On first looking into Champman's Homer

• Structure

  • Keats expresses the intellectual and literary pleasures that he derived from reading of ballads and romances of the olden times. inspired by his reading of Chapman’s translation of homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
  • Keats has read many books of adventurous and romantic tales. His reading has been like traveling in the different countries of the mind – the countries of imagination and fancy. From these travels, he has derived inestimable pleasure.
  • Petrarchan sonnet
• Themes


  • Power of poetry
  • Discovery and voyage
  • Imagination
• "Much I have travell'd in the realms of gold"


  • direct statement, typical of Keats, using the first person singular pronoun. The “realms of gold” symbolise literature and the arts as the poet sees them. Contextual evidence suggests this was a personal sonnet. For Keats, extraordinary creative accomplishments like Homer’s poetry— examples of human culture—isthe most valuable things
  • the mythic, almost fairy-tale like connotations of “gold” and “realms” give this image a kind of cold alien grandeur that suggests Keats had yet to feel truly at home in this domain until reading Chapman’s Homer.
• "Round many western islands have I been which bards in fealty to Apollo hold"


  • implies that he is metaphorically travelling around islands, unable to moor.
  • Keats feels alienated from the islands and literature they symbolise. He is unwelcome and must remain at sea.
  • Keats' alienation is explored here through Apollo, the mythical Greek god, who nudges the poet and therefore closer geographically to Homer'
  • “Fealty” is a pledge of allegiance, usually religious. The dedication to Apollo is apt, as he is the god of poetry and music amongst other attributes.
• "Yet did I never breathe its pure serene till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold"


  • Keats' metaphor — describing Homer’s poetry as the air he breathes — demonstrates the value placed on literature - biological necessity - so this indicates Keats saw the importance of ‘breathing out’ his own literature.
  • longing to produce poetry valued by society, Keats took it hard when Blackwoods and other literary magazines rejected his work - assonant breathe and serene rhyming
  • emphatic, with strong monosyllables and ending in the consonant rhyming ‘loud’ and ‘bold’; the thumping ’d’s giving emphasis.
• "Then I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken"


  • compares Keats' feelings of awe to looking through a telescope at the universe in all its beauty - knowledge of the solar system was expanded by William Herschel, who identified the planet Uranus in 1781.
  • The poem subtly raises the issue of the discovery of planets and continents, as well as the literature of the past. There is an underlying sub-text that is critical of the vanity of man who thinks he grasps the totality of knowledge and understanding of the world.
  • Verb swims links to watery images
• "Look'd at each other with a wild surmise - silent, upon a peak in Darien"


  • The ‘wild surmise’ describes their attempt to make sense of the vastness and rationalise it, but fail - oxymoron
  • Darien is in Central America - contrast between the old world and the new - metaphor for Keats who was a ‘reader’ and the Keats who was adventurously creating. ‘peak’ - spiritual heights reached through writing.
  • ‘silent’ - ironic - Keats comparing himself to an adventurer to describe his creative forays, why should he be ‘silent’ - his mind must think deeply before finding his poetic voice.