Standing aloof in giant ignorance,
Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades,
As one who sits ashore and longs
To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas.
So thou wast blind; -- but then the veil was rent,
For Jove uncurtain'd Heaven to let thee live,
And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent,
And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive;
Aye on the shores of darkness there is light,
And precipices show untrodden
There is a budding morrow in the midnight,
There is a triple sight in blindness keen;
Such seeing hadst thou, as it once
To Dian,
Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.'This admirable sonnet also occurs in manuscript in Sir Charles Dilke's copy of Endymion, and was included, like the Sonnet "When I have fears", in the Literary Remains (1848).
The date given in both places is 1818. The evidence of the manuscript on this point is of consequence as bearing on the relative positions of this sonnet and that 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer'.
I understand the "giant ignorance" of line I to have reference to Keats's inability to enjoy Homer in the original Greek, and not to an entire ignorance of the Iliad and Odyssey such as might have characterized the period before the sonnet on Chapman's version was written in 1816.
Indeed the second quatrain seems to me to be too well felt for so vague an attitude as Keats's must have been towards Homer before he knew any version at all; but the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose intuitions in such matters were of the keenest, and entitled to the most careful consideration, held that the present sonnet must have preceded that of 1816, and received with considerable reserve the evidence as to the date which I communicated to him in the course of our correspondence. It will be of interest to many lovers both of Keats and of Rossetti to learn that the latter poet whom we have but lately lost considered this sonnet to contain Keats's finest single line of poetry -- 'There is a budding morrow in midnight,'a line which Rossetti told me he thought one of the finest "in all poetry." No one will dispute that it is a most astonishing line, more particularly for a young man of Keats's years in 1818.' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed.
H.
Buxton Forman,
Crowell publ. 1895.
