That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene,
Till I heard Chapman speak out lout and bold:
Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
(lines 6-10)
In describing what sublime is Edmund Burke explains the sublimity of words. Burke explains “….words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the the sublime….” We can see this in Keats poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” when Keats compares the feeling of reading Chapman’s Homer to the sublime feeling of watching the skies and viewing a planet (lines 6-10). Burke explains that specific words need to be use to cause the”three effects” in the mind for the words to be consider sublime. To Burke describing a scene can produce a picture in the mind, but it does not have an “affection” to the soul. Burke expresses “if words have all their possible extent of power, three effects arise in the mind of the hearer.” These three effects are sound, picture and “affection of the soul produced by one or by both of the foregoing.”
Keats has these three effects in the lines 6-10 when describing the feeling reading Chapman’s Homer gave him. He painted the picture of sky watching and associated the feeling with the feeling a person gets when watching the skies and seeing something never seen before, a new planet, this feeling creates an “affection of the soul” therefore making these lines in the poem sublime. Although sky watching and reading Chapman’s Homer are different from each other, Keats is able to draw this comparison of the two to explain in words the feeling he felt.
