Poem of the Week: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" by John Keats

From The Guardian Books Blog: "Keats was bantering, perhaps, when he asserted at Haydon's gathering that Newton had spoiled the rainbow by reducing it to a prism. But again in his poem Lamia he alludes to the power of "cold philosophy" to "unweave the rainbow". There's no doubt that his death-shadowed early life provided an additional impulse to his devotion to literature: he needed an escape route into enchantment. And yet, Keats's openness to experience and his powerful impulse towards self-education are hardly the qualities of an opponent of science. That famously stated willingness to remain "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts" is surely proof enough of an essentially scientific temperament. He was medically trained, and, as all biographical accounts make clear, he confronted his own mortality to the very end with courageous, pitiless realism."

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travelled 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-browed 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 Cortes when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

--John Keats