Please summarize Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."

John Keats(1795-1821) the English Romantic poet was the
son of an ostler-a person who looked after the horses in a stable. He had a rudimentary
school education and never went to university. Nevertheless, he was fascinated by
ancient Greek classical poetry. The only way he could read Homer's epics was in an
English translation.

George Chapaman (1559-1634) the
Elizabethan poet and dramatist had translated Homer's epics into English. In October
1816 Keats read this translation throughout the night and then wrote the sonnet "On
First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." The Petrarchan sonnet expresses Keats' intense joy
and amazement on reading the great epics of Homer in English for the first
time.

"deep-browed" refers to the intellect of Homer.
Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are the seminal works of western literature which continue
to influence writers even today.

"demesne" is a medieval
word meaning 'domain.' The word reveals Keats' love for all things medieval and colours
the poem with an archaic tinge.

In the octave Keats,the
reader and lover of poetry, compares himself to an explorer who has travelled far and
wide and that in the course of his voyages he has heard of Homer's famous 'domain' but
that he couldn't visit it and experience its beauties till he had read the English
translation of Chapman.

In the sestet he gives us two
analogies to describe his joy on reading Chapman's "Homer." Firstly, he remarks that he
was as thrilled as an astronomer who discovers a new planet and secondly, he was as
delighted as when the explorer Cortez discovered the Pacific
Ocean:

Then
felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his
ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the
Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
—
Silent, upon a peak in
Darien.