the shipwreck of Ulysses, in the fifth book of the ‘Odysseis’ [Chapman’s transliteration of the Greek word for Odyssey], and I had the reward of one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:
Then forth he came, his both knees falt’ring, both
His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth
His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath
Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.
The sea had soak’d his heart through.
It is the most famous meeting between Homer and an English poet. Keats had read and stared in delight, shocked into a moment of recognition, of what the Greeks called anagnōrisis, when a clogging surface is stripped away and the essence for which you have been hungering is revealed.
At this stage Odysseus has been at sea for twenty days. For nearly two hundred lines he is churned through the pain Poseidon has wished on him.
Just as when, in the autumn, the North Wind drives the thistle tufts over the plain and they cling close to each other, so did the gales drive the raft this way and that across the sea.
The sea is never more vengeful in these poems, never more maniacally driven by violence and rage. The raft is overturned and broken, the giant surf hammers on flesh-shredding rock. It is one of Odysseus’s great tests. His name itself in Greek embeds the word odysato, meaning ‘to be hated’, and that adjective appears twice in this storm. He is the hated man on the hateful sea. This is his moment of suffering, and the sea he sails on is loathing itself.
Throughout the Odyssey he is the man of many parts, inventive, ingenious, with many skills and many gifts, but here is merely polytlas, the man who dares many things, suffers many things and endures many things. Only when a goddess-bird and then Athene herself come to his aid can he finally drag himself to the shore.
Here in a virtually literal translation is what Homer says as Odysseus emerges from the surf:
he then bent both knees
and his strong hands-and-arms; for sea had killed his heart.
Swollen all his flesh, while sea oozed much
up through mouth and nostrils, he then breathless and speechless
lay scarcely-capable, terrible weariness came to him.
The Greek word Chapman translated in The sea had soak’d his heart through – the phrase which Keats loved so much – is dedmēto, which means overpowered or tamed. It comes from a verb, damazo, of immensely ancient lineage, its roots spoken in the steppelands of Eurasia at least six thousand years ago, used to describe the breaking-in of animals and later the bending of metal to your desires and needs. It is essentially the same word as ‘tame’ in English, or domo in Latin, the word for reduction, to kill in a fight, to domesticate and dominate. But in the Iliad it also appears as a word for seduction, or more likely the rape of girls. Young girls, enemies, heifers and wives are referred to in Homer by words that come from the same stem. So Odysseus here is tamed and unmanned by the sea. The sea has done for him. As a hero reduced to the condition of a heifer, his heroic willpower temporarily overcome, he is no better than a corpse, bloated, destroyed, owned, possessed and dominated.
Pope, encased in the language of politesse, fell short when faced with this challenge:
his knees no more
Perform’d their office, or his weight upheld:
His swoln heart heaved; his bloated body swell’d:
From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran;
And lost in lassitude lay all the man.
On a sofa? you might ask.
Others have tried and failed: ‘For the heart within him was crushed by the sea,’ wrote Professor A.T. Murray in 1919; ‘Odysseus bent his knees and sturdy arms, exhausted by his struggle with the sea,’ was E.V. Rieu’s Penguin post-war bestseller prose version in 1946; ‘his very heart was sick with salt water’, wrote the great American scholar-poet Richmond Lattimore in 1967; ‘The sea had beaten down his striving heart,’ his successor Robert Fagles in 1996.
Keats was right. None approaches ‘The sea had soak’d his heart through,’ perhaps because Chapman’s English has absorbed the vengeful nature of the sea Odysseus has just experienced; has understood that his soul is as good as drowned; has not lost the governing physicality of the Homeric world, so that Odysseus’s heart appears as the organ of pain; and is able to summon a visual image of a marinaded corpse, blanched and shrivelled from exposure to the water, as white as tripe. Chapman had understood dedmēto: Odysseus’s sea-soaked heart is a heart with the heart drained out of it.
Clarke and Keats read Chapman together all night, and at six in the morning Keats returned to his Dean Street lodgings – his ‘beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings’ – with Chapman looming in his mind. On the journey home across London he had begun to frame the sonnet which on arrival he wrote down. The manuscript, which he paid a boy to take over to Cowden Clarke that morning, so that it was on his breakfast table by ten o’clock, survives. The big, loopingly written words of that first morning text are not quite the same as what is usually printed.
On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer
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,
Which low deep brow’d Homer ruled as his Demesne:
Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,
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 wond’ring 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 –
It was the first great poem he wrote. And it is a poem about greatness, not about first reading Homer; nor even about first reading Chapman’s Homer; it’s about first looking into Chapman’s Homer and, from one or two fragments and passages, understanding for the first time what Homer meant. It is as if that big 1616 folio were a sort of aquarium into which he and Clarke had peered in amazement, looking up at each other as they found the beauties and rarities swimming in its depths. No other version had given Keats this plunging perspective into the ancient. Politeness had dressed Homer in felicity, when his underlying qualities are more like this: martial, huge, struggling through jungle, dense, disturbing and then providing that moment of revelatory release, of a calm pacific vision emerging on to what had been fields of storm or battle. Men had assured Keats that Homer possessed such a realm, but he had been unable to see it in the translations he knew. Here at last, though, was the moment when, cresting a rise, a new and deeper, ineffably broad landscape had opened in front of him. Homer might be dressed up as a cultural convenience, a classic, but in truth he is not like that. He is otherness itself: impolite, manly, cosmic, wild, enormous.
Keats made a mistake: it was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, not Cortez, who first sighted the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t correct that, but when he came to revise this poem for publication he did change a word or two, most importantly the seventh line. In the first early-October-morning version, after his