When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.

These lines come from John Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), written after a night of reading George Chapman’s vigorous English translation of Homer with his friend and mentor Charles Cowden Clarke. Keats, then a young poet newly committed to literature, describes the sudden exhilaration of encountering Homer in a form that felt newly alive to him. The poem belongs to Keats’s early period, when he was rapidly educating himself through intense reading and conversation. It was first published in 1816 and later collected in his 1817 volume “Poems.”

Keats likens the night sky to a “starr’d face” on which clouds form “symbols of a high romance,” suggesting that great literature can make the world appear newly charged with meaning. The “romance” is not merely love but the elevated, adventurous realm of epic and imaginative discovery. The image captures the moment when perception shifts: ordinary phenomena (clouds, stars) become legible as signs of something grander, as if nature itself were speaking in an epic language. In the sonnet’s larger argument, this is the emotional prelude to Keats’s comparison of reading Chapman to a historic discovery—an awakening to a vast cultural continent previously unknown to him.