Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery Noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud.”
How large and splendid is the imagery of the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”! And who that has any sense of poetry does not recognize the voice of a young master in the two superb lines of the last poem that Keats wrote?—the sonnet in which he speaks of the bright star
“watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task