132–3. Published 1817.

1 compare ‘To one who has been long in city pent’ 1. Leigh Hunt, reviewing 1817 in the Examiner, commented, ‘by no contrivance of any sort can we prevent this from jumping out of the heroic measure into mere rhythmicality’ (Critical Heritage, p. 59).

13 That distance of recognizance bereaves ‘which distance prevents from being distinctly recognized’ Woodhouse (1817), p. 148.

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER

Written early one morning in October 1816 after Keats returned to his lodgings in Dean Street, having stayed late at Clarke’s lodgings in Clerkenwell. First published in the Examiner, 1 December 1816, where it is quoted in an article by Leigh Hunt, whom Keats first met some time after 9 October.

Later critics have agreed with Hunt that this sonnet ‘completely announced the new poet taking possession’, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828), p. 248. Chapman offered Keats a masculine poetry opposed to the indulgent softness of Hunt’s work. Cowden Clarke, p. 130, recalled introducing Keats to Chapman – ‘One scene I could not fail to introduce to him – the shipwreck of Ulysses, in the fifth book of the Odysseis, 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.…” ’ Clarke says that Keats departed ‘at day-spring, yet he contrived that I should receive the poem from a distance of, may be, two miles by ten o’clock’. For discussion of the poem’s sources and structure see Murry (1930), pp. 15–33, and B. Ifor Evans, ‘Keats’s Approach to the Chapman Sonnet’, Essays and Studies of the English Association, XVI (1931).

The final text in 1817 differs from that in the Examiner or Keats’s draft (Harvard Library) and the holograph fair copy (Morgan Library).

1 realms of gold a reference to El Dorado, though probably also to the gold leaf embossing on the covers and spines of books.

4 in fealty poets are bound to Apollo by the feudal obligation of fidelity.

5 Oft ] But Examiner.

6 deep-browed ] deep written over low in Draft.

6 demesne ‘a district, region, territory’ (OED, which cites this example). But here may include overtones of the feudal sense of possession as by right (see l. 4n above).

7 ] Yet could I never judge what Men could mean Draft, Fair copy, Examiner. Cowden Clarke, p. 130, reports that Keats first wrote, ‘Yet could I never tell what men could mean’, but altered the line because this was ‘bald and too simply wondering’.

7 pure serene ‘serene’ is derived from the Latin, serenum, which means a clear, bright or serene sky. Compare Coleridge, Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni (1802), 72, ‘glittering through the pure serene’.

9–10 an echo of the vivid description of Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus in John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy given to Keats as a school prize in 1811.

11–12 the sources of these lines are varied. De Selincourt gives a passage from William Gilbert’s The Hurricane (1796) which is quoted by Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814) III, 931n: ‘… the Man of Mind… would certainly be swallowed up by the first Pizarro that crossed him. But when he… contemplates, from a sudden promontory, the distant, vast Pacific – and feels himself a freeman in this vast theatre… his exaltation is not less than imperial.’ Also influenced by Robertson’s description of Balboa first sighting the Pacific in his History of America (1777) I, pp. 289–90. Tennyson pointed out to Pal-grave that ‘History requires here Balbóa’ and not Cortez (The Golden Treasury [1861], p. 320).

11 eagle ] wond’ring Draft. Leigh Hunt called Cortez’s ‘eagle eyes’, ‘… a piece of historical painting, as the reader may see by Titian’s portrait of him’, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828), p. 249. Allott points out that no such painting by Titian is known. Jack, pp. 141–2, p. 265, says that in the sestet Keats designs his own ‘historical painting’, ‘stationing’ Cortez so as to dominate the scene.

13 Looked] Look Fair copy.

14 Darien a reference to the wild region south and east of the Panama canal between Darien, a town in the middle of the isthmus, and Colombia.

TO A YOUNG LADY WHO SENT ME A LAUREL CROWN

Date of composition unknown.