"I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in the future."Yes.
But for me, it's the nightstand, and the spring, and the track season.
2 comments:
Could we all quit trying to "change the world" and focus a little more on self-improvement?
Thanks for taking time from self-improvement to post about it and remind the rest of us it is what we are meant to be doing...
"MUCH have I travell’d 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.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 5
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken; 10
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"
--On first looking into Chapman’s Homer
John Keats (1795–1821). The Poetical Works of John Keats. 1884
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