5. Keats’s Chapman’s Homer, Justice’s Henry James

JOHN KEATS, “ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER”

At the dawn hour one morning in October 1816, a young man set out toward the Thames from Little Warner Street in Clerkenwell. He likely passed down St. John’s Street, turning beyond Smithfield Market through Newgate Street and Cheapside before coming to the long slope of Grace Church Street. The city’s silence would have been broken only by the early journeys of the laboring poor and traders heading to the markets.

The beaky-nosed youth ran what he called the “Gauntlet over London Bridge” and headed into the Borough, a “beastly place in dirt, turnings and windings,” as he had described it to a friend days before.1 Less than a decade later, Dickens lived a little further south off Borough High Street, an area he recalled in The Pickwick Papers:

If a man wished to abstract himself from the world; to remove himself from within the reach of temptation; to place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of the window, we should recommend him by all means to go to Lant Street.… The majority of the inhabitants either direct their energies to the letting of furnished apartments, or devote themselves to the healthful and invigorating pursuit of mangling.… The population is migratory, usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and generally by night. His Majesty’s revenues are seldom collected in this happy valley, the rents are dubious, and the water communication is very frequently cut off.2

His portrait of the rooms of the impoverished medical student Bob Sawyer is probably a fair description of the local lodgings in Keats’s day.3

Over the bridge, the young man crooked left into Tooley Street and shortly right into Dean Street, where his lodgings lay almost across from a Baptist chapel.4 He had chosen to stay near Guy’s Hospital, where he was licensed as apothecary and surgeon. A week or two later (on the twenty-ninth or thirty-first, the date still disputed),5 he would turn twenty-one and be able to practice. That year, 1816, had been the famous Year Without a Summer—through most of October, dawns were cloudy or rainy, and after the middle of the month mornings had usually fallen into the forties.6 Perhaps the young man lit a fire before he sat down to write.

This not quite boy—brown-haired and hazel-eyed like his late father, and according to Leigh Hunt “under the middle height”7—had been visiting that friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, once his tutor in Enfield, a village just north of London where Clarke’s father ran an academy. When Clarke came down to breakfast later that morning,8 he found on the table the poem the young man had written after crossing the Thames at dawn. The former student was John Keats. The later, slightly revised version of the poem read:

ON 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

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 star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.9

The earliest surviving copy is fairly clean, with straggling lines at the long edge linking the rhymes. The handwriting shows no sign of hurry, betraying only one second thought (“low-browed” Homer, which makes him sound broody and threatening, has been improved to “deep-browed”). This is probably the very sheet that landed on Clarke’s breakfast table before ten a.m.,10 enclosed in a now vanished letter (or at least an address leaf).11 Like Wordsworth, Keats sometimes composed his lines before writing them down—this may be his original draft.12 Most critics see the marginal scrawls as Keats’s blueprint of a Petrarchan sonnet, set down as he began; but they seem more an afterthought, scratched against the right edge by a hand much less deliberate than the bold one that composed the poem. Keats may have been checking the rhyme scheme before dispatching the poem—or perhaps it was Clarke, after receiving it.

Why was Keats out walking that cool dawn? All night the two young men had worked through a translation of Homer by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman. Clarke had borrowed a rare copy of the c. 1614 folio, one that belonged to Thomas Alsager, a theater critic who became the “reporter of the state of the money-market” for the Times.13 The two poets were fortunate to have the chance to pore over it—there was no modern edition of Chapman for another generation.14

When Clarke came to remember that evening, he said that Keats had left at “day-spring” (it’s too much to hope that this echoed Cowper’s translation of the Iliad—“the day-spring’s daughter rosy palm’d”).15 Keats might have prolonged the hour because in the dark he didn’t care to walk back into the Borough, a haunt of thieves; but the young men were night owls—of their long evenings, Clarke charmingly quoted Thomas Browne, more or less accurately: “We were acting our antipodes—the huntsmen were up in America, and they already were past their first sleep in Persia.”16 The exact time scarcely matters. A man’s watch was an approximate thing before railroads, if a man carried a watch at all. Still, “day-spring” would be near six a.m. in London at mid-October, the sun rising about half an hour after.

Clarke does not reveal how the letter arrived—he says only that Keats “contrived that I should receive the poem from a distance of, may be, two miles.”17 Someone else must have been home to lay it on the table—Clarke says he was alone in the house, which belonged to his brother-in-law, so perhaps a domestic.18 (Domestics, being invisible, did not count.) How might a man send a letter across London in 1816? The short stretch of Dean ran into Tooley Street, which in 1807 was described in Edward Pugh’s London as “long, but in some parts narrow, and … in general exceedingly dirty, owing to the great number of carts continually passing with goods from the different wharfs on the south side of the river Thames.”19 At the end of the month, on what may have been his birthday, the poet posted a letter to Clarke from the receiving house along Tooley.20 Keats need have done no more than drop the letter into a box there. London’s Twopenny Post was a modern convenience—letters could be paid for on delivery.21

John Keats, manuscript of “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.”

Source: MS. Keats 2.4, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The walk from Clerkenwell, a good two miles, would have taken Keats the better part of an hour, especially if he spent time musing over the passages from Homer that had so entranced him. Two sonnets Keats wrote about the same time, “Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there” and “On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour,” record, at least in part, his walks home from Hampstead.22 Like Wordsworth, Keats may have composed while he walked.

Even had lines formed as the poet found his way back to the Borough that dawn, it’s unlikely that he could have arrived home, perhaps lit a fire, written what may be the sole draft, read it over, then posted it to his friend, all before the eight a.m. pickup for London’s second delivery. That would have placed the poem in Clarke’s hands between ten and eleven later that morning.23 It’s useless to chop minutes two centuries after.

Keats was known to write in white heat and almost without correction.24 (The evidence of his drafts recalls what the editors of the First Folio wrote of Shakespeare—“We have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”)25 The morning may have been cold—Keats might have hurried home, or left slightly earlier than dayspring. Still, considering all the small impedimenta (warming his fingers; sharpening a quill, common use of steel nibs being a few years in the future; addressing a sheet; folding up the poem; sealing it with wax, which required a candle flame; taking the walk down Tooley) and at least some time thinking over his words, the timing is difficult.

How could Clarke have received the letter, if not by post? Keats had no servant. Having not yet been to bed, he would likely have been too exhausted to deliver the poem himself and steal back to Southwark. His biographer Robert Gittings claims it was carried by an “early-morning postal messenger.”26 (Others vaguely say “messenger” or “courier” or “postboy.”) The Twopenny Post had six daily deliveries—a letter posted by ten that morning would have reached Clarke with the third delivery, between noon and one or one-thirty p.m.27 Why then go to the expense of hiring a man, perhaps a servant at a nearby inn? (There were large coaching-inns in Borough High Street.)28 Because on one day of the week there were no deliveries. If Keats wrote “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” early on the morning of the Sabbath, that would explain his failure to use the Twopenny Post. The date of the poem, written sometime after the ninth,29 would then probably be the morning of October 13 or 20, or even as late as October 27.30 Keats and Clarke had dined at Leigh Hunt’s on Hunt’s birthday, October 19, the occasion on which Hunt and Keats first met; and the loan of Chapman may have come through Hunt, a good friend of Alsager’s.31 It is all no more than a possibility.32

Had Keats hired a man, he must have felt the occasion important—the gesture certainly showed Romantic intensity. (It would have taken more time, and more care, than walking to the receiving house.) After the night-long session with the old folio, the sonnet was a mark of gratitude—and perhaps he was eager to share his own astonishment at a poem that had arrived like a bolt of lighting. His previous verse had been earnest, and terrible.

Though Keats had studied Latin and French at Enfield, he had left, probably at fifteen, with no Greek.33 (Charles Armitage Brown claims that a few years later, about 1818 or 1819, the time of Hyperion and Lamia, Keats was “deeply absorbed in the study of Greek and Italian”—this might have been part of a yearning to read Homer plain.)34 Like Clarke, he knew Homer through the teeter-totter of Pope’s couplets, whose formal antitheses decked out the bard in the raiments of some courtier to George I. Like many poets of the day, Keats despised the Augustans, mocking them rather amusingly in “Sleep and Poetry” (“with a puling infant’s force / They swayed about upon a rocking horse / And thought it Pegasus”).35 He would have agreed with the classicist Richard Bentley, who condescendingly remarked, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.”36

Map of Southwark in 1813. Dean Street runs north near the far right of the map.

Source: Richard Horwood’s Plan of the Cities of London, Westminster and Southwark. Published by William Faden, 1813. Courtesy London Metropolitan Archives, City of London.

The young men had spent the evening ravaging through the folio, looking up what Clarke called the “ ‘famousest’ passages, as we had scrappily known them in Pope’s version.”37 Decades later, when he wrote down his recollections of Keats, Clarke recaptured their excitement. He remembered four passages in particular, the quotations filled with Chapman’s brusque attractions. From the third book of the Iliad, Clarke showed Keats the portrait of Odysseus, where the Trojan Antenor said that, when the Greek rose to speak, his words “flew about our eares, like drifts of winters snow.”38 Compare Pope’s long-winded, almost comical,

But, when he speaks, what Elocution flows!

Soft as the Fleeces of descending Snows

The copious Accents fall, with easy Art;

Melting they fall, and sink into the Heart!39

The “easy Art” and melting snowflakes are pure Pope, and purely Pope—Chapman captures the terrible force of Homer’s blizzard. This was part of a longer passage Keats and Clarke examined, “that perfect scene of the conversation on Troy wall of the old Senators with Helen.”40 As he doesn’t quote more than the portrait, we have to guess where else in the passage Keats’s interest fixed. Perhaps, with his fondness for grasshoppers, he responded to Chapman’s description, early in the scene, of the nattering old warriors:

And, as in well-growne woods, on trees, cold spinie Grashoppers

Sit chirping, and send voices out, that scarce can pierce our eares,41

a comparison Pope renders more clumsily. His elderly Trojans

In Summer-Days like Grashoppers rejoice,

A bloodless Race, that send a feeble Voice.42

As Homer has them lighting on trees, the insects are probably cicadas. This famous image drew a long note from Pope defending it (“one of the justest and most natural Images in the World”),43 but Chapman’s version is more fully blooded in bloodlessness. Still, he cannot entirely be trusted. When Helen names the Greeks in distant view, Chapman makes Agamemnon a head taller than other great Achaean warriors, while Homer leaves him a head shorter.44

Having possessed the folio for some time, Clarke may already have scouted extracts for his young friend, who loved poetic language thickened with imagery. Clarke recalled that at about sixteen the poet had carried off a volume of The Faerie Queene and gone through it “as a young horse would through a spring meadow—ramping!”

He especially singled out epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, “what an image that is—‘sea-shouldering whales!’ ”45

That quality is missing from Pope’s emollient verse.

The Augustan doesn’t always have the worst of it. Though Clarke mentions46 the moment in Iliad 5 when Athena lit Diomedes’s shield and helmet with living fire, Chapman’s bouncy rendering,

Like rich Autumnus golden lampe, whose brightnesse men admire,

Past all the other host of starres, when with his chearefull face,

Fresh washt in loftie Ocean waues, he doth the skies enchase,47

is inferior to Pope’s

Th’ unweary’d Blaze incessant Streams supplies,

Like the red Star that fires th’ Autumnal Skies,

When fresh he rears his radiant Orb to Sight,

And bath’d in Ocean, shoots a keener Light.48

Enchase means to set with a gem, here the red star hung in the skies. The glamour of Chapman’s translation may have come partly from its physical presence—the large volume, published almost exactly two centuries before, had been printed in rich Jacobean orthography: “Fresh washt in loftie Ocean waues.” The initial and medial s’s were long s’s (in a double s, only the first letter), another way Chapman’s language had the patina of antiquity. (Editions of Pope retained the long s into Keats’s day, but the typography was more orderly and legible than in Chapman’s folio. By the time Keats wrote his sonnet, the old letter-form was passing out of use.)49 The slower you read Chapman, the less irritating his fourteeners, the more magnificent and generous his language. If Chapman’s translation is more vigorous, more filthy with particulars, Pope has his polished grandeur and formal elegance.

The two night-readers also studied Neptune’s thundering progress toward the Greek ships in book 13—Chapman there is good (“Three steps he onely tooke, / Before he far-off Ægas reacht; but with the fourth, it shooke / With his drad entrie”),50 yet Pope is better:

Fierce as he past, the lofty Mountains nod,

The Forests shake! Earth trembled as he trod,

And felt the Footsteps of th’ immortal God.51

In the final passage, the wreck of Odysseus from book 5 of the Odyssey, Clarke recalled the specific line where Keats gave him the “reward of one of his delighted stares.”52

Then forth he came, his both knees faltring; both

His strong hands hanging downe; and all with froth

His cheeks and nosthrils flowing. Voice and breath

Spent to all vse; and downe he sunke to Death.

The sea had soakt his heart through: all his vaines,

His toiles had rackt, t’a labouring womans paines.

Dead wearie was he.53

The italics are Clarke’s.

Though Chapman translated the Iliad into fourteeners, his Odyssey is pitched into pentameter couplets violently enjambed, unlike Pope’s. The Augustan’s translation is not awful, but Clarke rightly casts scorn on the couplet that corresponds to the line: “From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran; / And lost in lassitude lay all the man.”54 He grubbed the Pope up for Keats on a later occasion, he remembered, so that momentous first evening they didn’t have the Augustan before them. Clarke could scarcely conceal his delight at the memory, for he italicized Pope’s pallid second line and marked it with three exclamation points. “Chapman supplied us with many an after-treat,”55 he wrote, so he must have kept the old folio for some time. Pope’s Odyssey is not all Pope—half the books were translated by hirelings and touched up by the master.

Much in “Chapman’s Homer” is clear on first reading, and much hovers at the edge of clarity. The first stanza is the reminiscence of a poet-traveler, an occupation unknown until Alphonse de Lamartine named it in 1835.56 The world Keats invented is at once physical and metaphorical (call it a world existing in the physics of metaphor), fancifully packed with realms, states, kingdoms, each carved out by a poet, or granted by Apollo—on this imagined globe, the greatest poets rule the largest emperies. Keats, who had ambitions, and might have longed for a small city or two, reads the map of imagination onto the map of the world. Homer and Shakespeare must have been his Alexanders, and Dante and Ariosto and Tasso monarchs of vast lands—the undertone of conquest should not be ignored. (For Keats’s ranking of his predecessors, see “Ode to Apollo” and his letter to Benjamin Haydon of March 25, 1818: “When I die I’ll have my Shakespeare placed on my heart, with Homer in my right hand.”)57 The bards hold their lands in fealty, and for the conquistadors fealty was a license to conquer.

The young poet has journeyed through the realms of gold (every great poet is a Golden Age—and Keats had already begun a sonnet with “How many bards gild the lapses of time!”),58 picking up knowledge like a gypsy scholar, but not to one land closed by his ignorance of ancient Greek—that wide expanse ruled by Homer. Homer’s epics had been lost to Western Europe for a thousand years—even Petrarch failed to find someone who could translate them or teach him Homeric Greek. Not until decades later was Homer reclaimed for the Western tradition. Why not travel to a land you wanted to see? Because, if you didn’t know the language, you would need a translator. At Enfield, Keats had studied his Latin and French, studied them hard, beginning a translation of the Aeneid he finished while apprentice to the surgeon-apothecary Thomas Hammond.59 Though aware of his otherwise inadequate education, Keats was a striver. He had, perhaps, the fantasy that the greatest poet of the ancient world held the key to poetry itself; apparently he didn’t know the medieval and Renaissance Latin translations, which often showed great fidelity to the originals.60 Pope’s version, from which Keats occasionally drew allusions in his letters,61 was useless to someone who wanted to understand why Homer was accorded his place primus super pares. Keats was not, however, without a touch of arrogance. The following spring he wrote that lines from Pope’s translation, read out by his brother Tom, “seem like Mice to mine.”62

Some critics have located Keats’s islands in the Mediterranean. Though the sea of Odysseus has a few western islands, it lacks realms of gold. Keats must have been thinking of the Spanish Main, from which for some three centuries treasure ships had sailed back to Europe. In the indentures of this imagery, the geographical becomes metagraphical. A few years later, in “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”63 Keats made them kings.

LOW-BROWED

In the copy of the poem probably sent to Clarke, Keats called Homer “low-browed,” then scratched it out. He could not have meant the bard a Neanderthal (Neanderthals were not described for another half-century), but a low forehead had long been a defining feature of the ape (The Tempest: “We shall … all be turn’d to Barnacles, or to Apes / With foreheads villanous low”).64 “Having a low forehead,” Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775) defines the compound;65 but in 1816 “low-browed” was rarely if ever used of people. It was an architectural term applied to doors, caverns, windows, roofs, cottages, anything that might have a low entrance (the way a man might lower his brows over his eyes)—hence, as the OED has it, “dark, gloomy.” It was also applied to rocks of a beetlish appearance, no doubt due to the “low-brow’d rocks” in L’Allegro (Pope later borrowed the term).66 “Beetle-browed” goes back at least as far as Langland, often with the sense of “reproachful,” and later “sullen” or “surly.”67 The OED does not record any “low-browed” people before 1855, though the dictionary’s dating must always be treated skeptically—an 1829 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine describes a man as “smug-faced, smooth-haired, low-browed, pug-nosed, cock-chin’d,” while the Spectator in 1841 refers to a “faction of low-browed, sketching clubbists,” the term referring to the artists’ brutishness rather than their fierce concentration.68 Keats could have found the idea in Chapman, had he and Clarke paged through Iliad 17: “And lets his rough browes downe so low, they couer all his eyes. / So Aiax lookt”—but why would Homer look so?69 Keats must have felt “low-browed” mistaken or ambiguous—it may have been only a brief place-marker for some better epithet, or more likely an error in judgment immediately corrected. “Deep-browed” was his own coinage.

What might he have meant by “low-browed,” though? Given its use in architecture, perhaps he thought that Homer, like a low doorway or a low room, was difficult to enter (for Keats, before he heard Chapman, virtually impossible). “Deep-browed” would then be simply a variation—a man whose brows so hooded his eyes that, in a surprisingly old sense, he was hard to read. So the man, so the work.

PURE SERENE

The final lines of the octet lie waiting to complete the complex thought Keats has slowly developed. They are perhaps the first sign in his poetry of a power to surprise beyond the mere register of the words. “Pure serene” is Romantic guff, perhaps a nod to Coleridge’s “Hymn Before Sun-Rise” or Henry Cary’s translation of Dante, which Keats owned and where the phrase occurs twice.70 Through the previous century, the phrase appeared often enough in scientific and medical papers or travel journals as an adjectival phrase describing the atmosphere (“the sudden mixture of the pure serene air above the clouds”).71 Keats might have met it elsewhere in his vagabond reading. At this period, the noun “serene” meant “fine quiet weather,” “serenity,” and most pertinently an “unruffled expanse of clear sky or calm sea,” as in Byron (“Kissing, not ruffling, the blue deep’s serene”) and Cowper (“The bark that plows the deep serene”), to use the OED’s examples. In these stray meanings Keats has prepared, perhaps unknowingly, the startling images that close the poem.

The effect (where effect is not logic) is that the paradisal freshness, the simplifying quiet, of line 7 is disrupted by the mortal thunder of Chapman. Effect has preceded cause—Keats’s logic, logic rather than effect, is that the violent storm leaves a freshness after, like the ozone released by the lightning bolt. A man in the miasmic warren of Dean Street might well pine for the pure serene. (Only a few months before, he had begun a sonnet, “To one who has been long in city pent, / ’Tis very sweet to look into the fair / And open face of heaven.”)72 There follow, as if Keats had been reading the OED, the clear night skies of Herschel and the calm sea of Cortez. Certain ideas roil about a poet’s imagination. At Margate that August, Keats had ended a sonnet with “wonders of the sky and sea.”73

“Chapman’s Homer” requires only two sentences, one cobbled from statements cast from present-perfect reminiscence (“Much have I travell’d …,” “Round … islands have I been”), the other an admission in past-perfect foreknowledge (“of one wide expanse had I been told”), rising through simple past toward a recognition (“did I never breathe its pure serene”) qualified by the independent clause that ends the octet (“Till I heard”). The volta is sandwiched between two measures of time (“Till …: / Then …”), marked by a subordinate conjunction and an adverb, one rising toward the climax, the other falling away. The consequence of revelation (“Then felt I”) leads to the two similes that form the sestet. This progress of revelation—condition, development, climax, consequence, figurative comparison—brings us exactly to the moment the night before. Tense is crucial: how much more offhanded and detached the poem would have seemed had he begun, “Much had I travell’d.” Keats’s tendency toward Romantic mooniness is here denied in his control of tenses.

The poet perhaps had something like his rhymes in mind from the start. The plain “seen” and “been” become the more fanciful “demesne” and “serene.” It seems improbable that he’d written the first pair and then had a stroke of luck—yet “serene” was a much later second thought. In the copy dispatched to Clarke, the line read, “Yet could I never judge what men could mean,” the sort of bland, rhyme-filling line a poet in a hurry might set down until he could think of better, if he could think of better. (Clarke later recalled that the draft read, “Yet could I never tell …” His memory may have faltered there.)74

Keats told Clarke that the original line “was bald, and too simply wondering”75—bald, presumably, of metaphor or real thought. The replacement keeps the lineaments, “Yet ______ I never ______,” though the more natural wording might have been “Yet never did I …,” which gives more vigor to “never.” (The line has often been misquoted this way, even by Helen Vendler.)76 The original line suffered from other problems—the repetition of “could” is enough to suggest that Keats hadn’t completely escaped his student verse, and “men” risks confusion with the very different body of “men” five lines later. Besides, though “what men could mean” underlines the poet’s ignorance of Homer, the line repeats the gist of “had I been told.” It’s not a ruinous recurrence, but “serene” anticipates the staring of Cortez and the silence with which the poem ends.

The original line survived into the publication of the sonnet in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner a few weeks later, on December 1.77 Hunt, in his brief article on the poet, mentioned “one incorrect rhyme, … easily altered”78—he meant the exact rhyme of “demesne” and “mean.” Keats’s motive may therefore have been merely technical, and a way to please Hunt, his new acquaintance. The poet’s rhymes were often abused—he was called a “very facetious rhymer” by one critic; another remarked that, having written a “line at random,” the poet “follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme.”79 Here Keats is perhaps glimpsed in the act of composition—having written “ken” and “men,” he’s unlikely simply to have happened upon “Darien.” Once the word occurred to him, however, triggered by his inaccurate memory of Balboa or by some rhyming thought of “men in Darien,” he could easily have worked backward, “men” proving easy to manipulate and “ken” being just makeweight. The earlier use of “men,” however, would have to go.

Keats might have been pardonably proud of “pure serene.” The sonnet would have been extraordinary without that line, but something would have been lost, even were the fine knitting of the images of sky and sea mere accident, not calculation. The use of the noun for clear sky or calm weather (extending to metaphorical readings of mood and feeling) is itself of interest, since it gradually replaced and then wrote out of existence the earlier noun serene—a fine mist or rain, thought to be unhealthy, falling after sunset in equatorial countries.

TILL I HEARD CHAPMAN SPEAK OUT LOUD AND BOLD

In each stanza, the second appearance of a rhyme explains or elaborates the first. The “realms of gold” are those that “bards in fealty … hold.” The passive receipt of knowledge, like a schoolboy’s (“Oft … had I been told”), becomes a second listening—to Chapman speaking “loud and bold.”

The force and passion of Chapman’s oratory are reminiscent of the passage Clarke had shown Keats:

He stood a little still, and fixt upon the earth his eyes;

His scepter moving neither way, but held it formally,

Like one that vainely doth affect. Of wrathfull qualitie,

And franticke (rashly iudging him) you would have said he was,

But when out of his ample breast, he gave his great voyce passe,

And words that flew about our eares, like drifts of winters snow;

None thenceforth might contend with him.80

“Vainely doth affect” meant “vainly tries [to speak].” Odysseus, though seemingly shy, spoke with such vehemence, when he did speak, that his words were a blizzard against which no man could stand. Pope, in his gentler version, misunderstood the point.

How did the long-dead Chapman speak, however? By being read aloud. Keats and Clarke were used to reading to each other (the habit dated back to Enfield).81 It’s unlikely that this night was different—how can a poet hear the sonorities of a passage, its very speech becoming speech, without reading it aloud? Keats’s friend George Felton Mathew recalled that, when reading aloud, the poet never had “tears in his eyes” or a “broken voice.”82 We have a stronger clue in Benjamin Haydon’s recollection of the young poet reciting the “Ode to Pan” from Endymion: “I begged Keats to repeat it—which he did in his usual half chant, (most touching) walking up & down the room.” (Haydon called the lines “exquisite”—Wordsworth, who had just been introduced to the young poet, did not agree.)83 Keats may have been a gentle but not sentimental reader. Perhaps Clarke gave Chapman the thunder of Odysseus. This was not just Keats’s first reading of Homer, Chapman’s pure Homer, but his first listening.

Clarke’s further testimony about the evening can be found in the notes from which he later wrote up his recollections: “How distinctly is that earnest stare, and protrusion of the upper lip now present with me, as we came upon some piece of rough-hewn doric elevation in the fine old poet. He sometimes shouted.”84 This was probably Keats’s reaction, not his style of reading; but recall how Odysseus stared at the ground before he spoke. (The slippery pronoun is delightful—it’s not at first clear whether the shouts are Chapman’s or Keats’s.) This all-night frolic, punctuated by whoops and yelps, probably confirms that the house was empty apart from a servant or two, whose feelings would not have been consulted. With its silent or dumbfounded stares, its stentorian voice (“loud and bold”), the sonnet perhaps retains a ghostly recollection of that evening over the ancient folio, Keats excited almost past bearing. His old tutor would have seen this at once, reading “Chapman’s Homer” at his table. Had Clarke been the loud and bold reader, he would have been delighted by the tacit acknowledgment. None of this is necessary to the meaning; but it might explain the spur to Keats’s imagination, or at least his hurry to get the poem to Clerkenwell. In a poem so intensely about looking (“kingdoms seen,” “watcher of the skies,” “into his ken,” “eagle eyes,” “star’d,” “look’d”), “told” is the echo of rumor or lecture; but the almost jubilant “loud and bold” is the sole recognition of the voice of oral poetry.

“Speak out” had so many meanings in Keats’s day, it would be difficult to specify which was primary—they range from the redundant (“To talk in a loud voice, or so as to be heard distinctly”) to meanings not mutually exclusive (“To talk freely or unreservedly,” “To break into speech,” “To utter; to make known in words; to declare openly or clearly”). No doubt such meanings form a crowded complex, none entirely exhausting the poet’s sensitivity to language. The OED’s most interesting possibility, however, is a rare poetic usage, unfortunately always recorded as transitive: “To create by speaking.” The first citation is from Abraham Cowley, “They sung how God spoke out the worlds vast ball.” Cowley invented the irregular ode Keats later took up, though the young poet was probably borrowing from Wordsworth and Coleridge. What unnamed world could Chapman have created for Keats? Homer’s, of course. (And, by insinuating irony, what is the next link in this chain of association but the “worlds vast ball” discovered by Herschel?)

The following spring, May 1817, it must have hurt Keats mortally to read in the European Magazine his old friend Mathew’s review of Poems, the young poet’s first book. Keats should not be said, the critic argued, to eclipse better poets simply because he was “pouring forth his splendors in the Orient.” Having groused about the “slovenly independence of his versification,” the critic came to the sonnet. Though “absurd in its application,” it was a “fair specimen” of the good sonnets in the book. Even so:

“Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold” however is a bad line—not only as it breaks the metaphor—but as it blows out the whole sonnet into an unseemly hyperbole.85

Mathew objected to just what later readers would admire—the injection of personality. The critic’s strictures are not so much undeserved as misapplied. After lines of wan, conventional writing, with the whiff of antique gods and medieval fiefdoms hanging about them, Keats had broken into a modern register. The sonnet has often been the form through which the modern muscles in—modern diction and modern airs mark the sonnets of Milton, Wordsworth, and Auden. Keats has fallen far from Apollonian inspiration, fallen for a mere translation (anyone with half an education could have read ancient Greek), yet his tone is triumphant. It’s as if Odysseus had spoken to him—as, in a way, he had. Mathew’s final judgment of Keats, however, was that

the mere luxuries of imagination, more especially in the possession of the proud egotist of diseased feelings and perverted principles, may become the ruin of a people—inculcate the falsest and most dangerous ideas of the condition of humanity—and refine us into the degeneracy of butterflies that perish in the deceitful glories of a destructive taper.86

That tells us as much about the critic as it does about the importance of poetry in 1817. (By “butterflies” he probably meant “moths.”)

Many phrases from “Chapman’s Homer” had been used by earlier writers: “goodly states” and “wide expanse”; “his demesne” and “pure serene”; “loud and bold” and “with eagle eyes”; “wild surmise” and even, in a poem by one N. Sloan in the European Magazine of May 1808, “realms of gold,” all but the last pair frequently enough that Keats might have known them.87 A poem is often composed in part of familiar phrases—Homer, as Milman Parry showed nearly a century ago, is brilliantly patched with timeworn epithets and stock formulae. The poet’s task is the invention of the new on ground long trodden, just as the watcher must scan a sky long watched.

SOME WATCHER OF THE SKIES

The poem closes with two images among the most memorable in English poetry, images through which Keats renders in emotion his discovery of Homer, and does so by indirection. (Eliot would have had to look no further than Keats for such a pure example of the objective correlative.) The speaker of the poem is only figuratively a traveler; in the last lines, the metaphors are therefore meta-metaphors. Through the old folio, Keats could hear the bard of two-and-a-half millennia before. Pope had blocked the view of Homer; Chapman gave a glimpse, sometimes better than a glimpse, of what had been missed. A later critic, George Gilfillan, called Chapman’s the “only translation which gives the savageism, if not the sublimity of Homer—his wild beasts muzzling and maddening in their fleshy fury, and his heroes ‘red-wat-shod.’ ”88 (Just two months before that October evening, Leigh Hunt had called Chapman’s Homer a “fine rough old wine”—recall that probably through Hunt the borrowed volume came.)89 Though the images might seem to aggrandize the moment a poor young man, one who had never written a good poem, finds a voice of magnificent power (it’s only a poem about reading, after all), they represent the importance of Homer to him.

The similes allow Keats to specify and magnify a feeling otherwise difficult to measure, capable of measure only by comparison to two transforming discoveries remembered from his reading in astronomy and history (this is also a poem about metamorphosis through reading). Both events changed the boundaries of the known.

A NEW PLANET SWIMS INTO HIS KEN

The Babylonians knew six planets in the solar system, from Mercury out to Saturn, all visible to the naked eye. Critics usually say that the “new planet” is a reference to William Herschel’s observation of Uranus in 1781, the first planet discovered since antiquity. Keats had almost certainly read of the discovery in John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy (fifth edition, 1807), which lay on his shelves—he had won it as a school prize at Enfield.90 More recent discoveries have been forgotten, however. When Keats was a boy, newer planets had been found, namely Ceres (1801), Pallas (1802), Juno (1804), and Vesta (1807), now called asteroids.

Bonnycastle mentioned two of these planets in the edition Keats owned (in the seventh edition of 1816, all four were present in detail).91 Indeed, the title of the chapter in which the poet read of these unknown worlds was “Of the New Planets, and Other Discoveries.” To Keats, it must have seemed that the sky was full of undiscovered bodies and that any watcher of the skies, if only he scanned the heavens long enough, might discover a planet. (In Keats’s day, a watcher who hoped to see something new would need a telescope.) This may explain why Herschel is unnamed—after all, Keats could have written, “like some Herschel of the skies.” The “new planets” in Bonnycastle were pointed out half a century ago, but they have rarely been mentioned since.92

Keats’s biographer Nicholas Roe argues that an equal or greater influence on Keats’s attention to the skies was the “living orrery” established by the founder of the Enfield school, John Ryland. According to Rylandiana, boys were handed cards and made to act out the motion of the planets around the sun, “giving each boy a direction to move from east to west; Mercury to move swiftest, and the others in proportion to their distances, and each boy repeating in his turn the contents of his card, concerning his distance, magnitude, period, and hourly motion.”93 However schoolboyish the method, it would have fixed in Keats’s mind the great mechanical system of the planets.

When a “new planet swims” into the vision of the astronomer, it must have a medium through which to swim. Keats is probably thinking of the aether. Astronomers would believe until Einstein that the stars and planets moved through the heavens suspended in this substance—Keats would have read in “An Explanation of the Principal Terms” in his copy of Bonnycastle that “ether” was a “fine subtile fluid.”94 Indeed, the poet had recently ended a sonnet with what seems an eerie premonition of the line in “Chapman’s Homer”: “E’en like the passage of an angel’s tear / That falls through the clear ether silently.”95 That a planet moves at all, relative to the stars, made the Greeks name it “wanderer.” Only by accidental grace does “aether” in Greek mean something very close to “pure serene.”

Why this particular act of discovery? All night Keats had been soaked through with Chapman’s imagery. We cannot know the way his imagination worked—he may have happened on his images by devious course. Yet one of the passages Clarke recollected, as noted earlier, described the flaming light from the shield and helmet of Diomedes: “Like rich Autumnus golden lampe, … / Fresh washt in loftie Ocean waues, he doth the skies enchase.”96 (The light of bright stars close to the horizon passes through a thicker layer of air, shimmering as if immersed—or as if emerging from the waves.) What is the golden lamp of Autumnus? Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star in the night sky, which appears over the southern horizon in autumn. Had the passage made Keats think of the heavens, his imagination might have passed easily to the planets, sometimes called stars, as Venus is still the morning or evening star. Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne, “I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Hethen.”97

OR LIKE STOUT CORTEZ

Keats had traveled in the realms of gold because he was too poor to travel anywhere else. Indeed, he may then never have been farther than Margate, where a few weeks before he had stood upon a cliff and seen the wide expanse of the North Sea.98 Keats had every intention of becoming a real traveler, but his travels too often were visions unfulfilled—he was to propose trips to the Continent, or just to Lisbon or Scotland. Later, he wanted to sail to America to see his brother George. He had his few journeys, but dreamed of more. Less than two years before he died at Rome, he was thinking of a voyage to South America, or of joining an Indiaman as a surgeon.99

As a schoolboy, Keats had devoured travel books, histories, and mythology.100 He had read William Robertson’s History of America (1777) at Enfield and later owned a copy.101 Robertson was a famous historian in his day, the rival of Gibbon and Hume. It is usually thought that Keats was recalling, with some confusion, the historian’s description of Balboa’s discovery:

Balboa commanded his men to halt, and advanced alone to the summit, that he might be the first who should enjoy a spectacle which he had so long desired. As soon as he beheld the South Sea stretching in endless prospect below him, he fell on his knees, and lifting up his hands to Heaven, returned thanks to God.… His followers, observing his transports of joy, rushed forward to join in his wonder, exultation and gratitude.102

Perhaps, as Richard Garnett pointed out more than a century ago,103 Keats was influenced by other sources, like the remarks by William Gilbert that Wordsworth fondly quoted in a note to The Excursion (1814):

A Man is supposed to improve by going out into the World, by visiting London. Artificial man does; he extends with his sphere; but alas! that sphere is microscopic: it is formed of minutiae, and he surrenders his genuine vision to the artist, in order to embrace it in his ken. His bodily senses grow acute …; while his mental become proportionally obtuse. The reverse is the Man of Mind: He who is placed in the sphere of Nature and of God, might be a mock at Tattersall’s and Brookes’s [sic], and a sneer at St. James’s; he would certainly be swallowed alive by the first Pizarro that crossed him:—But when he walks along the River of Amazons; when he rests his eye on the unrivalled Andes; … Or 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.104

In his ken! “Ken” may not have been a makeweight after all. (Wordsworth thought the Gilbert “one of the finest passages of modern English prose.”)105 In this paean to the benefits of the grand tour, a tour that included the Romantic sublime of the Andes and the Pacific, Keats might have found justification for the vision of the artist. His travel may have been largely in books (indeed, the poem is a homage to his books); but he was free to be a man of mind, and his reading could take him much farther than London. He was not the man for Tattersall’s, the famous horse auctioneer with a sideline in betting, or Brooks’s, the gentleman’s club notable for gaming (St. James’s Street was full of coffeehouses and clubs). The coincidence of “in his ken” with the view of the Pacific suggests that Keats took this passage deeply to heart. He of course had read The Excursion. Just over a year after “Chapman’s Homer,” the poet wrote his friend Haydon “that there are three things to rejoice at in this Age—The Excursion[,] Your Pictures, and Hazlitt’s depth of Taste.”106

Critics have sometimes suggested that Keats’s error was influenced or encouraged by the passage in Robertson where Cortez looks from the heights upon the “vast plain of Mexico.”107 Given the devious methods of imagination, the notion can’t be entirely disregarded; but the scene bears little relation in detail to Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific, while the mood is less dramatic than the description of his “transports of joy” and the “wonder, exultation and gratitude” that gripped him and his men.108

Why would Keats have remembered this discovery, however falsely? Balboa did not march his men across the isthmus in search of a new sea. As Robertson’s history reminds us,

A young cazique … tumbled the gold out of the balance with indignation; and, turning to the Spaniards, “Why do you quarrel (says he) about such a trifle? If you are so passionately fond of gold …, I will conduct you to a region where the metal … is so common that the meanest utensils are formed of it.” … Balboa and his companions inquired eagerly where this happy country lay, and how they might arrive at it. He informed them that at the distance of six suns, that is of six days journey towards the south, they should discover another ocean, near to which this wealthy kingdom was situated.109

Balboa sought realms of gold. He found something greater, the ocean that would bind the fragments of the known world. On the far side lay China—half-a-dozen years later, Magellan’s ships set sail on the voyage that circumnavigated the globe. Keats too found something, perhaps. The discoveries of Herschel and Balboa each owed a debt to chance (that young cazique!), like Clarke’s timely acquisition of the borrowed folio.

The scholarly consensus is that the young poet, rushing to judgment that October morning, muddled his schoolboy reading. Clarke remarked that Keats possessed a “tolerably retentive memory” as a student,110 but the conquistadors had a tangled history. What became the most famous example of a poet getting the facts wrong was so trivial at the time that apparently no one noticed. It is usually said that the mistake went unrecognized until 1861, when Tennyson mentioned it to Francis Turner Palgrave, then compiling his Golden Treasury.111 However, in an 1845 review of the new edition of Leigh Hunt’s Imagination and Fancy, the anonymous critic notes the error and amusingly proposes that the line be changed posthumously.112 The mistake was not made to satisfy the meter, since “Balboa” has the same metrical profile as “stout Cortez,” which—the meter tells us—must have been pronounced COR-tez. (“Stout” did not then usually mean thickset or overweight, retaining the older meanings of proud, valiant, determined.)

The title Keats used in the copy he sent Clarke was “On the first looking into Chapman’s Homer”—the first looking. This might have been a slip—yet it suggests that, for Keats, his first real encounter with Homer, even through the medium of Chapman, ranked with discovering a new planet or a new sea. One can cut too fine in parsing a meaning. The second man to discover the Pacific will not be found in history books, though the vision may have been no less astonishing.113

Coasting among his islands and visiting new realms, Keats seems less a conquistador than an Odysseus—but we can ask too much of metaphor. It’s amusing but irrelevant that Herschel did not know exactly what he’d seen. He thought at first the blur in the glass was a new comet, a rare enough achievement (less than a dozen had been found that century). Even in the scientific paper announcing the news, he was too diplomatic to do more than strongly imply that it was a planet. Keats’s deep-felt wonder on looking into Homer, his setting the moment at one with the great discoveries of science and exploration, only confirm Clarke’s portrait of his boyish passions—the young Keats who was moved to tears reading aloud from Cymbeline and given to “ecstatic” exclamations about Spenser.114

EAGLE EYES

Poems often need a bit of padding, and in a labyrinthine form like the sonnet an obvious rhyme can be a gift. Still, Cortez’s “eagle eyes” are curious. The ocean was lying directly before him—he could have been blind and not missed it. The common phrase normally referred to keen sight, as in the OED’s citation from Thomas Dekker, “Women haue eagles eyes, / To prie euen to the heart.” (Keats’s “eagle” was deliberate, because in the earliest version he had written “wond’ring eyes,” another bit of juvenile stuffing.) Perhaps the sense in Keats is closer to “predatory” (Dekker may partly embrace this shading), as if new realms of conquest had suddenly been opened. Leigh Hunt remarked that Titian had captured these eagle eyes in the conquistador’s portrait (he does not claim that Keats had seen it), yet no such painting is known.115 Beyond that sea lay other lands, even continents, all yet unconquered. Keats’s Cortez was not thinking of the sea—what he saw was possibility.

For whom does a conquistador conquer? For his king. (Robertson: “Balboa advancing up to the middle in the waves with his buckler and sword, took possession of that ocean in the name of the king his master.”)116 Balboa carried back riches in gold and pearls from his march across the isthmus—booty from local tribes, freely or not so freely given, force of arms ever the handmaiden of extortion.117

The watcher of the skies is neatly parallel—the discoverer of a planet is allowed to name it, figuratively setting a flag upon it. Herschel christened the new planet Georgium Sidus, the Star of George, for the king of England, the German king of that transplanted German. This placed a rather mediocre ruler, George III, among the gods—rather like a long string of Roman emperors. Foreign astronomers found Herschel’s patriotic gesture a bit much. Some would have preferred the name Neptune, but eventually Uranus held sway. Uranus was father of Saturn, as Saturn was father of Jupiter. We are staring back through the paternal bloodline of gods.

SILENT UPON A PEAK

Keats preferred the Petrarchan sonnet almost exclusively, early in his work. Its octet and sestet require a complex intertwining of logic and rhyme (here abba abba cdcdcd)—the Shakespearean sonnet can be satisfied with three examples and a homily. Keats’s octet closes with the crescendo of Chapman’s speech. The sestet opens upon an excitement scarcely contained—contained only by comparison to the watcher of the skies who, after long and fruitless waiting (Herschel had spent months methodically examining the sky sector by small sector for double stars), sees something passed over by all watchers before; and to the conquistador who, on thinnest rumor, has slogged through nearly impassable jungle and swamp in search of a will-o’-the-wisp. Keats asks us to give name to their reactions.

The Isthmus of Panama was then known as the Isthmus of Darien. At the moment of discovery, this Cortez—rapt, enraptured, what you will—stares in wonder. He has entered avant la lettre that mise-en-scène of the Romantic sublime, the sight from a precipice over a distant realm, a view no European had seen. Wonder does not need words or does not have them. Indeed, the sea needed only one word, since what startled the first Europeans was not just the sea’s unexpectedness, or its vastness, but its apparent dead calm—hence the name with which Magellan christened it, the Pacific. That is an apt name for the pure serene.

The new planet glides in silence through another pure serene. Keats forces us to imagine the astronomer’s surprise, excitement, gratification; but while Cortez, his fictional Cortez, gazes out upon the new ocean, his men look wildly at one another, as if unsure what to say, or without the need to say a thing. Perhaps they slowly realize what this discovery must mean—gold. When Clarke remembered that night, he recalled Keats’s “teeming wonderment.”118 The acts of seeing with which the poem began—the “many goodly states and kingdoms seen”—are united with the discoveries of the eye in the new planet and in Cortez’s overlook of the Pacific. Chapman, in a nice turn, had to be heard to be seen—the words on the page were not enough.

I am taken with Helen Vendler’s notion that Keats’s tropes represent his “active search for the right simile,” his “wrestling with experience”; but I’m not convinced that Cortez is therefore the more adequate symbol, that Keats simply replaces the watcher of the skies, who is “too passive, too isolated, too impotent.”119 She underestimates the long nights, the impatient hours, the deep frustrations of the astronomer (Keats knew the anxiety of anticipation)—the poet, like the astronomer, works in solitude. Had Keats laid the tropes down in reverse order, the effect might have been equally striking. These are not images competing, one summarily dropped in favor of the other, but collaborative, offering discovery divided against itself: the night versus the day, the solitary versus the group, looking up into the overwhelming emptiness of the heavens versus looking out upon the vacancy of the sea (Keats’s title is “On First Looking Into …”).

Keats knew Homer’s words spoken aloud, loudly, but he found his words describing silence—the silence, in a way, enjoyed on his long walk home, contemplating all he had heard. In another minute, Cortez’s men may have begun to shout in excitement; but the poem closes, decrescendo, on the sublime moment of revelation, the silence yet unbroken.120 The sonnet was the young poet’s first major poem, written before Keats was Keats. (Leigh Hunt later remarked that it “completely announced the new poet taking possession”—it would be tempting to say, like a conquistador, or a man granted a fiefdom by Apollo.)121 Despite its flaws, we read it tainted by foreknowledge of all the poems that followed.

There is a last irony, pointed out long ago by Keats’s biographer Aileen Ward. The line that so entranced Keats, “The sea had soakt his heart through,” is not Homer.122 Indeed, the heavily layered description Keats adored was sometimes just George Chapman. Homer’s grasshoppers were not “cold spinie”; his Neptune did not make the city of Aegae (Aegas, in Chapman) shake “with his drad entrie”; nor, in the description of the wreck of Odysseus, is there mention of a woman’s birth pangs. Even the gate of ivory may lead to invention. Chapman could on occasion out-Homer Homer.

DONALD JUSTICE, “HENRY JAMES BY THE PACIFIC”

The American Scene, that itinerary of his brilliantly melancholy return to America, took Henry James through New York and New England, down into the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, and as far as Palm Beach. He left the journey where in a sense it left him:

There was no doubt, under the influence of this last look, that Florida still had, in her ingenuous, not at all insidious way, the secret of pleasing, and that even round about me the vagueness was still an appeal. The vagueness was warm, the vagueness was bright, the vagueness was sweet, being scented and flowered and fruited; above all, the vagueness was somehow consciously and confessedly weak. I made out in it something of the look of the charming shy face that desires to communicate and that yet has just too little expression.123

James in his fiction was the master of such characterization, captured almost in the act of becoming present and vivid to his own imagination, “vague” because the impressions from which character might be “built up” had not coalesced, or solidified, or congealed. (That the character is here the state of Florida suggests how far toward fiction James’s journey had taken him.) The passage is a reminder that James’s style itself depends on a beguiling, willful vagueness, one extraordinary in how much it reveals while seeming to wind candy floss around a paper core.

There, a sentence or two later, the book ended, at least in its American edition, published in 1907. The British edition pressed on for a few pages, where James ruminated, thoughtfully, lugubriously, over what he had discovered. He had seen an immense swath of country, or as much as the Pullman cars could show him through the “great square of plate-glass.”124 However much the train’s “great monotonous rumble” seemed to boast, “See what I’m making of all this—see what I’m making, what I’m making!” James could answer only, “I see what you are not making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not.”125 The America he saw was a solitude ravaged:

You touch the great lonely land—as one feels it still to be—only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag with a cynicism all your own.126

Tocqueville was no more eloquent in his admiration or despair.

James’s journey did not end with the book—after his return north, he pressed westward to Chicago, to Los Angeles and San Francisco and Seattle, then back east through St. Paul. The American Scene was meant merely as an introduction. Though it had been his intention to offer a sequel on his western visit, seeing the vast continent he had previously only imagined, events overtook him. The San Francisco earthquake in April 1906, less than a year after James sailed back to England, disturbed him so much that he ended his American reveries. As his nephew Harry later recalled, “He felt it as an event so stupendous and sensational that it must throw what he had to say into the shade.”127

It was perhaps this sense of incompletion, this invocation of the artistic idea conceived, toyed with, and reluctantly abandoned, that drew Donald Justice to that western journey. James’s impressions survive only in stray letters and a few pages in a notebook, but from their incomplete matter and their troubled grandeur Justice wrote a sonnet as sad and knowing as any in American literature.

HENRY JAMES BY THE PACIFIC

In a hotel room by the sea, the Master

Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.

Not that he foresees immediate disaster,

Only a sort of freshness being lost—

Or should he go on calling it Innocence?

The sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone;

Wall Street controls the wilderness. There’s an immense

Novel in all this waiting to be done,

But not, not—sadly enough—by him. His talents,

Such as they may be, want an older theme,

One rather more civilized than this, on balance.

For him now always the consoling dream

Is just the mild dear light of Lamb House falling

Beautifully down the pages of his calling.128

The sonnet was collected (as “Epilogue: Coronado Beach, California”) with three brief preambles under the title “American Scenes (1904–1905).”129 There the poet drew from James’s journey for portraits, each just two quatrains, of Cambridge houses, a railroad junction south of Richmond, and an old cemetery in Charleston. That is how the poem appears in his Collected Poems, though Justice had originally published the sonnet separately130 and later published it alone once more, under the title above.131

The poem begins almost whimsically, with a sidelong allusion to Poe, whose “kingdom by the sea” has been reduced to a modern hotel-room, the sort to which James resorted after those deprivations and inconveniences that were a tax on his patience through much of his travels. (He called the hotel a “synonym for civilization.”)132 The pathos-heavy verses of “Annabel Lee,” its lovers parted by death, read now like a popular song composed for the fashionable morbidity of the 1840s (the poem was indeed adapted in that vein just before the Civil War).133 The constriction and the absurdity of the hotel room—its rented comforts, its transient occupation—seem the wrong casement for that Jamesian brooding from which his rare, rarefied art so often hatched. In a hotel, he was no better than any other tourist. The poem’s first provocation lies in the title—who would imagine James, that denizen of the parlor, that habitué of New York and London, having anything to do with the Pacific? He is out of his ken.

James, however, loved Southern California: “The days have been mostly here of heavenly beauty, and the flowers, the wild flowers just now in particular, … fairly rage, with radiance.”134 We would think ill of the novelist had he known nothing of nature; we should not think ill because he was no camper, no lover of the discomforts a hotel’s comfort might make bearable. Here at the start, Justice has made a small protest against Thoreau, against the Romanticism that would never truck with hotels—the contemplations of art do not require for their setting the “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death” of Paradise Lost.135 The sublime may be purchased on hire, in other words, and at a remove.

That lost freshness is the freshness of the whole country, a century or more after the end of the Revolution. The American experiment always seemed tenuous, perhaps more so to those who had long lived abroad. (Who within a country has ever seen it plain?) There were disasters immediately ahead—the San Francisco quake, the Panic of 1907—but none worse than the disasters behind: the Civil War, the Panic of 1873, and the Year of the Locust the following year. Still, every freshness is ground down by history; and James’s great theme is the loss of innocence, dramatized most brutally where the innocent meets a Europe wiser and more cunning and fatal. (The distinction is not subtle—freshness is lost gradually, minute by minute, but innocence is lost once for ever.) The reader cannot ignore that, for the aging novelist now in the shadows of his career, the freshness lost is personal as well. The Age of Innocence, by James’s friend Edith Wharton, would not be published until after his death—but it was set in that Gilded Age James knew well.

Sailing to America after an absence of more than twenty years, the novelist sought signs of the life he had abandoned. (He would have titled his book The Return of the Native, he wrote in a letter, “if Thomas Hardy hadn’t long ago made that impossible.”)136 Perhaps the saddest short story of his late career is “The Jolly Corner” (1908) in which an expatriate returns to New York after an even longer lingering abroad, returns repeatedly to his large old-fashioned house, now closed up, where he is haunted by a figure glimpsed briefly, flittingly, at the end of a vista of rooms or half concealed in the gloom, a figure with the face of a stranger and a mutilated hand. Only at the end of the tale does the exile realize that this compound ghost is the self he would have become, had he remained. The fiction possesses a rueful substrate for an author long dispossessed. James visited the family home in Boston, the house on Ashburton Place where he had lived during the late years of the Civil War, and was so moved that weeks later he came once more, only to find the building razed and the ground naked and bare, “as if the bottom had fallen out of one’s own biography.”137

No wonder James often found solace in his rented rooms. He wrote from a club in Chicago, just before the push west,

I am already … rather spent and weary, weary of motion and chatter, and oh, of such an unimagined dreariness of ugliness (on many, on most sides!) and of the perpetual effort of trying to “do justice” to what one doesn’t like. If one could only damn it and have done with it! … This Chicago is huge, infinite …; black, smoky, old-looking.… Yet this club (which looks old and sober too!) is an abode of peace, a benediction to me in the looming largeness; I live here, and they put one up … with one’s so excellent room with perfect bathroom and w.c., of its own.138

If even Paradise benefits from a Paradise to escape to, how much more important that Hell should. (The charming rumbling and rambling of James’s letters might remind us that his brother, William James, coined the phrase “stream of consciousness.”)

It may not be surprising that James felt this loss of freshness just where freshness achieved so much amid so little, in that California spring where a man could dine like an Adam. (“I live on oranges and olives,” James remarked in delight, “fresh from the tree.”)139 That is the Eden for which this Adam had perhaps unknowingly been searching, yet it casts further into darkness all that James has seen and disliked in the hideously altered cities along the way. Paradise may be regained, but never innocence.

The second quatrain of the sonnet suggests what might be made of those American losses—the exile is always seeking to turn into gold his portion of straw. In view of that alluring emptiness of the Pacific, James, the poet’s James, contemplates the inner vacancy of the country he has crossed. Arriving in Los Angeles after a tiresome journey on the Southern Pacific, the real James reported that he had “reached this racketing spot … many hours late, & after an ordeal, of alkali deserts & sleep-defying ‘sleepers’ drawn out almost to madness.”140 From all that muddled, middling emptiness, something, perhaps.

The “sad-faced monsters” had been slaughtered nearly to extinction by hide and tongue hunters (pickled buffalo tongue was once a delicacy). Much of that Jamesian sense of a future foreclosed falls into the simple, discomfiting sentence, “Wall Street controls the wilderness.” This was the end Frederick Jackson Turner had foreseen, or worse than the end.141 The possibility of infinite American expansion, one that contemplated the eventual annexation of Mexico and Canada, with further annexations abroad, was no longer possible. The escape within, the movement ever west, had died with the closing of the frontier. Wall Street owned the wilderness because Congress had deeded it away. To build a railroad across that vast country known as the Great American Desert, transcontinental railroad companies had been given generous land grants along the track—land greater in area than the state of Texas. The very comforts James enjoyed in his posh Pullman were purchased from those destroying the wilderness, yet given what made James James he could have seen that landscape only by train.

The great novels of the Master (as his disciples called him, perhaps not always without teasing) were now behind him—The Golden Bowl (1904), The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and more distantly The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Only recently behind, the greater of them, but behind nonetheless. Ahead lay the tedious gathering and finicky rewriting of the New York edition, with its tortured, artfully ambitious introductions; but his triumphs would now be rare, dominated by mishaps and failed projects. Apart from those introductions and half-a-dozen mostly mediocre stories, his finished work would be reduced to his refined memoirs of childhood and the end of youth. It was perhaps James’s fear of what lay ahead at sixty-one that drew Justice at sixty to contemplate the artistic crisis every artist may eventually face.

There might have been a Jamesian novel of the West, a novel that encapsulated the American character—its industry, its careless ambition and go-ahead nature, its heedless desire for profit. It would have been unlike any novel the Master had written. He had often set the American character in the frame of Europe, where in mutual incomprehension the American sometimes lost more than innocence. (“Innocence,” with its brute capital, is where the poem leaves the freshness offered by youth—the novelist aging as well as his country—and enters the realm of Adamic innocence and the loss of Paradise.) There seems no evidence in his letters or journals that James ever contemplated such a novel, but Justice uses the idea to broach the real subject, the artist’s recognition of his own limits, and of his eventual extinction. Justice, who never wrote a poem of major length, and except once or twice never a love poem, filled his late work with gestures of valediction, often in poems of quiet refusal.

It is a terrible moment, when a man realizes that he no longer possesses a reflexive understanding of his own country. On his belated return to America, James found once familiar cities he hardly recognized, like Boston and New York (as well as a few, like Philadelphia, that came as a relief). “The Jolly Corner” suggests that to have stayed would have been an invitation to tragedy; but of course James could not know what novels he could have written, what triumphs he could have endured, had he not moved to England. That might have been a melancholy thought.

The terms in which Justice casts that knowledge are those of talent. The word, in its modern sense, derives from the parable in Matthew 25, where before a long journey a man divides his treasure among three servants—five to the first, two to the second, and a single one to the last, each according to his merits. On his return, when asked how they employed their “talents,” the first two servants boast that they had doubled his money by using it for trade. (It would be profitable to know what sharp practice or Yankee cuteness the servants used.) The gold or silver talent, weighing sixty-five pounds, was no mean amount of money. The last and lowest servant confesses that, fearing his master’s wrath, he had buried his only talent. The master has him cast “into outer darkness.” The parable, of course, looks toward those gifts granted by God—what we now, following the parable, call talents. If we do not use God’s gifts, the burden of the parable implies, we shall be cast out as well. It also implies that, however lavish or mean the gift, we are expected to use whatever we’re given.

One of the stray amusements of Justice’s sonnet is the poet’s care with words—the rhyme between talents and balance that calls up the moneychanger’s balance, the alliteration tying Wall Street grotesquely to wilderness, the brute conjunction of Master and disaster (used to very different effect in Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art”). From the moneychanger’s balance we have acquired our sense of an account in balance. When Milton wrote, “To serve therewith my Maker, and present / My true account” in the sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent,”142 the word refers both to financial accounting and to the account rendered to God at the Day of Judgment—it may also be the tale the poet feels impelled to write. Such small pleasures, such small recognitions of pleasure, are those any good poet scatters by the way. Though they may be bound to meaning, they are not necessary to it; yet they come with such frequency in Justice’s poem that a reader may be tempted to look deeper, to find perhaps in those vanished sad-faced monsters a reminder of the vastation James’s father faced in midlife, a year after his son’s birth—or of those devastations, those terrible epiphanies, James forced upon his major characters.

Perhaps, at the outer edge of affection and allusion, Innocence bears hidden ties to immense, partly because Innocence has been conditioned by the previous lost (what is greater than lost innocence?), which sits menacingly above it at line end, like the warning Dante saw over the gates of Hell. Immense is dramatically and seductively enjambed with Novel—the line might have continued, “There’s an immense / Tragedy” or “Sadness” or “Relief.” The play among these collusions is intricate, and not just because James was often drawn in his novels, immensely, to the theme of lost innocence. Though I resist critics who find meaning in the physical—often accidental—placement of words, had I written the poem I would not have been displeased by the accident. In his sonnet, Milton too uses the parable of the talents. The line “And that one talent which is death to hide” swings Janus-like between Matthew and our modern usage, which predates Milton by two centuries. Milton’s crisis is his blindness—how can he continue to write afterward? If a man fails to use God’s gift, will he be cast, in this case, from an inner darkness into an outer one? What lay before the poet was the epic of lost innocence, Paradise Lost, the work (really the long novel of a different day) that looms in the background of this closing of the frontier.

The minor pleasures extend to meter—Justice’s pentameter is canny enough to absorb the juddering of the third line, where the poet has probably invoked the rare privilege of an initial anapest: “Not that HE foreSEES.” (Otherwise the line would be trochaic pentameter—or even hexameter.) The tenth line is similarly difficult, and would require an odd emphasis (“SUCH as THEY MAY be”—trochee-spondee—when the phrasing seems to ask for “SUCH as THEY may BE”). That stress on “may” introduces a fine hesitation to James’s thinking that, given his manner, might be perfect here. The anapests sown through the poem are otherwise naturally inserted, so never assertive; and, because of the sharp caesura, the reader might not notice that the seventh line could be scanned as an alexandrine.

The sonnet is a form with certain debts that must be recognized and paid. Justice was a poet who rarely worked in form without testing it a little—he trusted that a good artist could get away with things a bad one cannot. It is by such pressure on convention, by such slight fractures of the expected, that a reader is made sensitive to the artist’s finesse—the finesse evident, for example, in the mimicry of the final line, where the initial trochee allows a fall brought up short, amusingly, by the word “down” (the fall begins with “falling” in the previous line). A reversed first foot is the most common variation in iambic pentameter; but it’s unusual to find in meter the echoes of meaning, or at least ones the least interesting.

A man who knew nothing but civilization might have found a novel on the wilderness, or what wilderness yet remained, a bad idea. Twain perhaps reached a similar impasse when he came to write the sequel to Huckleberry Finn. On the Mississippi, he was in his medium—the world where he had grown up, the river he had traveled as a cub pilot during the great days of the steamboat. The sequel was titled Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians,143 and after some fifty pages Twain abandoned it. It’s one thing to imagine a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court—such a novel can dine on secondhand medievalism—but the American wilderness was to Twain both too close and too far away. He was out of his element, and he knew it.

The sonnet ends with a dying fall, a couplet using feminine rhymes. Falling/calling echoes the feminine rhymes of Master/disaster and talents/balance, among the most galvanizing rhymes in the poem. The consoling dream for James can no longer be of the elsewhere, of America unseen or America abandoned—both are now lost to him; and he is driven back to Lamb House, his beloved home in Rye, where he had written the three extraordinary novels of the early century. The consoling dream may be a retreat, as the poet must have realized—in its first printing, the line read “recurring,” which feels darker, more burdened, a spectral possession like that in “The Jolly Corner.” Justice meant the dream to be comforting, no doubt, for a James so far from home. “Consoling” secures the warmer, less psychological reading.

The return to Lamb House feels like a defeat, however, a defeat only partially rescued by that falling light—falling handsomely, but still falling. “Fall” is a charged word after so much talk of innocence. Adam and Eve were ejected from their kingdom—but in a sense James has withdrawn to his own paradise, there to live out his days like Prospero in retirement. The word that ends the poem, however, is “calling.” Milton quarreled with himself about how to use those God-given talents; he found his answer, not in Matthew 25, but in the parable of the vineyard in Matthew 20:1–16, where men hired in the morning complain when those hired later in the day are paid the same amount. “God doth not need / Either man’s work or His own gifts,” Milton is informed by Patience. Though not one of the seven cardinal or theological virtues, Patience was mentioned as the “fruit of the Spirit” by Paul in Galatians 5:22, along with love, joy, peace, and other virtues. It was translated in the King James Version as “longsuffering,” hence Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait.” (James knew patience as a devil—he remarks in his brief notes on California, “I can only invoke my familiar demon of patience, who always comes, doesn’t he?, when I call.”)144 Milton must wait, in other words, for the call. We still use that word, in the sense of artistic calling, though we know it better by its Latin equivalent, vocation.

At the end of the poem, James is called back to his calling, to those words he puts down so masterfully—and the reader should not ignore the quiet, almost religious gesture, neither to be mocked nor really to be believed, of the English light falling onto the page (an illuminated manuscript!) like the light of the Annunciation. In this ending, the artist has been summoned to his gifts once more, called by whatever figure we wish to name (God, the Muse, one’s private demon of artistic necessity). It is perhaps a sly touch that those late novels had been composed by what might also be called a calling—beginning in 1897, at least at Lamb House, a secretary typed out James’s sentences as he dictated them.

A reader of more religious temperament might discover in the name Lamb House a hint of passivity and sacrifice. Indeed, James could be seen, if not a lamb led to ritual slaughter, then as the passive recipient of those gifts—but the retreat to Rye does suggest that no longer will James take on a major challenge in the novel. (Indeed, apart from an adaptation he never finished another.) He will merely write bad plays, thumbing through his life in his autobiographies, and his art in the New York edition, waiting for the end. The name of the house makes an accidental but severe contrast to those monsters of the plains, shot down in their thousands and tens of thousands for that most American of religions, commerce. (All for pickled buffalo tongues, winter coats, and lap robes.) Though that calling back was in some ways a failure for James, it was not for Justice, whose late poems were among his most gorgeous and most darkly revealing.

Justice drew heavily from The American Scene and the attendant notebook for the sets of paired quatrains that preceded the sonnet in “American Scenes (1904–1905).” In “Cambridge in Winter,” for example:

Immense pale houses! Sunshine just now and snow

Light up and pauperize the whole brave show—

Each fanlight, each veranda, each good address,

All a mere paint and pasteboard paltriness!

 

These winter sunsets are the one fine thing:

Blood on the snow, some last impassioned fling,

The wild frankness and sadness of surrender—

As if our cities ever could be tender!145

The original lines in the notebook read:

The snow, the sunshine, light up and pauperize all the wooden surfaces, all the mere paint and pasteboard paltriness. The one fine thing are the winter sunsets, the blood on the snow, the pink crystal of the west, the wild frankness, wild sadness (?)—so to speak—of the surrender.146

You must cast an eye upward from these lines for the phrases condensed and formed into the initial exclamation: “the immense rise in the type and scope and scale of the American house, as it more and more multiplies.” The poet has adjusted the syntax, tightened the prose here and particularized it there (to pointed effect in the third line), and allowed the rhymes suggested in James to drive to the surface some of the themes he chose to leave buried. The scene of the houses is so resplendent that the reader who fails to give due weight to “pauperize” and “paltriness” may not realize how much James detested new American architecture.

Justice had less material for the California scene—or, more likely, he conceived of the sonnet differently, as a portrait of James, not an invocation of the Master’s observations of the here or there. The only debt the sonnet owes to The American Scene lies in the penultimate line—James had remarked in his notebook, “These things are all packed away, … till I shall let in upon them the mild still light of dear old L[amb] H[ouse].”147 There were probably other Jamesian sources—note a passage from early in his unfinished The Middle Years (1917):

Youth is an army, the whole battalion of our faculties and our freshnesses, our passions and our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy’s country, the country of the general lost freshness.148

Here the pressure and attention of the sonnet is felt in fine.

The sonnet may have an even more obscure source, however—“On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” The poems each concern discovery of a land often rumored but never visited. Lack of ancient Greek kept Keats beyond the borders of Homer’s domain, as no doubt sheer discomfort had for James when thinking of California—the transcontinental railroad was not completed until he was in his mid-twenties, and it offered only miserable comfort for years thereafter. Balboa (to correct Keats’s error) reached the shores of the Pacific after a slog through sixty miles of jungle and swamp, a journey of some twenty-five days.149 James could have traveled from Chicago to Los Angeles—two thousand miles or better—in less than three, though delays made him late.150 Swaddled in the absurd comforts of a Pullman car, he would have been provided with a chef and a stock of good wines. (He mentions in a letter from Chicago that he believes the train equipped with “barber’s shops, bathrooms, stenographers and typists.”)151 Recall that according to William Robertson in The History of America (1777), when Balboa reached the Pacific with his cohort of men,

as he beheld the South Sea stretching in endless prospect below him, he fell on his knees, and, lifting up his hands to Heaven, returned thanks to God.… His followers … rushed forward to join in his wonder, exultation and gratitude.152

This was the version Keats knew—he too wrote from books. Balboa stood alone, looking out at his discovery, knowing that history had changed. Beyond the horizon lay other lands to conquer and the great trading entrepôts of Asia. He had found the realms of gold.

Keats too was changed. Having been introduced one night to Chapman’s translation of Homer, he wrote his sonnet rapidly and fluently the next morning—it was the first poem of genius he produced. Having come the immense distance, James—the James that Justice partially invents—takes stock of himself, looking back over the country so rapidly compassed. It is a retrospective of a life unlived—he sees the great themes a novelist might gather in force, the life of the country to which he had been born. He knows he must abandon them, as he had abandoned the country itself twenty-odd years before. For James, that country, his own country, must remain unwritten. He would turn homeward, having found at the far reaches of the New World, not possibilities opened, but possibilities finally and forever closed.

Each poet has used a great literary figure as the medium of self-discovery—these are poems in part about the rewards of reading. Keats casts his discovery in terms of conquest. Having written the sonnet, he embarked upon his brief, radiant career. For Justice, his career nearing its end, the question is whether age makes the artist impotent. If the later sonnet is a peculiar inversion of “Chapman’s Homer” (James’s observation on youth’s “reluctant march into the enemy’s country” provides the military link), each is also a performative act whose writing resolves an artistic crisis. Keats felt denied the greatest poet of the Western world by his ignorance of ancient Greek. Chapman’s translation opened the borders, and the poet responded by showing what his gifts could accomplish. Justice considered whether the aging artist could continue to write, whether age emasculates the artist—the beauty of the sonnet proves the anxiety premature. In “When I consider,” Milton also found the answer to a question—whether, though blind, he could still exercise his magnificent gifts.

Henry James stayed at the Hotel del Coronado when he visited San Diego—the conquistadors who possessed Keats left their mark on James as well. (George Sand, he once wrote, “found her gift of improvisation … by leaping—a surprised conquistador of ‘style’—straight upon the coral strand.”)153 The hotel, built in 1888, still stands, grand or grandiose as ever. I once asked Donald Justice whether he had recognized the odd, subterranean links between “Chapman’s Homer” and “Henry James by the Pacific.” He seemed surprised, then gratified. After thinking for a moment, he said, “Not at all.”