Nature and Human Experience in Keats and Arnold

There's something powerful about nature and human experience in Keats's "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."  In Keats it has more to do with experiencing nature via language, while in Arnold it's simply experiencing nature.  I'll begin with Keats.


"On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer"

The poem is in a single stanza, but many things point to it being two sections, lines 1-6 and lines 7-14.  One obvious one is the use of the conjunction "yet" to begin line 7, creating a distinction between what follows that word and what preceded it.

More interesting to note is a change in diction that separates the poem into these sections.  There are a few interesting words in the first section:

• realms
• gold
• kingdoms
• deep-brow'd
• demesne

But the section is played down by plain adjectives and verbs, such as:

• goodly
• seen
• been
• hold
• wide
• told
• ruled

(The image is the first that comes up from a Google image search of the word "goodly".  The image doesn't evoke any feeling, and in fact almost all of the images that came up were just the word printed out on various things--books and t-shirts.)

The remainder of the poem is a stark contrast.  Take in these powerful words and phrases:

• breathe
• pure
• serene
• speak
• loud
• bold
• watcher of the skies
• planet
• swims
• stout
• eagle eyes
• wild
• surmise
• silent
• peak

(This image is the first that comes from a Google image search of the word "breathe".  It is an action word, a human word, a feeling word, quite different from "goodly," a distinction which I think is shown strongly by the difference in pictures.)

http://lilavinyasa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/breathe_by_sibayak.jpg

What turns the poem from the first section to the second is the speaker's experience with Chapman's Homer.  I think experience is a key word.  I'm not familiar with Chapman's Homer, but it must be that the speaker really experienced these lands based on that text, whereas before he(/she?  probably he) had merely taken in the greatness of the world superficially somehow, simply traveling it, seeing it, being told of it rather than breathing it.  Furthermore, the speaker doesn't just experience the world as himself but is even able to step into the shoes of others—Cortez and his men—by the end of the poem and feel (presumably) what they felt.  It seems that language is key to experiencing—really feeling—nature, which then seems to open up to feeling the world as a whole, including experiencing empathy for others.

"Dover Beach"

I'm not quite as strong on my understanding of this poem yet--especially its third stanza--but something really stood out to me in the second stanza that bears a strong relation to the Keats poem.  Sophocles, as the speaker of the poem says, heard the sounds of the tide and the pebbles long ago on the Aegean, and the sounds "brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery..."  Here, rather than experiencing nature through language as in Keats, Sophocles has simply experienced nature first-hand. But it has still taken him to another level of human experience--it is a transformative experience that grants him greater empathy--just like in Keats.