shut up
Ending the poem in a moment of quiet reflection- very Romantic