Aug
3
On first looking into Chapman’s Homer
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 stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Comment:
The title implies that merely seeing – “looking” – can be of enormous significance.
We are probably prudent to take “realms of gold” and “goodly states and kingdoms” as literally as possible. Let’s say, for just a moment, that he has traveled in wealthy areas, and stopped by or seen from a distance well-administered political orders.
From the actual material happiness that can be procured by wealth, he has moved to a slightly more abstract happiness – that of being ruled well. This happiness is nearly only seen, though: even though a traveler can enjoy the riches of his hosts, he cannot partake fully of the joys of having good laws.
And when he brings up “islands,” he does not ever say he stopped at any of the other islands. “Round” could mean that yes, he stopped at them, but it could also mean that he merely went around them. Even less than “seeing” is just being told that there are places one is going past, that one only glances at, that are ruled by “bards in fealty to Apollo.”
Our narrator is a wanderer. He has moved past being comforted by wealth, by power exercised responsibly, and by a culture uniting a people such that it is almost divine. Remember what poetry inspired by the gods is: it is a divine Revelation to a people that if they internalize, they may live near perfectly, as if there were no law necessary.
For some reason, none of these things appeal to our narrator. What does he see as faulty in each of them?
The word “see” is used explicitly with his mention of “goodly states and kingdoms.” It is as if a poet who wishes to create a perfect people through his poetry is obvious. If a poet can’t get a grip on the hearts of a people such that he makes them perfect in their own little place, maybe he can exhort them to rule of the noble, or building up their wealth for their own comfort and a legacy.
It is a too explicit link between poetry and the political that our narrator does not like.
He is chasing the truth of a rumor down, that there is a realm ruled by someone thoughtful, “deep-brow’d.” Such a realm has a “pure serene:” not peace through comfort or good order, but by something invisible.
Loud and bold something is uttered, this realm is uttered: the act of speaking is what proves the truth of the rumor. Our wanderer becomes in that moment an explorer.
The heavens and the ocean – places where divinity resides – at that point become the domain of the narrator.
And our wanderer turned explorer has become a leader in the final image. Not only has he been raised by the discovery of Homer, but he has brought others to that discovery, and they are stunned, awed.
Some poetry tells you what is divine exactly, and such poetry is of the realm of the imagination.
Homer puts aside the divine for the question of freedom. His pure serene is liberation, as it is the realm of the imagination. To see into the yonder is not to possess: as I was discussing with Josh, “voir” versus “avoir,” if we take “a” to be an alpha-privative of a sort. Politics is about possession, and poetry that aims to be political is material at base. Poetry that aims to discover is a world unexplored, always, where the reader is freed from earthly concerns and free to discover the divine anew.
May
7
Time and Change: On Keats’ "The Human Seasons"
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The Human Seasons
John Keats
Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man:
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring’s honey’d cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness—to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
Comment:
We are invited to compare “the measure of the year” with “the mind of man.” One wonders if external and internal time are parallel, or dependent in some way on each other as the poem progresses.
The image of man knowing is that of a bird. In Spring he is most full of lust, because he can fly everywhere (“easy span”) and take in many things. Summer’s heat seems to ground the bird in one way, but allow him to take off in others – the produce of summer is the “rumination” on what Spring had given, those beautiful things that are ignored wholly in Autumn. There is contemplation in Autumn, but it has a wistful quality, as if the best has passed.
Now usually, when one is talking about the seasons, one says that Spring is the time of birth, Summer of lust, Autumn of contemplation, and Winter death. Here, the order is lust, contemplation of beauty, contemplation of mystery, and then “pale misfeature.” One could say that the difference in these lists in elements and order results from the fact that in one, we are talking about man living simply, the other we are discussing the mind purely.
But the mind purely is not something we are given in this poem immediately. “Pale misfeature” is just one of the problems with that argument; the other problem is the sequence of seeing, thinking, reflecting, and finally the changing of the bird. The seeing and thinking are linked to the power and love of beauty that the bird has. When Autumn comes, the bird has virtually stopped wanting to fly, stopped wanting to behold beautiful things. A love of power is dependent on a love of beauty, and that isn’t there anymore.
What is there is “idleness,” followed by “pale misfeature.” And I’m tempted to say some glib nonsense like “Keats is romanticizing sensuality at the expense of age” here, but that’s too obvious to say, so obvious that I think it’s a joke the poem is playing with.
Rather, the mind has moved because of physical changes from love of knowledge to love of mystery. What exactly is dying here, what is the key to our mortal nature?
I think the answer is in “idleness” and “pale misfeature” – these are not bad things. “Idleness” is the consequence of tiring of beauty as a standard, and power as a means. One wants to be something better than what one beholds.
“Pale misfeature” then speaks to change. It is the literal difference between someone learned, who camps out with his books all the time, and someone devoted to being vigorous for vigorousness’ sake. What is dying is not the bird – what is dying is the standard that governed all things previously. The mind of man is that which is truly changeable, as we can change it purely by thinking differently. All other things decay, especially those things which before caused flight “nearest unto heaven.”
Mar
27
To Autumn
John Keats
I.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
II.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
III.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Comment:
She is shrouded in mystery, and when she creates, she does not do so in a boastful manner, limiting herself to one area of excellence. Her lover is also quiet, being older himself, and the progress of their relationship is only quietly given away by their fruits. First there were the simple joys of sensuality, which made the Bacchae ecstatic, but led these two to a quiet domesticity (the vines wrap around a domicile, I assume). Then there were the mistakes couples make that they weather together, and are more prosperous for so doing: note that the Fall is a beginning – it is by no means final. At some point, there is plenty (“gourd”), and that extends finally to reproduction (“hazel,” with its “kernel”), the true wealth of love.
Now this realm of love based on the purely sensual is best defined by the labors of the bees. There is a narrow-mindedness intrinsic to these creatures; they cannot see their labors and blessings will soon come to an end.
As the Sun goes away, one finds Autumn more and more upon the earth, trying to work, but seemingly wistful. The list in that second stanza is a strange one, as it uses elements from the first stanza, but not entirely, and absolutely not in the same way: the “wind” is what is needed for kernels of hazels to be planted and grow, but instead it merely lifts her hair. She sleeps on the material that might be the thatch of the roof of the house. Instead of the plenty of the gourd filling her, there is merely the fume of poppies, and finally, all that is left of the apples is cider. “Gourd” from the first stanza is obviously gone, as is the grape that was more significant than the thatch, and the order has shifted from grape (thatch), apples, gourd, hazel (wind) to wind (kernel), thatch (grape), poppies (gourd), apples. If sensuality and its fruits that were produced were more important before, emotions are more important here. Each element from the first list has lost some of its physical nature, and the first and last elements are the key to the list: the first stanza links sensuality and reproduction, here, feelings and what is left of couplehood are linked.
I always felt that the world’s most beautiful woman was being described in the second stanza, and she was heartbroken, and maybe didn’t even quite realize it.
The third stanza moves from objects to music. The music occurs while the day dies, and the image of rosy clouds touching the plain is a complete literal and thematic inversion of the Homeric image of “rosy-fingered Dawn.” The music is from animate creatures, not just ones with nutritive souls or no souls at all. We ascend from river banks to hills with the animals, but that doesn’t quite satisfy the speaker, for he builds another more important distinction into that list, one more than physical – we also move from fragmented sounds (gnats, lambs, crickets) to the song of a bird and then to a song that perhaps God only can understand, in His realm.
Now those of you familiar with my take on Sonnet 73 know that I hold Autumn to be the reflective season, where maturity and art reach a pinnacle, as they are in the shadow of death directly. Keats throws a new wrinkle into that logic in this poem, with the sun moving to an empty sky: the Muse comes about because of the unfulfillment of her own erotic longings, and the inspiration of the artist – the speaker of the poem – is the combination of beauty and loneliness. The birth of art is the birth of tragedy; the great love that creates must die away, and art is that longing for an eternal love, the hope that as thought and reflection fade, separated from their ability to create, they can meet again elsewhere.