‘The Sea Had Soaked His Heart Through’

Keats's Cortez

Keats’s great sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (1816) came about after he visited his old schoolfriend, Charles Cowden Clarke. The two sat up all night reading Chapman’s Odyssey, and Clarke later recalled ‘Keats shouting with delight as some passage of especial energy struck his imagination’ (the two men parted at dawn, with Keats returning to his lodgings, but Clarke said that he sent the poem across London by the first post: ‘at ten o’clock the next morning, I found the sonnet on my breakfast-table’).

What was the passage that particularly excited Keats? It was this one, in which shipwrecked Odysseus washes up at Phaeacia:

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 sunk to death.
The sea had soaked his heart through; all his veins
His toils had rack’d … [Chapman’s Odyssey (1616): bk 5, lines 608f]

Specifically, Keats delighted in that line ‘the sea had soaked his heart through’, and went about repeating it over and over. You can see it working through the schoolboy error that Keats, famously, makes in this poem: for it was Balboa, not Cortez, who first set European eyes on the Pacific. But Keats’s imagination imports the cor, the heart, from the latter’s name into his sea-heart-soaked poem, via Chapman’s line.

The sea had soaked his heart through. Here’s the Homeric Greek that Chapman translated:

ὁ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἄμφω γούνατ᾽ ἔκαμψε
χεῖράς τε στιβαράς. ἁλὶ γὰρ δέδμητο φίλον κῆρ.
ᾤδεε δὲ χρόα πάντα, θάλασσα δὲ κήκιε πολλὴ
ἂν στόμα τε ῥῖνάς θ᾽: ὁ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἄπνευστος καὶ ἄναυδος
κεῖτ᾽ ὀλιγηπελέων, κάματος δέ μιν αἰνὸς ἵκανεν. [Odyssey, 5: 453–7]

Literal version: “And he let his two knees bend and his strong hands fall, for his spirit was crushed by the sea. And all his flesh was swollen, and sea water flowed in streams up through his mouth and nostrils. So he lay breathless and speechless, with scarce strength to move; for terrible weariness had come upon him.”

The specific phrase that so delighted Keats is: ἁλὶ γὰρ δέδμητο φίλον κῆρ. But Chapman’s version of this gets the Greek wrong: κῆρ (keer) is ‘heart’, yes — the word comes into English via Latin as eg ‘cardiac’ — but δέδμητο (dedmeeto) is from the verb δαμάζω (damazo), which means ‘to tame, subdue, control, to conquer, rule over’ and sometimes ‘to kill’, although it also means ‘[of women] to give in marriage; [of women] to seduce or rape’, which is a pretty depressing semantic linkage, really. But his heart was subdued by the sea (we might, if we were feeling bold, translate this line as his heart was raped by the sea) is not the same thing as ‘the sea had soaked his heart through’. Chapman seems to have misread the operative word, δαμάζω, taking it perhaps for a variant of διαμπάξ (diampax), or διαμπερές (diamperes), both of which mean ‘right through, through and through’, and derive from a root that means ‘pierced through’. Not that Greekless Keats would have known about his error.

I mean, we could (whisper it) suggest that Chapman has improved upon Homer, here … but that would approach to sacrilege. Wouldn’t it? Well, some of my favourites from Chapman’s Homer do precisely that: this, from his Iliad for instance, describing the dead: ‘They never see the flying sun, nor hear the winds that breathe’ [8:481] Or this account of men falling in battle on the dusty plains of Troy:

       The batter'd earth flew
In clouds of dust about their ears, rais'd from the horses’ hooves,
That beat a thunder out of earth as terrible as Jove's. [11:151-3]

Gorgeous stuff.