sawyl | On first looking into Chapman’s Homer (Reply)

The exhausting demands of the last few weeks have finally caught up with me so, in lieu of a proper post, here's Keats' sonnet On first looking into Chapman’s Homer, which I've had stuck in my head for much of the last week:

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.

In an odd coincidence, Jo Walton's latest post over on the Tor Blog just happens to quote from the last line of the sonnet. I wonder if she too might have caught Tamsin Greig reading it on last Sunday's Words and Music...