袖珍经典｜苏薇星：On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats

袖珍经典｜第01期

“一部经典作品要说的话永远说不完”，经典作品所具有的特殊魅力正是在于，我们每一次与它接触，无论是初见还是重温，都能够获得一份新颖的体验。因而，了解经典、品味经典，是一个值得不懈追求的永恒课题。自今日起，文研院特推出“袖珍经典”栏目，邀请校内外学者每期围绕古今中外的一部经典作品进行解读，带领读者捕捉其中细节，深挖背后蕴含。希望透过对经典作品的赏析，我们可以置身于文化和历史的脉络中，与经典作品产生共鸣，将经典的种子留在我们身上。

在首期栏目中，北京大学外国语学院英语系苏薇星老师将聚焦于英国浪漫主义诗人约翰·济慈（John Keats）的十四行诗On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer，回顾其创作背景，介绍诗歌在形式和音韵上的特点，从历史语境中分析诗歌蕴藏的文化意涵。此外，苏薇星老师特意录制音频，对这首诗进行了朗读与诠释，使得读者可以更为直观地欣赏诗歌本身的韵律美感。感谢苏薇星老师授权发布！现在，就让我们一同进入济慈的On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer，跟随诗人的想象力，在了解诗人生命历程与体验的同时，也发现自我生命的丰富与力量。

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

John Keats

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been,

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet never did I 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.[i]

导　读

苏薇星

The poem you have just listened to is a sonnet composed by John Keats a few weeks before his twenty-first birthday. Keats was born in 1795. Are we born only once? The American philosopher and psychologist William James, in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, classifies human beings into the once-born type and the twice-born type. The once-born carry on their lives without any pressing need for deliverance. The twice-born crave deliverance. James, no doubt, is exploring religious experience in that treatise. But we will see that even if one belongs to the once-born type, the subject of rebirth is no less relevant. Why don’t we consider this question through the “Chapman’s Homer” sonnet, which I will call Keats’s baptismal poem.

“A sonnet is a moment’s monument-- / Memorial from the Soul’s eternity / To one dead deathless hour,” thus writes a Victorian sonneteer – Dante Gabriel Rossetti. These verses may not apply in equal measure to all sonnets, but they well characterize the Keats sonnet in question. Which moment does the poet commemorate and immortalize? Let’s travel back to an October night in 1816, to the flat of Keats’s friend Charles Cowden Clarke. Keats, who never went to college, is ready to begin his practice as an apothecary; he has not yet avowed his poetic vocation. For the past few years Keats has been writing poems, and only one found its way into print. Clarke is Keats’s senior by eight years. Their friendship already boasts a long history, having begun at Enfield Academy, where Keats received his education, and Charles’s father, John Clarke, was headmaster. Greek was not part of the curriculum at that progressive-minded school, so Keats did not achieve proficiency in the Greek language. On this autumn evening, Clarke has at hand a folio copy of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, translated by the Elizabethan poet and dramatist George Chapman. What happened throughout that sleepless night and the next morning, which Clarke later documents in his memoirs, must be familiar to every devotee of Keats.

The two friends set about reading some renowned passages they knew previously in Pope’s rendition.[ii] As Clarke recalls:

One scene I could not fail to introduce to him—the shipwreck of Ulysses, in the fifth book of the “Odysseis,” and I had the reward of one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:--

Then forth he came, his both knees falt’ring, both

His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth

His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath

Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.

The sea had soak’d his heart through: all his vaines,

His toiles had rack’t, t’a labouring woman’s paines.[iii]

These verses describe Odysseus’s struggle as he survives Poseidon’s vengeful storm and lands on the island of the Phaiakians. At daybreak Keats takes leave of Clarke, walks two miles south back to his lodgings, puts pen to paper, and by ten o’clock the same morning Clarke is reading Keats’s manuscript of the “Chapman’s Homer” sonnet, which has just arrived by mail. Only one line was significantly revised by the poet afterwards. From this day onward, the two friends would share, as Clarke informs us, “many after-treats” of Chapman’s translation of Homer.

济慈读到的《伊利亚特》译本：Chapman's Homer

A compact and often intricate lyric, the sonnet originated in Italy in the thirteenth century, and spread far and wide. In the sixteenth century, Wyatt transplanted the sonnet into the English language. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney became the first generation of great English sonneteers. The Petrarchan form, imported from Italy, and its local adaptation – the Shakespearean form – have continued since then as the two major sonnet forms in English. Each has maintained its own structure and rhyme scheme, while evolving its distinctive dynamic over the centuries. In the Petrarchan sonnet an octave works its way up to a turning point (volta), where a sestet takes over and imbues the poem with a greater dynamism. In the Shakespearean sonnet, three discrete quatrains press forward towards a couplet, which is expected to sum up all preceding lines with a memorable sententia or, occasionally, to turn the tables by a counter-argument.

Keats tried his hand at quite a variety of sonnet forms; he often grafts one form onto another. In “Chapman’s Homer” we find a Petrarchan sonnet, though the octave may strike us as quite Shakespearean in its dynamic. The poet begins by applying the fairly common journey metaphor to his poetic aspiration. Let’s take this opportunity to review some of Keats’s formative inspirations. Clarke, in his memoirs, recalls the adolescent Keats’s fascination with Spenser’s Epithalamion. This friend also remembers how Keats once borrowed a copy of Book 1 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and that night, went through it “as a young horse would through a spring meadow—ramping!” One of Keats’s very first poems is titled “Imitation of Spenser.” Besides, Chaucer’s poetry diffused an irresistible appeal for Keats. Byron’s lyrics, for a while, also cast its enchantment.

斯宾塞的《仙后》

“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.” From one line to the next, the largely regular progression of iambic pentameter sustains an equable, contented tone. Phrasal balance dovetails with syntactical symmetry. Each line marches onward without a caesura until the end. These features conspire to produce the apparent autonomy of the relaxed opening quatrain. However, the glory of “much” and “many” starts to fade when the poet confesses his longing for the One, the anguish of perpetual delay in arriving at his terra or acqua incognita: “Oft of one wide expanse had I been told / That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne.” Here the sonnet is set to realize its volta or turn. The “pure serene,” a literary expression evoking the tranquil immensity of the sky or sea, announces the sestet. What does Keats discover, or rather, what is revealed to him, when he hears “Chapman speak out loud and bold”?

Keats’s voice, too, enters a different key, “loud and bold” in its own way. The leisurely travel metaphor is superseded by the exploration trope, i.e., the astronomer’s cosmological quest and the navigator’s New World adventure. For the “watcher of the skies,” Keats’s contemporaries would very likely recall William Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, but we needn’t fix a particular allusion. Next, the poet in rapture identifies himself with Cortez, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, at the moment of his “first looking into” the Pacific Ocean, “upon a peak in Darien,” Panama. It is common for editors since the mid-twentieth-century to annotate this detail with a correction, reminding the reader that it was Balboa, not Cortez, who enjoyed the first sight of the Pacific by a European, from its eastern shores, in 1513. In recent decades, however, some scholars have contended that Keats knew exactly what he was doing. Let’s leave aside the details of this controversy.

Hernán Cortés，阿兹特克帝国的征服者

In contrast to the even-paced rhythm of the sonnet’s octave, a verve infiltrates the one-sentence sestet like a flash of lightning.This electrifying impulse informs the radiant testimony of the following lines: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” Here the first line overflows its boundary into the second. How much the astronomer must have toiled for and dreamed of the new orb. Yet he is not portrayed in active pursuit. Perhaps a humble yet noble passivity attends the instant of discovery; the sky-watcher is attending, i.e., waiting for and being attentive to, the revelation. In the next analogy, the conquistador Cortez’s “eagle eyes” – if we judge by other eagle imagery in Keats’s corpus – probably do not signal rapacious ambition, but marvel and amazement at the sublime. Throughout the next four lines, enjambment helps maintain rhythmic tension. The thrill of excitement disrupts the iambic meter here and there. Caesurae arrest the flow of verses – for example, in order to insert the suspenseful parenthesis about Cortez’s men “look[ing] at each other with a wild surmise.” The sense of suspense culminates in a conspicuous caesura in the final line, as early as after the second syllable: “Silent,” as if poetic utterance were instantly muted by an act that the ancient Greeks would call θαυμαζειν – to be speechless with wonder. The remaining notes do not take us anywhere but transfix us right here: “upon a peak in Darien.” This final unstressed, self-effacing vowel, echoing its counterpart in “Silent,” brings the sonnet to close in a rapt surrender to wonder.

A new planet and the first sight of the Pacific do not merely add to our store of knowledge; rather, they initiate us into “an original relation with the universe” (to recall Emerson’s exhortation). First looking into Chapman’s Homer, Keats, we might imagine, discovered Greek antiquity for himself, and thereby discovered himself—a new self at the beginning of an original relation. This sonnet that within its fourteen lines translates us from terrestrial realms to celestial spheres, as it were, celebrates the poet’s personal Renaissance, through baptism in the Homeric Aegean.

济慈肖像

A new planet hints at another, at other stars and systems, other universes, to be discovered. The Pacific provokes wonder not just by its immensity, but above all by its suggestion of infinity. The Keats scholar Stuart Sperry acutely recognizes in this poem “a realization of infinitely deepening perspectives into the mysterious and unknown.”[iv] Even being twice-born may not suffice. To be sure, the “Chapman’s Homer” sonnet did not translate novitiate Keats to beatitude once and for all. He remained committed to what he would later call “the vale of soul-making,” where other predecessors, including Shakespeare and Milton, awaited him to reinherit their legacies. Not one definitive deliverance, but acts of finite transcendence awaited Keats in what remained of his brief and fiery life. In early 1818, a little over a year after “first looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Keats sits down to read King Lear once more, during his composition of the romance Endymion: “once again, the fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay / Must I burn through,” he writes. On this occasion Keats craves a fire-baptism, the rebirth of the phoenix: “When through this old oak forest I am gone / Give me phoenix wings to fly at my desire.”

In Keats’s world, it behooves even deities to be born again. Toward the end of Hyperion: A Fragment (1818-19), we behold nascent Apollo on the island of Delos, at daybreak, venturing forth alone “beside the osiers of a rivulet, / Full ankle-deep in lilies of the vale.” Like that child in Whitman’s lyric “There was a child went forth,” the young Delian Apollo is learning poetry from the songs of the earth. However, this god of poetry needs to undergo another birth. In the silent face of Mnemosyne, Apollo reads “a wondrous lesson”:

Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions,

Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,

Creations and destroyings.

In this vision, the agons and agonies that Apollo suffers belong alike to cosmogony and to history. The poet, in Keats’s eyes, must be reborn through the creations and destroyings that belong to history, and through the imagination without which history would be unbearable.

注释（请滑动查看）：

[i] All citations from Keats’s poems come from John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

[ii] For Keats’s life, I have mainly referred to Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963 and Andrew Motion, Keats. London: Faber & Faber, 1997.

[iii] Charles and Mary Cowden Clark, Recollections of Writers, 1878, p.130.

[iv] Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973, p.74.

责任编辑：王东宇、刘雨桐