When, between dawn and about nine o'clock one October morning in 1816, John Keats composed ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer’, he had parted from a night of poetic enthusiasm spent with his friend Charles Cowden Clarke in Clerkenwell. They had been looking into and reading out passages from a ca. 1614 edition of George Chapman's translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, which had been borrowed from Thomas Alsager (a friend of Leigh Hunt's) by Cowden Clarke: ‘and to work we went, turning to some of the “famousest” passages, as we had scrappily known them in Pope's version’. Cowden Clarke recalled the effect on Keats of lines from Homer's Odysses that describe the hero being washed on shore and, in particular, the phrase ‘The sea had soakt his heart through’ which produced ‘one of his delighted stares’:

Cowden Clarke's word ‘stares’ may have been suggested not only by his friend's behaviour but also as analogous with the experience in the sonnet Keats sent to Clerkenwell in time for it to be read at a ten o'clock breakfast that following morning, the poem in which, in the famous confusion of conquistadors, stout Cortez ‘stared at the Pacific’.