Comparative Essay - Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale and To Autumn

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Comparative Essay - “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn”

        Throughout the three poems that Keats composed: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn”, Keats is principally concerned to explore the concepts of time, the relationships between art and nature, mortality and immortality, using a series of paradoxes both thematically and literally in the poem to contrast the main elements discussed in his work, and to enhance the fact that “Ode” in itself is a paradox as it is a result of both celebration and commemoration. However, he looks at these elements in depth from different aspects and perspectives in order to find a way in which art and nature can both exist, developing his ideas within the poems.

In all his three poems, he focuses on the main themes: art, nature and time. Nevertheless, although he looks at the same elements in these poems, he always finds different ways of understanding these concepts in all three poems, as if he is developing his ideas towards a final conclusion. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” he propels the idea of nature contained by art; “Ode to a Nightingale” is about art contained in nature; whereas “To Autumn” reveals the idea that art and nature are reconciled. In each of Keats’s poems, he uses different techniques to back up the main idea that he wants to suggest in each ode.

In the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Keats focuses mainly on the immortality and beauty of art, where things are frozen forever in a state of perfection, such as the images on the urn. In actual fact, Keats resembles the urn to the picture of “still unravish’d bride”, which could be seen as an image which represents beauty, but at the same time quite an unrealistic representation as he portraits a very particular part in time: the moment of anticipation, where things are frozen just a fraction of time before perfection and can then be perfected by the imagination of human mind. Nevertheless, this can also be ruined and destroyed by reality. He cleverly makes use of oxymoron when describing the urn as an “unravish’d bride”, which propels the idea of the immortality and perfection of art and at the same time, the limitations which exist because of its unreality. This can be perceived as the fact that he longs for the longevity that is possessed by the urn, and the powerful attraction to art nevertheless having known its limits, and the desire of looking forward to the moment of anticipation, which can then be perfected by the imagination, and lasting forever.

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However, the way from which he sees art changes when he comes to write the poem “Ode to a Nightingale”, where art is once again presented as attractive but incomplete from a human point of view, which introduces an ongoing reflection from a self-conscious position on the significance of art. In this poem, Keats expresses the concept of the existence of art in nature through the image of the nightingale and its song: the nightingale, at a certain extent, can be perceived as nature, and the song therefore represents a form of art. Here, the song can act as a ...

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