Why Homer Matters (6 page)

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. More 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, Cortés 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 agonized 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 center 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?

 

3 • LOVING HOMER

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, yogurt 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, 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 colonization 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 mustaches, 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
Iliad
s 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 in 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, Homer and nature were indistinguishable, and for me Homer is also everywhere: from the North Atlantic to the plain of Troy, in the mountains of Extremadura, on the beaches of Ischia.

No shore now is without its Homeric echoes. It is one of the realms of the heroes, the great zone of liminality between land and sea, the sphere of chance-in-play. Outcomes are never certain there. It is the governing metaphor for the position of the Greeks in the
Iliad
. The Trojans are never seen on the beach, unless battling there, but that is where the Greeks are at home. It is a place of ritual and longing: in book 3 of the
Odyssey
, the people of Pylos are making a giant sacrifice to the gods on the beach; in book 5 Odysseus weeps on the beaches of Calypso's island for his sorrows and his distance from home. It is also the place of promise: in book 6, his eyes rimmed red with sea salt, he finds Nausicaa and her girls and their assurance of life, colored by the hint of sex. It is the realm of threat, where Odysseus and his men on their descent to Hades draw up their ships in the cold and dark, in terror at the experiences they know await them. It is above all the field of ambiguity, where at the very center of the
Odyssey
, Odysseus lands, this time still asleep, on Ithaca, fails to understand he has reached home at last, or to acknowledge that trouble awaits him, and sets off, uncertain, into the island he would like to call home.

In the
Iliad
, when Odysseus and Ajax go to Achilles in book 9 to urge him to rejoin the fight against the Trojans, they walk there by a seashore that is roaring with the violence and scale of Poseidon's terror.

The way they take is along the strand of the deep sea,

Where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,

Uttering many prayers to the holder and shaker of earth

That they might persuade the proud heart of great Achilles.

It is also the place of grief, where later in the
Iliad
, in the restlessness of his despair over the death of his beloved friend Patroclus and when sleep will not come, Achilles goes in the night

To wander in anguish, aimless along the surf,

where one morning after another,

Flaming over the sea and shore, dawn would find him pacing there.

As so often in Homer, the single moment encapsulates the enormous story. Man and landscape interfuse. The dawn-lit Achilles in the agony of sorrow wanders by the aimless surf; no place for Homer is more filled with tragedy than the beach. It is on the beach that Achilles builds the great funeral pyre for Patroclus, the man he loved, now dead, as Achilles will soon be.

As an extension of the beach itself, nothing is more potent in Homer than the first moments of a vessel leaving it. Leaving a beach is moving off from indecision. The setup for departure, like the arming for battle or the preparation of dinner, is repeated time and again. These scenes contain the oldest form of Greek and are at the deepest level of these many-layered poems. They are as old as Homer gets.

And so today a friend—Martin Thomas—stands in the shallows, his trousers rolled up, his calves in the water, hands on hips, saying, not shouting, the good-bye from the beach. Homeric departures are full of verbal formulas, repeated every time a boat puts to sea, describing the necessary actions. The repetitiveness is often concealed in translations, as if it were an embarrassment and some variation were needed in the saying of these words, but their formulaic nature is important, as if the poem were an incantation, a ritual departure-charm, a way of getting ready for sea, an arming of the ship, getting the words right in the way that things on the boat must be got right.

So Martin asks, like a hero, if I am all right. Am I prepared? Have I stepped the mast properly? Is the running rigging free? Are the sheets through the fairleads? Is the rudder secured on its pintles? Is the mainsheet caught on the rudderstock? Do I have water, something to eat, my phone?

Homeric crews almost never sail away. From the shelter of their bay or quayside, they nearly always row out into the seaway to catch the wind. So today at home in Scotland, there has been a turn in the wind, and the water in the bay is lying still, in its own calm. If I could walk on it, I would walk on it this morning. It looks more like oil than water. A blackbird half a mile away is singing in the arms of a Scots pine. A curlew I can hear but not see moans somewhere over there beside the rocks. The seawater itself is green with the reflected woods, an ink of molten leaves and boughs.

But beyond the bay, beyond its two headlands, I can see out into the sound, where there is a suggestion of wind. I must row out there and follow the Homeric pattern. As I drift away from the shore, Martin walks up the beach, looks back once or twice and the sand goes blue beneath me with the depth.

Homeric departures are often at dawn, in the calm before the wind gets up. As the day begins, the voyage begins. Everyone knows that Homeric dawn is “rosy-fingered”—not rayed with her outspread fingers, but touching the tips of trees and rocks with her fingers. She also sometimes sits “on her golden throne” as if she were the goddess of the glowing sky; or, beautifully, she can wear “her veil the colour of saffron,”
krokopeplos
, the crocus-cloth, the warmest color in the world, from the stigmas of the Cretan crocus, the flush of well-being and luxury. And as she rises over the water in those beautiful clothes, the color is spread across the whole of the sea beneath her, a drenching and staining of the world with the beauty of dawn. She presides over the launching, to sponsor it, but the hero of the ship must lead his men. The voyage cannot happen without human will. And so under his command but with his goddess alongside him, the hero and crew embark, loosen the stern lines that hold the ship to the shore, sit on the benches and “strike the sea with their oars.”

That is how it is here now too. Martin is back in the house, and I settle on the bench in my small boat, the main thwart, put the oars in the rowlocks and ease the blades into the green sea. I can't help but feel the ancientness of it, my own life woven into the fabric of the past. The boat slips forward in a dream of liquidity, released from ploddingness into a kind of flight. With each stroke—a pull, the bending of the shaft of the oar as it is drawn against the water, the sucking puddle as the blades exit and then their dripping onto the perfect skin of the sea—I join the continuous past. Whoever first made a boat, even a simple punt driven forward with a pole, or a dugout with a basic paddle, must have seen and felt this fluency as a kind of magic, a suspension of the earthbound rules of existence.