In her biography of Keats Lucasta Miller points out that Pope translates this passage like so:
He dropp'd his sinewy arms: his knees no more
Perform'd their office, or his weight upheld:
His swoln heart heaved; his bloated body swell'd:
From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran;
And lost in lassitude lay all the man,
Deprived of voice, of motion, and of breath;
The soul scarce waking in the arms of death.
As someone who likes Pope's Homer for what it is I must admit that this is not its finest hour. And if Keats had somewhere in the back of his mind "and lost in lassitude lay all the man" "the sea had soaked his heart through" would have struck him, like anyone, as a vast improvement.
In her biography of Keats Lucasta Miller points out that Pope translates this passage like so:
He dropp'd his sinewy arms: his knees no more
Perform'd their office, or his weight upheld:
His swoln heart heaved; his bloated body swell'd:
From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran;
And lost in lassitude lay all the man,
Deprived of voice, of motion, and of breath;
The soul scarce waking in the arms of death.
As someone who likes Pope's Homer for what it is I must admit that this is not its finest hour. And if Keats had somewhere in the back of his mind "and lost in lassitude lay all the man" "the sea had soaked his heart through" would have struck him, like anyone, as a vast improvement.
I'm sure you know the Norman MacCaig poem...
The Way it Goes
Reality isn't what it used to be,
I mutter gloomily
when I feel like Cortez on his peak in Darien
and then remember it wasn't Cortez at all
and feel more like him than ever.
I hadn't seen that before: it's great!
As we always say, 'Trust Norman.'