To Homer
To Homer - form Summary
Sonnets of Visionary Blindness
This poem is a compact sonnet that uses classical imagery to compress a central paradox: Homer’s physical blindness coincides with heightened poetic vision. Keats frames mythic figures and maritime motifs to show how limitation becomes a source of transcendent perception. The sonnet’s tight structure concentrates contrasts—darkness and light, blindness and "triple sight"—so the form itself underscores the theme of visionary insight emerging from apparent lack.
Read Complete AnalysesStanding aloof in giant ignorance, Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades, As one who sits ashore and longs perchance To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas. So thou wast blind;--but then the veil was rent, For Jove uncurtain'd Heaven to let thee live, And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent, And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive; Aye on the shores of darkness there is light, And precipices show untrodden green, There is a budding morrow in midnight, There is a triple sight in blindness keen; Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befell To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.