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Ode on a Grecian Urn, The Eve of St. Agnes
Ode on a Grecian Urn The Eve of St Agnes Author:John Keats Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SONNET. ON FIBST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER. It was Charles Cowden Clarke who was with Keats when the friends made the acquaintance of this translation o... more »f Homer by the Elizabethan poet. The two young- men had sat up nearly all one night in the summer of 1815 in Clarke's lodging, reading from a folio volume of the book which they had borrowed. Keats left for his own lodgings at dawn, and when Clarke came down to breakfast the next morning, he found this sonnet which Keats had sent him. So Keats entered the world of Homer by the broad doors of a translation which shows how universal the Greek is, since he is at home in the England of Shakespeare. 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. i 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 10 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. 11. That it was Balboa and not Cortez who first saw the Pacific an American schoolboy could have told Keats, but it is not such slips as these that unmake poetry. ODE ON A GRECIAN URN. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. Lempbieke's classical dictionary made Keats acquainted with the names and attributes of the inhabitants of the heavens in the ancient world, and the Shakespearean Chapman introduced him to Homer, but his acquaintance with the subtlest spirit of Greece was by a more direct means. Keats did not read Greek, and he had no schola...« less