A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 9 ( The Keatsian Sway)

We see Dante and Cavalcanti praising their true loves. We see the same in Michaelangelo and we see Petrarch too going gaga over Laura. But in England we find the sonnet becoming a vehicle fit for spreading in the world as it goes beyond this in Shakespeare's praise of poetry, the sonnet and the power of creation and writing, in Milton taking on the questioning of and explaining of God's ways to me(n), and taking on the might of the Catholic Church, in Wordsworth who offers a tribute to England and Milton as well as to Nature and to London. 

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The city here has not been spoiled by industrialization - note the "smokeless air" - and is lying down, asleep, although a "mighty heart", and Wordsworth praises it, finding something akin in the way it lies open to the fields and sky to "the sea that bares its bosom to the moon," with the word "bare" coming in again here, to contradict "like a garment," reminding us of "naked" in the previously quoted sonnet, in the last chapter. This precariously held, beautiful balance between the artificial - "ships, towers, dome, theatres and temples"  - and the natural sun steeping in his first splendour valley, rock and hill while "the river glideth at his own sweet will", suggesting the city is now the woman implicitly waiting to be awakened, is admirable.  

Keats carried this nature of a sonnet being a tribute to something or someone started by Surrey's sonnet to Wyatt after his death (left unquoted) one step further in his sonnet on Homer in translation by Chapman, walking a deeper road whereby now not only writing and literature matters or Milton and Nature or the city but so do the classics, their authors and translation with his first metaphor that reading is a journey through "realms of gold", so he surprisingly privileges the act of reading too.  This is really to bring in the note of Romanticism in a way similar to Wordsworth's paean to the "pagan".

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

BY JOHN KEATS

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.

What is extolled here is not just Chapman but the spirit of the English Renaissance, with its search for treasures, the journey, the voyage, the discovery and exploration of new lands, with its conquests and quests, with the aspiration to even gaze at the stars with longing and cross continents, yet by connecting it to reading, got from knowledge gained, it interiorizes it and this may be the charm of this sonnet, that it brings us back to the writer himself who is wandering within himself and not the world's borders and expanding margins, to find a parallel to the greatness of Homer in his own poetry. Keats' form is very Wordsworthian. The sestet is a cd cd cd.

However, it would be unjust to let go of Keats, the poet, just yet, without also referring to his Achilles' heel, that which Arnold found not sublime, but which we find pathos-filled. 

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”

BY JOHN KEATS

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

         Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

         Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

         Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

         Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

         Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

         Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The bright star is, of course, Fanny Brawne, his muse. We do not know what to make of this sonnet in 2020 as it sounds a bit jejune to today's hardened, sex-jaded souls. Perhaps it did even then. But we cannot but admire the mastery of the sonneteer even as we decry his childishness or mere sensuality, if we do, and also remark on the difference in his rhyme scheme which suddenly becomes abab abab cd cd ee. Step by step we see the sonnet evolving to become fluid in its strictness, and yet retain enough of a form to serve its deeper purpose. Arnold said of Keats " that many who are themselves, also, badly bred and badly trained should enjoy it, and should even think it a beautiful and characteristic production of him whom they call their "lovely and beloved Keats," does not make it better. These are the admirers whose pawing and fondness does not good but harm to the fame of Keats; who concentrate attention upon what in him is least wholesome and most questionable; who worship him, and would have the world worship him too, as the poet of

"Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair,
Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast."

This sensuous strain Keats had, and a man of his poetic powers could not, whatever his strain, but show his talent in it. But he has something more, and something better." 

And what was better in him, as Arnold sees it,  resurfaces in Arnold's famous "Dover Beach", therefore.

Thus, Keats' "The moving waters at their priestlike task

         Of pure ablution round earth's human shores" 

become in Arnold: "The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled."

Keats' "negative capability" and his sonnets are in a sense inseparable, as we see it in them, especially in these two, in enough measure to know that he could lose himself totally in his surroundings, like Shakespeare who could lose himself in his dramatis personae.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45514/composed-upon-westminster-bridge-september-3-1802

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=On+First+Looking+into+Chapman%27s+Homer

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44468/bright-star-would-i-were-stedfast-as-thou-art

http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/CommentRecord.php?action=GET&cmmtid=6504

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach