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

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;

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.

—John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816)

The conquistador’s name must be pronounced Córtez. In a long essay on “Chapman’s Homer” (in Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods, 2018), I did not elaborate on a statement that seemed self-evident. I’ve since been asked why I proposed such a contrary notion, since in English now, as always in Spanish, the name is pronounced Cortéz. The reader pained by a little metrical gabble may skip some of the following passages with impunity, but the first great poem Keats wrote remains a lens into the history of language revealed by meter.

The whole line is “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes,” ten syllables in iambic pentameter. “Or like” could be iamb or trochee—metrically