John Keats - Ode on Grecian Urn

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John Keats

Ode on Grecian Urn

“Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous”, Arnold affirms as he sets out to prove that Keats, though lacked fixed purpose, was in his pursuit of Beauty on his way towards something moral and whole some. Indeed the virtue of Keats’s poetry is that he does not philosophize. Unlike some of his romantic contemporaries, he escaped the imposed facts of the world into a sort of “sensuous mysticism” of Beauty. This fact has been, also, emphasized by Arnold when affirms that “Keats’s yearning (strong) passion for the Beautiful is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual”. Keats himself claimed that had he been strong enough, he would have lived alone and pursued his quest for Beauty:

“I have loved the principle of Beauty in all things. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affection and the truth of the imagination”.

Such facts help us to reach the conclusion that Keats was that kind of poets for whom the world of beauty was a kind of shelter or a refugee; an escape from the dreary and painful effect of ordinary experience. W. H. Hudson affirms that “with [Keats] poetry breaks away from the interests of contemporary life, returns to the past, and devotes itself to the service of beauty”. This kind of interest, and such background is quite relevant to the theme and subject matter of this Ode.

Matter- of- fact the “Ode to Grecian Urn” invites a special consideration among Keats’s other odes for two reasons: it is an indoor, not an outdoor, poem; and deals with art and not nature. It is by no means his maturest ode, which belongs to that part of Keats’s mind, which responded eagerly to Elgin Marbles and to all other examples of Greek art.

Urns- (vase-like containers made of pottery or stone with rounded bodies and narrow necks)- were used in ancient Greece and Rome to preserve the Ashes of the dead. In the early 19th century it was by no means unusual to make a work of painting or sculpture a subject of a poem. Moreover, the title of the Ode suggests that Keats had in mind a particular work of Greek art. But no Greek Urn has been discovered which corresponds with that which Keats describes. Accordingly it becomes clear that Keats was not merely thinking of any particular Urn, but of Greek sculptures in general as represented by most famous Elgin marbles which he had seen in the British museum. Thus this ode proves that Keats had a natural affinity with the Greek mind and his love for Greek art.

In his “The Romantic Imagination” Maurice Bowra, describing the movement of the poem, states that:

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In his “The Romantic Imagination” Maurice Bowra, describing the movement of the poem, states that:

The “Ode on Grecian Urn” is built on a neat and recognizable plan in three parts: introduction, main subject, and conclusion. The first stanza gives the introduction, the next three stanzas introduce the main subject, whereas the fifth stanza is the conclusion. The introduction presents the Urn in its mystery and shows what questions it poses to the poet. The main subject consists of the two scenes depicted on the Urn –(the one, described in the first three stanzas, is of a “mad pursuit”, in which a youth pipes under a tree while another youth pursues a maiden; the other scene is of a sacrificial sermon, in which a priest leads a garlanded heifer to “a green alter” and is followed by a company of pious worshippers)- these scenes are not described as from a casual observer, but as Keats sees them with full force of his imaginative insight. The conclusion relates the experience gained from the Urn to its special order of reality and answers the questions which the poem has raised.

The theme of the Ode, accordingly, has to do with the relationship between Imagination and reality, the temporal and the eternal; the superiority and immortality of a work of art if compared to our mundane actuality.

It is worthy of note that the strength of the poem lies in the pattern of interwoven paradoxes which persist through out the whole Ode, contributing to its unity of thought and the development of its main theme –(i.e. the Urn, by means of its reconciliation between opposites, has managed to achieve immortality). The First stanza is quick to initiate this system of paradoxes. Keats first begins by a series of apostrophes, personifying the Urn, and addressing it in its special association to silence and time. Then the Urn is associated with virginity (still unravish’d bride); that’s to say the Urn, though a bride, remains intact, and it becomes clear that the natural processes of change have been gentle to this piece of art, leaving it untouched. It is now “the foster child of silence and short time” because the artist who made it has died long ago, and the Urn was adopted by Silence and Slow Time. This metaphor is intended to convey the quietness and the undiminished glory of the Urn over the centuries.

The paradox is compounded with the beginning of the third line: though the Urn has been associated with silence in the previous lines, it is now personified as a ‘Historian” for it tells stories and records a cultural era. It is a “sylvan historian” because of the rural scenes craved on its surface. Though silent, the Urn “can…thus express/ A flowery tale more sweet than our rhyme”. That’s to say the Urn tells stories and communicate them more ably than a poet can. In the rest of the stanza the poet articulates his puzzlement regarding the cravings on the surface of the Urn in a series of questions, playing on paradox and contrasts: Are the figures, he wondered, “deities or mortals”, “men or gods”? The final two lines of the 1st stanza highlight the paradoxical sense that persists the whole poem. The Urn that has been earlier associated with silence, stillness, quietness, and virginity, is associated now with sound, passion, and activity. This has been portrayed in the music of the “pipes and timbrel” and in the “mad pursuit” between the maiden and her lover, and in her struggle to escape his clutches. Indeed such a vivid picture of men or gods chasing, in a state of wild passion, their reluctant maidens stands in contrast with the “unravish’d bride” image of the early lines.

In the second stanza, the poet begins to introduce his main subject – the supremacy of art to life- and the paradox of silent utterance, which begins in the 1st stanza, is maintained in the second:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter…

The unheard melodies of the flue-player depicted on the Urn are sweeter than those actually played in our finite world. They are “not to the sensual ear” but “to the spirit”. The idea is platonic: it has to deal with how can we access the ideal world of eternal abstract forms through the spirit and imagination. Perhaps that’s why the stillness of the Urn holds a superior life, mainly because the youth’s song is endless, “nor ever can those trees be bare” or lose their leaves, and though the lover will never reach the girl to kiss her, his love and her beauty will last forever, and they will ever be seen in such pleasure anticipation:

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss

Forever will thou love, and she be fair

In real life love and beauty declines, but the love and beauty depicted on the Urn will remain forever fair and fresh.

The third stanza continues the same line of thought. The poet continues to depict the happiness of the Urn’s world where spring is permanent, where the piper’s melodies are “ever new”, and where love is:

Forever warm and still to be enjoy’d

Forever panting, and for ever young

All breathing human passion far above…

The last two lines of this stanza confirm the superiority and the intensity of the passion depicted on the Urn. If compared to that of our finite world, we will find that our passions usually “leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d”. Thus it becomes quite clear that the love of living men is almost a parody of the love of the figures depicted on the Urn: the later’s love is warm, that of living men is “burning”, and though their love is still unsatisfied, “still to be enjoy’d”, whereas that of living men leaves a “parching tongue”.

As the poet refocuses his attention on the Urn a new scene is revealed, and he begins to question it in the fourth stanza. It is a scene of ritual sacrifice, at which a garlanded heifer is to be sacrificed at a “green alter”. Now the poet becomes so apt that he goes beyond the pictures themselves and begins to speculate on what the town was like:

What little town by river or sea shore,

Or mountain built with peaceful citadel

And playing on the same theme of the immortality of art, the poet affirms that the town will always be silent, and that it will remain desolated of its inhabitants who will never be able to get back again to their houses:

Little town thy streets for ever more

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e’er return

Keats begins the fifth stanza as if by getting away from the Urn to have a final survey. With this change of viewpoint the values represented by the Urn come into a new perspective. The poet now becomes objective, viewing the Urn as an object without life. The system of paradox which has been developing throughout the whole poem continues: though the Urn is a work of art of “fair attitude”, a “silent form”, motionless, made “of marble men and maidens”, and, by its very function, associated with death, it suggested a world of warmth, color, music, vitality, and passionate feelings. All this leads the poet to the conclusion of the eternity of the Urn:

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man…

For all its ideal perfection the Urn becomes a symbol of imaginative freedom and ideal world, which stands in contrast with the imperfect, messy, and mundane world of human existence.

Critical discussions of that ode tended to concentrate on the last two lines, what Keats meant when he said, “Beauty is truth, truth Beauty”, and how do these lines relate to the rest of the poem? If we examine Keats’s letters we would be able to infer the answer. It is true that Keats had for sometime been preoccupied with the relationship between Beauty –(the idealizing quality of a work of art)- and truth -(the inescapable facts of reality). “What the Imagination seizes as beauty”, Keats affirms in one of his letters dated November 1817, “ must be truth- whether it exists or not…the Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream, he waked and found it truth”. The same point has been affirmed in another letter as he affirms “ the excellence of every Art” lies in its ability to evaporate all disagreements, contraries, and paradoxes of life; showing the states of Imagination and reality as coexisting, beyond our world of suffering, change, and despair.