Wild Surmise

Here are some thoughts on poem two of a long National Poetry Month; let's see if we can knock down poems a little more quickly from here on in. This poem is about looking into old poetry, because what else is this month about? This poem was re-brought to my mind by a friend of mine who lives in Darien (but not the one mentioned in the poem) and who vacations in Smyrna (but not the one from the famous Hemingway supershort story On the Quai at Smyrna), making her, I guess, a sort of ersatz literary celebrity. Anyway, the poet is Keats (big poet Keats) and the poem is "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer".

This thing is a Petrarchan sonnet in scheme but not in flavor (it has an octave and a sestet; but it is about ancient Greek literature instead of about a pretty girl). It appears to endorse the radical position that Chapman did a better job of showing what Greece is like than Greece does, which is to say, it is right in my wheelhouse. It's set up weirdly: first we get Keats's big claim about how traveled he is (the Nineteenth Century "Where I've Been" facebook app); then we iris shot in to get a little about how he never breathed the pure serene of one wide expanse that deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne until he read Chapman's translation; then we telescope back out from books into an even wider expanse, of planets and of the New World. The thing that moves me the most about the poem is the way that after that cinematic telescope out, we get two of the most breathtaking images of which I'm aware in poetry, presented with stunning and Keatsian economy. First, we get "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken", an image of sudden discovery that gets me every time (me, and Bertie Wooster, too). And after that, stout Cortez, staring at the Pacific, looking at his men with wild surmise -- "silent, upon a peak in Darien".

I think that the last two lines of the poem are another thing to put in our sort of menagerie of little things poems could do. One of the things that we remember (or anyway that I remember) every National Poetry Month, is that poems are the way in which words can be used most versatilely. We had the Snark, and its blank terror, and we had all that stuff last year about poems that can act like songs or be really slow. And now, we get the poem that does the best, I think, at the Keatsian job of being quiet. Short stories are quiet all the time, especially compared to the bustle that, at their most bustling, novels can throw at us; but this poem doesn't have the eye-of-the-storm stillness of a Hemingway or Raymond Carver, but rather a kind of stillness at the end of any action. The most glorious views of nature resolve themselves in such a way that words just seem unnecessary. Keats's poem is brilliant, poignant and unsettling for suggesting that art -- Chapman's rendering of Homer's Greece -- might do the same thing.