The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. Adam Nicolson
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what Men could mean,
which acts as the core of the poem, the rejection of the instruction and learning he had received, substituting it with the vast scale of the new understanding that Chapman had given him. For publication, he replaced that with
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
which is politer and not entirely concordant with what the rest of the poem aims to mean. Further than that, he had borrowed the verb and the key adjectival noun from Pope’s Iliad:
The troops exulting sat in order round,
And beaming fires illumined all the ground.
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O’er heaven’s pure azure spreads her sacred light,
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene …
Keats, on the verge of his twenty-first birthday, even as this sonnet was announcing his new discovery of Homeric depth and presence, had not shrugged off that eighteenth-century inheritance.
For all that, coursing through the sonnet is a sense of arrival in the world of riches, a sudden shift in Keats’s cosmic geometry, moving beyond the drabness and tawdriness by which he felt besieged. Keats had become everybody in the sonnet’s fourteen lines: the astronomer, himself, Chapman, Homer, Cortez and ‘all his Men’. All coexist in the heightened and expanded moment of revelation. Pope had found fire in Homer; Keats discovered scale. And scale is what then entered his poetry, as a kind of private and tender sublime, the often agonised heroics of the heart, in which, just as in Homer, love and death engage in an inseparable dance.
Homer, or at least the idea of Homer, pools into Keats’s poetry. Hostile Tory reviewers in Blackwood’s Magazine started to call him ‘the cockney Homer’, but in Endymion, the long poem he had been contemplating when he wrote the Chapman sonnet, and which he began the following spring, his experience of that night with Cowden Clarke shapes the core phrases. People remember the poem’s beginnings:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
That is poetry as balm, even, as Andrew Motion has said, as medicine, the discipline which Keats was now abandoning for life as a poet. Keats went on to describe the ways in which beauty manifests itself in the world, the consolations it provides in ‘Trees old and young’, ‘daffodils/With the green world they live in’, streams and shady woods, ‘rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms’. But then, at the centre of this first part of the poem, drenched in memories of Shakespeare’s sweetest lyrics, comes this, the bass note of a Homeric presence, a sudden manliness, a scale of imagined beauty that encompasses the depths of the past:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead.
Homer is the foundation of truth and beauty, and Keats was happy to say that ‘we’ had imagined his poetry. Homer will enlarge your life. Homer is on a scale that stretches across human time and the full width of the human heart. Homer is alive in anyone who is prepared to attend. Homerity is humanity. Richmond Lattimore, making his great version of the Iliad in the late 1940s, when asked ‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ replied: ‘That question has no answer for those who do not know the answer already.’ Why another book about Homer? Why go for a walk? Why set sail? Why dance? Why exist?
HOMER-LOVE CAN FEEL LIKE a disease. If you catch it, you’re in danger of having it for life. He starts to infiltrate every nook of your consciousness. What would Homer have had for breakfast? (Oil, honey, yoghurt and delicious bread. One of the things that is wrong with the Cyclopes is that they don’t eat bread.) Or a picnic? (Grapes, figs, plums, beans.) How did he feed his heroes? (Grilled meat and thoroughly cooked sausages.) What did he think of parties? (He loved them: no moment was happier for a man than sitting down to a table loaded with wine and surrounded by his friends.)
These were questions the Greeks asked. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates was impressed by Homer’s decision, for example, that no hero should ever eat iced cakes: ‘all professional athletes are well aware that a man who is to be in good condition should take nothing of the kind’. Protein – well salted, not boiled – was the stuff for heroes. And it had to be red meat; fish was the last resort,fn1 and chickens had yet to arrive from the Far East: they reached the Aegean in about 500 BC, known to the Greeks as ‘the Persian Bird’.
I have a way now of finding Homer wherever I look for him. No encounter, no landscape is without its Homeric dimension. In a way, Homer has become a kind of scripture for me, an ancient book, full of urgent imperatives and ancient meanings, most of them half-discerned, to be puzzled over. It is a source of wisdom. There must be a name for this colonisation of the mind by an imaginative presence from the past. Possession, maybe? Mindjack? In one of his Socratic dialogues, Plato has a wonderful image for the secret and powerful hold that Homer has on his listeners. Socrates is talking to Ion, a mildly ridiculous rhapsode, a man who made his living by reciting and speaking about Homer. ‘I am conscious in my own self,’ Ion tells Socrates in phrases which even two and a half millennia later have a whiff of the stage, ‘and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak better and have more to say about Homer than any other man.’ If Greeks had moustaches, Ion would be twirling his.
The Socratic eyebrow rises a little, but he then tells Ion the truth, a little slyly, the Socratic wisdom masquerading as flattery. ‘The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer,’ Socrates says,
is not an art, but an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet … This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration.
The poet, Socrates tells him, is ‘a light and winged and holy thing’ – Homer not as great bearded mage, but like the bird Blegen found, or a mosquito, a flitting bug – of no substance, swept here and there on the winds of poetry. ‘There is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.’
Plato affects to despise poetry, for the way it interferes with the rational mind, but it is clear that he was in love with it, moved by it as much as Ion could ever hope to be. And he identified the mechanism: there is no act of will in loving Homer. You don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you. And so, like Ion, you hang as a curtain ring from him, who hangs from the Muse, who hangs from her father Greatness and her mother Memory.
I cannot go for a walk in the English chalklands without imagining the cold damp Iliads that must have been sung there. Every burial in an English Bronze Age round barrow must have had a version of these heroic songs sung at its making. But Homer is also in the Hebrides and off the coast of Ireland. Traditions of heroic song have endured there. One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate on Harris by his Macleod chief, for which he had to pay ‘1 panegyrick poem every year’. That is Homeric rent. Wild unadorned landscapes or places of great antiquity summon his archetypes and their stories. Pope thought that for Virgil,