Much have I traveled 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.
—from "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," by John Keats (1816)
In this sonnet, Keats compares the reading of a great poem (specifically, George Chapman's translation of Homer's Odyssey) to the wonders of planetary and exploratory discoveries. That feeling of wonder is the basis for most of our best thoughts, whether religious or secular.
It's amazing how the sun moves with us as we walk, appearing on the right side of Lassing Park when we're strolling at dawn, and then apparently following us to the left side as we leave the park. We try to get our heads around this. Well, the earth rotates from west to east, we were taught, so — that makes the sun look like it's going west. But actually, it seems to us that we're walking northward, which confuses us entirely. It sure is pretty, I observe scientifically.
Down by the water, a young man goes through Tai Chi exercises against the rising sun, his dog posing beside him as if the sun were a camera. Jeanne, who also performs these motions daily, flexes her arm and warns me that "Tai Chi" means "supreme ultimate fist," a surprisingly pugnacious name for such calm and graceful movements.
Sun worship makes sense to us: the sun's so dependable, and we're so dependent. Thanks to the Greeks, our patriarchal society thinks of the Sun God as male, Apollo being the most famous exemplar. As the Sun God, Apollo symbolizes light and knowledge, while his twin sister Artemis stands for the moon, darkness and mystery, her light a reflection of his — clearly sexist, as is the man in the moon. (On the other hand the ancient Germans, despite their love of bratwurst, had a Sun Goddess, named Sunna — which is where we got the word "sun" in the first place.)
As late as 1795, the year of Keats's birth, one of our great astronomers, William Herschel (1738-1822), wrote a paper for England's Royal Society claiming that the inside of the sun was dense and cool, and inhabited by intelligent beings, as was the moon. Although this sounds both charming and wacko, it has a genuine idea behind it. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Herschel suspected there were countless planets and galaxies, and we'd be guilty of ridiculous hubris if we thought we were the only thinking creatures in the entire cosmos. Today (considering the elected officials of our own sun-kissed state) we can't help but believe there are smarter beings than us out there somewhere: How hard can it be?
Keats, who wrote his sonnet during a single night after reading about Ulysses' shipwreck in The Odyssey, lived his short life (1795-1821) in a state of perpetual wonder, greeting each day, his marvelous letters attest, with gusto and excitement. He and his poetry matured, like the sunflower, at astonishing speed — it's barely believable he wrote those great Odes in his early 20s. France's boy genius, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), was more plausible; his youthful poems — "The Drunken Boat," "A Season in Hell" — were wild and revolutionary, crammed with young energy. But in Keats's poems, wonder led quickly to wisdom; how in the world did he have time for it? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter …
In 1830, at the ripe age of 38, John Herschel, William's father, proclaimed:
To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling … a soap bubble … an apple … a pebble … He walks in the midst of wonders.
So do we all. Here comes the sun.
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2011.
