On looking into Kavanagh's Homer

A suggestion about the sources for Patrick Kavanagh's sonnet 'Epic'.

Hoping not to turn this into an Irish poetry blog. But my friend Sam Enright’s most recent links roundup pointed me to Aidan O’Malley’s review of Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960, by Florence Impens. It got me thinking of maybe the most obvious bit of classicism in Irish poetry, Patrick Kavanagh’s great sonnet ‘Epic’:

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided: who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting ‘Damn your soul’
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel—
‘Here is the march along these iron stones’
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

I love the rhymes in this. Kavanagh starts with two quatrains, ABBA CDDC, rhymed incredibly subtly: connections just barely there, to the point that if you heard ‘Epic’ read aloud and didn’t know it was a sonnet, so didn’t listen out for rhyme, you might not even notice it. And if you did notice the rhyme, the quatrain structure might set you up to expect a quasi-Shakespearean sonnet that would continue with an EFFE quatrain, which is frustrated by ‘Ballyrush and Gortin’¹—just as these local townlands frustrate the narrator, who imagines they are unimportant in the face of something bigger.

But then, in the line where Homer’s ghost appears, we perk up: we notice that ‘mind’ rhymes with ‘inclined’. Maybe there is a greater structure to all this after all. ‘Such’ is an imperfect rhyme with ‘which’, so the appetite is kept alive but not yet sated. And then, both the structure and the rhyme finally resolve in the listener’s mind with the very last word, ‘importance’, which rhymes so utterly beautifully with ‘Gortin’ that everything suddenly clicks into place and we grasp the poem’s structure, knowing for sure that all along we’ve been hearing a sonnet, with an EFGFEG sestet. Homer’s ghost has not merely told us to believe in the importance of local affairs: he has also provided for us a structure to understand that importance, so that we do not merely have to trust him, but can see or indeed ‘make’ for ourselves.

And it is a structure that, crucially, does not negate the importance of world affairs. When listening to the poem in real time we don’t experience anything like a turn until line twelve, but by the end of the poem we understand in retrospect that line nine marked the sonnet’s volta. That is to say, it is precisely when Homer helps the narrator appreciate ‘local rows’ that the listener appreciates that the ‘Munich bother’ marked a turn. Only with a well-established ‘faith’ in the local can we really understand the earth-shaking importance of the global.

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Any sonneteer who wants to bring up Homer will unquestionably have, at the back of their mind, the greatest sonnet written about Homer: Keats’ ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Kavanagh’s debts to Keats was made incredibly obvious on first publication, when ‘Epic’ was printed beside another poem by Kavanagh, ‘On Looking into E. V. Rieu’s Homer’; that the Rieu poem was not itself a sonnet only made clearer that the sonnet beside it was also part of the link to Keats. And indeed, just as in Keats’ sonnet, so too in Kavanagh’s: Homer’s words allow the poet to see clearly, when before they saw but through a glass darkly.

But in Keats’ sonnet, the narrator does not hear Homer himself speak, but rather hears his great Elizabethan translator George Chapman, and comes to understand Homer through Chapman. It’s a point that is reminiscent of Plato’s famous analogy in the Ion: poetic inspiration is like a natural magnet, which not only attracts other metals but also magnetises them in turn, so they can go on and attract others with the same force.² In a certain imperfect sense, inspiration is transitive.

This transitive line of inspiration is potentially important for understanding ‘Epic’, because—as I suggested in an aside to my books of 2024 post when I had occasion to mention Kavanagh’s sonnet—Homer did not make the Iliad from a local row. The grand Bronze Age civilisations of the Eastern Mediterranean had been anything but ‘local’, and their sudden and total collapse (so total that the Greeks forgot how to write) was an epoch-defining event. The Homeric epics were composed as the Greeks dragged themselves out of the ensuing dark ages, and while we can and should doubt the degree to which the Iliad preserves an accurate folk memory of the Bronze Age collapse,³ there can be no question that it was constructed out of the omnipresent evidence of past Greek civilisation, which provided such a stark contrast to the concrete experience of post-collapse life.

Homer, as portrayed by Kavanagh in ‘Epic’, shares very little resemblance to what we know of the person(s) who composed the Iliad. And while modern scholarship has contributed a lot to our understanding here, nonetheless the very very basic outline of the Bronze Age collapse and its relationship to the myth of the Trojan War is a century older than Kavanagh’s poetry, so I’m not imposing anachronistic demands on him. So where did Kavanagh get his portrayal? Well, I can’t prove it, but I have an inkling that we should take the transitivity idea very seriously here: if Keats inspired Kavanagh, then (we might want to say) so did Chapman—and, perhaps, not merely through Keats.

The use in poetry of a ghost or shade who appears to speak wisdom is as old as Homer himself—book eleven of the Odyssey is the key text. The idea was famously taken over by Virgil into book six of the Aeneid, and remained continuously available to poets through to the present day. The idea of making the ghost himself a famous, long-dead poet also has an obvious pedigree—Dante was of course led through hell and purgatory by Virgil. The idea of using Homer would not be a crazy development.

But the earliest depiction I know of Homer’s shade coming to earth to speak to the poet comes Chapman’s own major poem, Euthymiae Raptus. It’s a weird poem, not worth reading today, that mixes neo-Stoic philosophy with praise for Elizabeth I—the keyword for both being ‘peace’, internal in the individual and external in the state. Peace herself is personified in the poem, and conducts a dialogue with the poet, who is led to her by none other than Homer.

I don’t know if Chapman would have been influenced by Dante—my prior is that it’s unlikely, but I’m no expert in the reading material of Elizabethan poets—but regardless, there are major differences between Dante’s use of Virgil and Chapman’s use of Homer. In the Comedy, Virgil (and indeed Homer, when he shows up) is a ‘virtuous pagan’, stuck in limbo; he is certainly human. But Chapman’s Homer was something entirely different:

When, sodainely, a comfortable light
Brake through the shade; and, after it, the sight
Of a most graue, and goodly person shinde;
With eys turnd vpwards, & was outward, blind;
But, inward; past, and future things, he sawe;
And was to both, and present times, their lawe.
His sacred bosome was so full of fire,
That t’was transparent; and made him expire
His breath in flames, that did instruct (me thought)
And (as my soule were then at full) they wrought.
At which, I casting downe my humble eyes,
Not daring to attempt their feruencies […]

Homer is more than nearly divine here: Chapman explicitly gives him the ability to see the past and future, and describes him as lawgiver (or law itself) and instructor. He even comes complete with the classic Old Testament marker of divinity: people (in this case, Chapman) fear to look at him. At this point in the poem the only thing that suggests that it is Homer that Chapman is meeting is the poet’s trademark blindness. As much as can be said of any character in Christian-era writings, then, Homer is here presented as a kind of god.

Almost immediately, the divine Homer delivers the standard Old Testament ‘be not afraid’ message. But he follows it up with an interesting explanation of why Chapman needs not fear him:

He thus bespake me; Deare minde, do not feare
My strange apparance; Now t’is time t’outweare
Thy bashfull disposition, and put on
As confident a countnance, as the Sunne.
For what hast thou to looke on, more diuine,
And horrid,⁴ then man is; as hee should shine,
And as he doth? […] [Emphasis mine.]

Men, including Chapman himself, are just as divine as Homer is. This may have functioned to allow Chapman to claim he was not sacrilegiously portraying a pagan poet as a divinity: he explicitly writes that Homer is no more divine than any other human, made in imago dei. But in context in the poem, the effect is rather to convey the impression that ‘man’ is rather more divine than the reader had thought—not that Chapman’s Homer is any less.

Here we have a clear parallel for the final sentence of Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’: ‘Gods make their own importance.’ Kavanagh compresses, but does not over-compress, the claim that both Homer and the narrator himself are divine (in some metaphorical sense). This idea is not present anywhere in the sonnet before the final line; but it is present in Chapman’s own version, centuries before Kavanagh, of the poet being confronted by Homer’s shade.

If this suggestion is right, and Kavanagh was influenced by Chapman (and not just the influence mediated by Keats’ sonnet), then I think it might explain why Kavanagh thought Homer’s focus was on the local. After the above-quoted portions of Euthymiae Raptus comes the passage where Homer reveals his identity to Chapman:

I am (sayd hee) that spirit Elysian,
That (in thy natiue ayre; and on the hill
Next Hitchins left hand) did thy bosome fill,
With such a flood of soule; that thou wert faine
(With exclamations of her Rapture then)
To vent it, to the Echoes of the vale;
When (meditating of me) a sweet gale
Brought me vpon thee; and thou didst inherit
My true sense (for the time then) in my spirit;
And I, inuisiblie, went prompting thee,
To those fayre Greenes, where thou didst english me.

Colin Burrow’s 2002 LRB review of a reissue of Chapman’s Homer says of these lines: ‘It's hard to believe that the ghost of Homer would have chosen Hitchin, Hertfordshire, as his chosen place for a return to earth.’ But then, it’s equally hard to believe he would pick rural County Monaghan. (I’ve been to both places: I would probably prefer Hitchin, but neither location is particularly Homeric.) What’s notable is that Chapman thought—literally and not merely poetically, Burrow claims—that Homer ‘prompted’ him to the ‘fayre Greenes’ of Hertfordshire, in order that Chapman might better translate the Iliad.

There’s not much in Homer or Homeric scholarship that might make you imagine him as a figure who would prompt a poet to focus his attention to fields. But in Chapman’s imagination, this is exactly what Homer did.

Kavanagh certainly knew Keats’ ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; if he followed Keats’ example and actually looked into Chapman’s Homer, he may have found these materials, and been prompted to write his own sonnet as a result. It’s not a theory I can prove, but at the very least, it’s a parallel I like.

1. ‘Gortin’ is pronounced ‘gor-chin’: listen to Kavanagh’s pronunciation here. The internal rhyme between ‘important’ at line ten and ‘Gortin’ at line eleven contributes to the temporary feeling that the poet has lost his end rhymes.

2. That Plato himself may not have believed Homer possessed genuine poetic inspiration—certainly not consistently—is neither here nor there. (An aside: the discussion in the Phaedrus of Stesichorus’ palinode, and the explicit contrast with Homer, seems to suggest that Plato was fairly confident that Stesichorus was divinely poetically inspired, the one poet Plato grants this to. If we take seriously the Ion’s transitivity thesis, we end up with the conclusion that Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red—creatively inspired by fragments of Stesichorus—is a divine work. Perhaps that’s why it was one of my favourite books of 2024!)

3. Though Troy was indeed destroyed in the collapse.

4. Like ‘horrible’, ‘horrid’ in the Elizabethan era did not have the same connotations it does today: something a little weaker than ‘fearful’ might be a decent paraphrase.