The poem is written about a Grecian urn, not literally but as a symbol for the speaker’s feelings about life. The speaker indicates that he enjoys the little mysteries of life and basically that he feels the best things in life should be kept secret. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweater; …” (ln 11-12) In the last stanza, this feeling is compared to his feelings about the anonymous form of the urn. “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity: …” (ln 44-45)
The speaker has many questions that he wants answered and compares this to what he sees on the urn. “What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape/Of deities or mortals, or of both/ … /What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? …” (ln 5-8) However, by looking at the urn, he receives no answers only sees a superficial view of the characters he seeks. “With brede/Of marble men and maidens overwrought, /With forest branches and the trodden weed; …” (ln 41-43)
The speaker voices his feelings about eternal life and compares his feelings to the fact that the urn will always be there to represent the person contained therein. “… little town, thy streets for evermore/Will silent be …” (ln 38-39) The comparison to the urn states that as time passes, the urn will always be there regardless of the events of the world. “When old age shall this generation waste, /Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe …” (ln 46-47)
As the poem concludes, the final two lines, “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’” (ln 49-50) are enclosed in quotation marks. This would indicate a change in speaker or possibly that the speaker is reading something. What the speaker is doing, is reading a quote that is written on the urn and the fact that the poem ends on this note signifies that this quote somehow answers any questions the speaker needs answered. There is no way to know what this answers because it should mean something different to everybody who reads it.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is meant to be a “universal truth”. The statement isn’t necessarily the meaning of life for everybody because life is what you make it, but it is all the meaning Keats needed to resolve whatever issues he was having with life or the lack thereof. It is for that reason that the statement stands out as much as it does in the poem. Ironically, Keats’ meaning of life is coming from an object that is designed to contain death.
