John Keats

Today was the second day of my Into to the English major course, which I am taking for the J term at Mercyhurst. During class, we discussed the reading we'd been assigned the night before, which was to read the first ten pages of our book, The Norton Introduction to Literature. We spent some time discussing a poem within the reading by John Keats. It was a poem he'd written about his excitement and joy when he heard George Chapman's translation of Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey. My favorite part is the end, specifically the last three lines:

He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

We talked about how literature is such an amazing thing, because it can make you feel exactly what the author was feeling at that exact moment. When I read those last few lines, I felt as though it were I discovering a huge expanse of water, standing there in shock and awe of the beauty.

It reminded me a lot of the movie Ocean's Eleven, actually, when all the members of the con team stood at the fountains in Vegas, starstruck and so completely satisfied that they'd done what they came to do, and marveling in the contentment of watching the water burst into the sky while Clair de Lune plays on in the background.

 

Maybe it doesn't make sense, but I feel that the men in the end of the poem felt the same way. They, of course, probably hadn't robbed a casino, but they achieved something of grandeur.