Trace the evolution of thought in "Ode to a Nightingale".

The first thought in Keats' melancholy "Ode to a Nightingale" is

"drowsy numbness" that pains the speaker's senses. Keats is
assumed to be speaking for himself in this Ode. He is so
metaphorically painfully numbed that he feels he is
metaphorically sinking to the Greek mythological river of Hades
that gives forgetfulness, the River Lethe. He tells us that his
pain is not caused by envy of "thy happy lot" but rather in
"being too happy in thine happiness," which refers to the
Nightingale. In other words, too happy to feel the happiness
exuding from the "light-winged Dryad of the trees," of course
the object of the Ode, the Nightingale, whom Keats equates
with an immortal deity of the woods, a Dryad.

The second stanza, has Keats crying out for a "full beaker" of
wine cooled in the earth and tasting of flowers and plants, of
dance, laughter and of song from the southern regions of
France ("Flora..., Dance, Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth").
This is an allusion to revelries in worship of the Classical Greek
and Roman god Bacchus (aka Dionysus). He then equates the
wine as full of the Mount Helicon Hippocrene bubbling spring
waters sacred to the Muses and the source of poetic
inspiration. His desire is to drink the Hippocrene brew of
inspiration in order to metaphorically leave the world's thoughts
and fly with the Nightingale to the rich interior of the forest.

He desires this to be able to forget what the immortal deity of

the Nightingale has never known: fever, fret, groans, palsy
shakes, sad grey [sic] hairs, paling youth that is deadly thin,
death. He says that in this life, to think is to be filled with the
sorrows and despairs, of beauty and love that both end too
quickly, "tomorrow." In the next stanza, Keats decides to brave
it and fly on the wings of Poesy (poetry), without the aid of
Bacchus's rites and the Muse's Hippocrene waters, as the
companion of the Nightingale even though he won't be able to
think aright nor perceive what the Nightingale perceives.
Next Keats reveals that many a night while listening to the deity
Nightingale, he woos Death that he might die with the song of
the
Nightingale in the air. Keats then plays on the conceit of the
immortality of the deity Nightingale, "not born for death,"
immortal from countless ages that even gave glimpses of "faery
lands forlorn." And the word "forlorn" brings the poet's thoughts
from soaring with the Nightingale back to his own body that he
has revealed is pain wracked. Keats ends with the description
of "fancy" (inspired imagination) as a "deceiving elf" and, as the
Nightingale's "anthem fades," he is left to wonder if his
excursion with the immortal Nightingale was vision or
dream...while awake or asleep.

What general idea does Ode to a Nightingale develop?

The basic idea in keats's Ode to A Nightingale is the conflict
between the Ideal and the Real, time and timelessness,
mortality and an escape into permanence. The real world for
keats is conditioned by flux and mutability, an awareness of
which causes pain. This notion of mutability and the anguish
resulting from it is explored in all details in stanza 3 where
Keates avers that human life, health, beauty and love are all
subject to flux and hence result in pain:

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear heach other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs.

The Nightingale's song to keats becomes a potent symbol of

his nympholeptic longing for immortality and hence his desire
for the rapport with the bird. It is not the biological species that
is Keats's concern, but the deathless song it produces. The
song appaers to the poet to be too full of the spiriot of
unadulterated joy  and hence the poet's interest in the song. He
achieves a rapport with the bird "through the wings of poesy''. it
is tragically paradoxical that ultimately the imaginative union
with the bird
braks and the poet is back to his desolate self;

Adieu the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

The poem raises deeply tragic questions relating to the

possibility of attainment of immortality or the transcendence of
pain in the human condition.

What is the element of sensuosness in Ode to Nightingale?

Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" is full of sensuous details. In fact,
it is the sensuousness of his imagery that makes him such a
great poet. Here are some examples of that bountiful sensuous
imagery:

O for a beaker full of the warm south,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;

The beaded bubbles winking at the brim are especially striking.

We have all noticed this in a glass of red wine but needed
Keats to call our attention to them. The little bubbles all cluster
as if they are beaded together. They are iridescent and reflect
the dark purple wine below them as well as the light that comes
from above. Does anybody take the time to appreciate such
tiny details anymore? Or do they all want to have read the
poem and put it behind them? The beaded bubbles are in
constant motion because they are so fragile. Not one of them
can last for long. Each of them will pop. Keats uses the word
"winking" to describe the effect perfectly. Each popped bubble
is replaced by another bubble as if there are infinite bubbles
eager to enjoy their moment of life and light. Keats may have
spent a long time looking for those exact words to create the
image.
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
In his imagination the poet is close to the ground in bushes
where nightingales nest. He imagines the faint light is blown
through the shadows by the breezes. It is a supernatural kind of
lighting effect known only to nightingales.

Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Keats deviates from the dominant iambic pentameter with "Fast

fading violets cover'd up in leaves." This line has
a syncopated effect. You can hear it if you read the line aloud.
The big white musk-rose full of what Keats calls wine, and
which is really a mixture of dew and the flower's own sweet-
smelling nectar, evokes an image of a sort of quiet, dimly
lighted pub where the flies gather in the evening to drink and
converse. This is a fascinating, nearly hypnotic image—for
anyone who will take the time to savor such things. F. Scott
Fitzgerald must have loved Keats. Fitzgerald's prose is full of
Keatsian-type description. He used the words "Tender is the
night" as the title for his best novel.

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Those last two lines are spoken just before the poet is called
back out of his fantasy into the grim world of reality. The lines
represent his effort to express what cannot be expressed. They
are the high point of the poem. The faery lands are "forlorn"
because nobody believes in them anymore. It is the word
"forlorn" that calls Keats back to reality against his will. Unlike
the nightingale, he is not immortal. He died at the tender age of
twenty-five, a tragic loss to English literature.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music—Do I wake or sleep?

Those are some examples of the sensuousness which is to be

found in "Ode to a Nightingale" and in most of Keats' poetry.
His "Ode to a Nightingale" is probably his greatest work.

How does Keats characterize the nightingale in Ode to a

nightinagale?

Keats characterizes the nightingale as being at "ease" and "too

happy in thine happiness." He means to say that the
nightingale is so at ease that it has no cares at all. This
contrasts with the speaker himself who is burdened with
melancholy. The nightingale is full of happiness because it is
not burdened with the knowledge of growing old, mortality and
death, and the passage of time. In other words, the speaker
knows these things. He is aware of his own mortality and the
fact that life is fleeting. The nightingale, on the other hand, is
not aware of these things and is, therefore, full of happiness. In
the third stanza, the speaker notes how the nightingale is not
burdened with these thoughts: 

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known, 

The weariness, the fever, and the fret, 

Here where men sit and hear each other groan; 

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; 

The speaker tries to at least forget the knowledge of his own
mortality. He supposes that wine ("a draught of vintage") might
allow him to forget this and be more like the carefree
nightingale. But this simply dulls his
melancholy, so he tries to escape his worries via his own
poetry. Past generations have heard the nightingale's song and
future generations will as well. The best the speaker can hope
for is that future generations will hear/read his poetry. He has
resigned himself to the fact that human experience is
necessarily burdened with knowledge of life and death. He
ascribes a kind of immortality to the nightingale (and more
particularly to the nightingale's song). It is immortal because it
is not aware of (or does not acknowledge) death and the
passage of time. 

What is the impact of the bird's song on poet?

The poet admires the nightingale's song because the bird sings
with "full-throated ease." The poet recognizes a freedom of
creativity and art in the song. In the third stanza, the poet notes
that the nightingale does not have the concerns that he, a
human being, has:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

The nightingale's song is beautiful and the poet recognizes the

creativity of that song as something comparable to his art of
poetry. So, he sees a common connection there. But the poet is
particularly fascinated because the song comes from a creature
who is not burdened by the realities of aging, sorrow, and
death. To the poet, the nightingale sings without those
concerns. He, on the other hand, writes poetry with those
concerns always in mind. Keats was always too aware of his
own mortality. And as an artist trying to create poetry that could
be timelessly celebrated, he is thinking of immortality. He
sees/hears that immortality in the nightingale's song because
the song comes from a place in which mortality is not a
concern:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;

The poet wonders what it's like to sing/create without those

concerns. He
also longs for his own poetry to achieve the kind of immortality
he hears in the nightingale's song.

John keats is haunted by the conflict between ideal world

and real world.Explain this statement.
In "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats longs to enter the world of the
nightingale. He is intoxicated by its beautiful song and
addresses it, saying:

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim

To Keats ( but more precisely his speaker), the nightingale

represents an ideal world that does not include disease,
suffering, despair, aging, and death. He wants to fly to the bird,
and become one with it and the luxuriant nature it is a part of.

Although individual nightingales die, it represents a world of

immortality, in which the ideal of the nightingale and its
intoxicating song continues on unchanged from generation to
generation, passing back into ancient times. The idea of this
alternative world of eternal beauty haunts the speaker. He
states, again addressing the nightingale:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown ...

The speaker goes on to note that even the Biblical Ruth, living
thousands of years ago, was, while homesick and forlorn,
comforted by the song of the nightingale. Unfortunately,
however, for the speaker, by the end of the poem he is called
back out of his dreamlike desire for merger with the nightingale
and reenters the real world.
What is the difference between keat's world and bird's
world?
This excellent poem creates a division between the world in
which Keats is forced to live, which is characterised by pain,
suffering and death, and the world of the nightingale, which is
seen by Keats as a symbol of the eternal and of beauty itself,
which remains unsullied by what happens in the earth below.
consider how this division is introduced in the third stanza of
this poem:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies...

Note the way that the nightingale lives "far away" where it is
able to forget the kind of sights and experiences it has never
known. Life for Keats and humans at large is characterised by
"weariness," "fever" and "fret," all leading to eventual death. By
contrast, if we look at the fourth stanza, we can see that the
world of the nightingale is described as a fantastical place of
enchantment with the "Queen-Moon" on her throne and
"Clustered around by all her starry Fays." In contrast to the life
of humans, the nightingale "wast not born for death" and is an
"immortal bird." It has never had the experience of "hungry
generations" treading it down.

What are the romantic elements in Ode to a Nightingale

Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is most likely the most well-
known and widely-read of his odes, and the critic Allen Tate
once said that this ode "at least tries to say everything that a
poet can say." The ode exhibits several of the themes that we
associate with poems of the Romantic Period in English
literature--transience of life, altered states of reality, nature and
the natural world, mortality, and the power of poetry to transport
the poet.
The ode begins, for example, with an indication that the poet's
sense of reality may be altered when he tells us that "and a
drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had
drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains. . . ."  From the
start, then, we have a poet who is perhaps observing life and
nature through the filter of an altered mind.

When we get to lines 25 and following (third stanza), Keats

discusses another pre-occupation of the Romantics, the
transience of life.  We are presented with images of decay, old
age and death: "Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies."  Keats is,
unfortunately, accurately depicting the aging of men, who often
become victims of palsy, lose their hair, and die.

But in stanza 4, the poetry is able to escape the ravages of old

age and time by taking flight on the "viewless wings of Poesy."
In this stanza and stanza 5, Keats essentially describes himself
as not particularly fearful of death--"Now more than ever it
seems rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no
pain. . . ."  He notes, however, that, having died, he's no longer
going to be able to hear the nightingale's song.

In stanzas 7 and 8, Nature's permanence, another Romantic

theme, is clear when Keats says that "Thou was not born for
death, immortal Bird!"  The nightingale's voice that Keats hears
was heard thousands of years ago in classical times and even
the biblical era.  Keats bids farewell to the nightingale, whose
song has enabled him to escape the reality of his mortality and
transported him into the natural world for awhile.  Consistent
with his altered state of mind, the poet cannot tell if he actually
heard the nightingale's song or if the vision and song were just
part of a dream.

 Explain permenance vs mutability in Ode to a Nightingale.

As with all Keats's odes, the "Ode To A Nightingale" explores
the relationship between a number of antitheses: art and life;
the immanent and the transcendent; and the permanent and
the mutable. Keats has chosen to use the nightingale, a well-
worn symbol of death, to illustrate the point. In doing so, Keats
lays bare the ambiguity of the Romantic attitude towards
nature, one that both acknowledges its changeability
while at the same time investing it with a sublime force which
has a life all its own.

The nightingale's song embodies this. It is sweetly beautiful, so

much so that it transcends the world of nature to which both we
and the bird belong. When the nightingale is dead and gone, its
song like all art will live on in the hearts and minds of
successive generations.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

But the nightingale is not immortal; like us and everything else

in nature it must one day perish. Yet, ever the arch-Romantic,
Keats invests nature with a power beyond anything mere
mortals can ever possibly conceive. The nightingale's song has
been there throughout history, delighting both emperor and
clown alike. And there is no reason for us not to hope that as
the world turns, the music will endure.

As Keats sinks deeper into reverie, he is lifted out of himself

and his immediate surroundings to partake of the sublime
music of the nightingale's song. But he knows that he cannot
do so for long. The harshness of reality must soon intrude.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Keats comes to his senses, reluctantly realizing that his languid

vision was precisely that. But there is enough ambiguity here to
sustain the tension between the permanent and the immutable.
What is real and what is ideal have yet to be conclusively
determined. 

In his own sublime lyrics, Keats desires to achieve the lasting

posterity of the nightingale. He too yearns for his song to soar
high above the here and now of the temporal world and attain
immortality. "Ode To A Nightingale" perfectly illuminates the
ancient saying Ars longa vita brevis. Art endures but life is
short.
Why does Keats want to escape from escape from reality
in Ode to a nightingale?

In the second stanza of "Ode to a Nightingale," the speaker

wishes that he could "leave the world unseen, / And with thee
[the nightingale] fade away into the forest dim."

In the third stanza, he says that he wants to escape from reality

so that he can "quite forget" what the nightingale "hast never
known." He then lists the experiences that he supposes the
nightingale has never known—and which, by implication, he
feels he has known too much. He describes "The weariness,
the fever, and the fret." The "weariness' could here refer to both
physical and mental exhaustion, as indeed could the "fever."
The "fret" seems to allude to all of the troubles and problems
that Keats, like most people, has had to deal with.

In the next few lines, Keats refers specifically to the aging

process and to death. He writes, for example, about how "youth
grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies." In other words, the
speaker wants to escape from reality so that he can escape
from the knowledge of his own mortality. This is knowledge that
he presumes the nightingale is ignorant of, and he envies the
nightingale this ignorance.

What is Keat's description of nature in Ode to a

Nightingale?
As we might expect, Keats's description of nature, here as
elsewhere, is suitably ripe and sensuous. At the same time,
there is something unreal about the immense beauty that
surrounds the poet as he reposes in the enveloping darkness:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the
seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn,
and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

The unreality of nature has rendered it almost a world of the

imagination. The same could be said of the nightingale's song,
which is also a part of nature, yet not quite of it, hinting
tantalizingly at the eternal beyond. Though taking place in the
world of the senses, the here and now, the nightingale's sweet
song hints at another world entirely—the world of the sublime,
the ethereal, the transcendent. It is out of this world that the
poet constructs his lush, dreamy vision.

Deprived of light, the poet must create his art out of the
darkness, out of the imagination. The world that he makes must
take its inspiration from the joys and beauties of nature, yet
transcend them, as indeed does the song of the nightingale.
This is nature as immutable, eternal and pure, no longer
subject to the ever-changing seasons; nature in the Romantic
sense as a living force in its own right, one that will go on long
after we have departed from this mortal coil, long after the poet
has passed away and "cease[d] upon the midnight with no
pain."

What poetic techniques are used in Ode on a grecian urn?

Keats uses the poetic device of apostrophe in this poem.
Apostrophe occurs when an inanimate object is addressed as if
it is alive. Keats addresses the urn in the first stanza, calling it:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time

He then proceeds to ask it a series of questions, as if it can

answer—an example of personification.

Keats also employs parallelism: in the final stanza he again

returns to apostrophe, mirroring the first stanza in addressing
the urn directly, stating:
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity
We get a sense of closure as the urn is depicting speaking
back to the narrator, giving him a cryptic answer to his
questions from stanza one about what it (the urn) means.

Keats also carefully structures the poem to reflect his rising

emotion as he contemplates the urn and becomes more and
more identified with it. The rise in emotion crescendos in the
middle of the poem, in stanza three, as the speaker repeats the
word "happy" over and over again, emphasizing his joy with the
repeated use of exclamation points. After this high point, the
speaker gradually comes down from his sense of euphoria.

Antithesis is another poetic device as the unchanging, eternal

quality of the urn is continually contrasted to the fast changes of
the natural world. One example is the speaker's delight that it
will be forever spring on the urn:

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves

Keats uses personification as well, not only of the vase, but of

the town that is emptied forever by the festival depicted on the
vase and treated as if it can experience the human emotion of
desolation or loneliness:

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return

All of these devices reinforce the speaker's intense, close

identification with the urn and his desire to be one of the figures
on it.
Explain "Beauty is truth,truth beauty,-that is all.Ye know on
earth and all ye need to know".
The lines

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou [you] say'st,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"

occur at the end of the poem. In this stanza, the speaker is

coming back down to reality after having experienced a period
of ecstatic identification with the urn. Earlier in the poem, he
describes that and expresses his desire to be one of the figures
on the urn, forever young, forever in love, forever in springtime.

As he come "down," the speaker reestablishes the distance

between himself and the urn. He is not going to achieve union
with the urn. However, thinking more soberly, he says that the
beautiful urn "tease[s]" him out of "thought" in the same way as
"eternity" (death). What he means is that while he was
contemplating the urn, he lost all sense of self and lived in the
timelessness of the eternal.

He then tells the urn that it will remain a "friend," a comfort, in

moments of sadness. He says in the quote that the urn reveals
to him that truth and beauty are the same thing in that both
bring us to the same peak of self-forgetting. Truth is eternal and
unchanging and so is beauty. Beyond that, there is no point in
overthinking the impact of beauty by trying too hard to
intellectualize it.

As for who is speaking, this is tricky. The speaker wants us to

believe it is the urn speaking to him. He says "thou" [you, the
urn] sayest [say] and then puts the statement about beauty and
truth in quotation marks to emphasize that these are the words
of the urn. So on a surface level, yes, the urn is speaking.
However, the speaker is telling the urn what it is saying to him.
What is the contrast between art and life in Ode on a
grecian urn?
Ah, one of my favorite controversial subjects to discuss about
one of my very favorite poems EVER!

The contrast Keats creates between art and life in "Ode on a

Grecian Urn" is precisely this:  that art is better than life (hence
the title of the poem).  In fact, Keats proves this when he says,
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter." 
Why is art better than life?  Art, as in the form of the urn, can
capture life at its best and keep it there.  Here is my favorite
example:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near
the goal--yet, do not grieve; / She cannot faded, though thou
has not thy bliss, / Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Although ingeniously left unstated here, the contrast between

art and life is quite vivid.  This lover can literally never kiss his
love.  In life, they could kiss, yes, but that is not the real goal. 
Keats even uses the word "winning" to prove that art is the true
capturer of beauty here.  In life, this young lady's beauty would
eventually fade and her lover's passion would fade as well. 
Here I always imagine Keats exclaiming, "Not on this urn!"  This
is literally the same point of so many poets:  that a love can
remain eternal through poetry.  In Keats case here, through art.

Near the end of the poem, Keats even borders on jealousy of

the urn, that will stand steadfast in beauty as the rest of the
earth may waste away.  Keats even goes so far as to call it
"Cold Pastoral!  When old age shall this generation waste, /
Thou shalt remain."  Of course, the contrast between art an life
is finalized in the final lines of the poem as well:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all / Ye know on earth,

and all ye need to know.
Truth, then (according to the highly debated last two lines of the
poem), can precisely be found upon the urn (and not always
necessarily in life).  Therefore art presents for us a utopia for
the world to reside in its own way.
What final messages does the urn hold for mankind in Ode
on a grecian urn?
The last two lines of Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” have
puzzled successive generations of literary critics and scholars
ever since the poem was first published. Not only has it been
impossible to achieve any kind of consensus on the precise
meaning of these lines, but it also hasn't even been possible to
determine exactly who or what is saying them and to whom
they are being addressed.

That being the case, it is impossible to provide a definite

answer to the question as to the last two lines' meaning.
However, what we can do is to operate on the basis of a theory
which, if it doesn't command complete unanimity among
scholars, does at least attract the support of a wide spectrum of
scholarly opinion.

The last two lines of the Ode are as follows:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Now if we proceed on the basis of the theory that these lines

are spoken by the urn and are addressed to humankind, then
we can argue that the message conveyed is that of the
imperishable nature of beauty and truth.

In that sense, a work of art, like the urn in the poem, can speak
to us about beauty and truth and can point the way towards a
kind of Platonic realm of absolute beauty of which all beautiful
objects in the world around us partake. The urn itself, like all
works of art, can be destroyed, but the message that it conveys
cannot. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” lies beyond the human
world with all its changes and is therefore indestructible.

The work of art is ideally placed to convey this message

because it is in the world as a created object, a cultural artifact,
while at the same time pointing towards a transcendental world,
a world of absolute beauty.

Why is the urn a foster child of silence and slow time?

In his poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats calls the urn a
“foster
child of silence and slow time.” Let's unpack this description
and reflect on its meaning.

First, a foster child refers to a child who is raised by adults who

are not their biological parents. The word “foster” suggests a
nurturing that leads to growth and development. When Keats
says that the urn is a foster child of silence and time, then, he
means that the urn was not created by silence and time (for it
was made by a human artist). Rather, silence and time have
contributed to the urn's growth and development in some way.

It seems a little odd to think of an inanimate object like an urn

growing and developing, and of course, it cannot do so
physically. But it does grow and develop in meaning and value
over time. Later in the poem, Keats describes the glimpse the
urn provides of a history that is lost to the modern world yet has
grown in meaning because of its remoteness. Over the years,
the urn has become a valuable object for what it shows us
about the past, and it provides meaningful images not available
elsewhere.

Now let's think about silence and “slow time” and how these
add meaning and value to the urn. Silence gives a nod toward
observation and reflection. Only in silence, without distraction,
can a viewer fully encounter the images on the urn and discern
or create their meaning. Time, as mentioned above, makes the
urn more remote from us and therefore a source of history.
Further, time has left this urn intact. Many such objects once
existed but no longer do, but time has spared this urn, allowing
it the opportunity to speak to us today.

Discuss Keats as a hellenist with reference from Ode on a

grecian urn.
Hellenism suggests love for Greek art and sculptor . At the age
of sixteen ,Keats' interest to Greek art and literature , was
stirred with his study of Chapman's Homer .The artist in Keats
was half in love with Greek art .
Keats is every inch a Hellenist .In Grecian urn we find him
dealing with the engraved pictures  on the Urn .Greek ritual
finds expression in the references of mysterious priest ,heifer
garlanded ,and dressed in silken flanks , green altar .Again
"attic", means Greek .Keats mentions the
word ,"Tempe" , and with that word , we are transported to the
eastern coast of northern Greece where Tempe is
situated .Arcadia relates to a famous pastoral -sight in Greece .

How is ode on a grecian urn a romantic poem?

A Grecian urn is a classical object, and it is easy to imagine
such an object being the subject of contemplation for many
poets. To pinpoint the Romantic qualities of Keats's "Ode on a
Grecian Urn," it is worth considering how different a poem on
the same subject by Alexander Pope—an Augustan poet—for
instance, might be. In the first place, Pope would not use a
poem on a man-made object to celebrate nature, as Keats
does. Additionally, Keats is not as great a nature-worshipper as
Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, but he does continually
stress the way in which the urn depicts natural scenes. It is
"sylvan" and "flowery" and "leaf-fring'd."

Keats's ode is Romantic in the way it uses sensual imagery to

suggest something beyond sensuality, something which
(contrary to the Augustan spirit) cannot be described in rational
terms. The "wild ecstasy" of the poem is Romantic in spirit,
encouraging readers to let their sensibilities overwhelm them.
The justification for this lies in Keats's famous final lines.
Beauty will not only reveal the truth (something the Augustan
would have disputed) but is the truth. This notion that you can
discover the most profound and important wisdom simply by
opening your heart to beauty is one of the central tenets of
Romanticism.

Why does Keats call the urn a "Sylvan historian"?

In this poem, Keats contemplates a scene painted on a Grecian
urn. Greek art was flooding into England at this time, and
people were fascinated by it.

Sylvan means wooded. What Keats is sees on the urn is a

group of people heading for a pagan festival in a wooded area
outside of town. Because the scene takes place in a woodsy,
leafy setting, Keats refers to it as sylvan.

The urn records a specific moment from the past, including two
lovers just about to kiss. Therefore, because the urn is
recording history, Keats
calls it "historian."

In the poem, Keats becomes progressively more enthusiastic

about the happiness of being a figure painted on a Grecian urn,
forever young, forever in love, forever joyfully headed to a
festival in a setting where it will forever be a beautiful spring
day. As he gazes at the vase, being part of a work of art,—
never to aging, growing sick, or dying—seems preferable to
him to human mortality. 

Historical and social context of Ode on a grecian urn.

According to scholar Jonathan Sachs, "in the later eighteenth
and early nineteenth century ... [there was] an increasing
fascination with Greece and Greek culture." Keats shared in
that fascination. We know, for instance, that he viewed the
Elgin marbles, brought to England from Greece in 1805, and
we know that two articles by the artist Benjamin Haydon on
classical Greek art influenced Keats' writing of "Ode on a
Grecian Urn." The first Haydon article was about Greek worship
and sacrifice, which figure prominently in Keats' poem. We
have evidence too that Keats saw and made copies of classical
Grecian urns. 

During this period, archeology was beginning to flourish and

antiquities from once great cultures flooded into England: the
year "Ode to a Grecian Urn" was written also saw the
publication of Shelley's "Ozymandias," inspired by the shipment
of the Egyptian statue of Ramses II to England. As these
poems attest, both poets shared the contemporary interest in
"antique" cultures.

In a more specific historical context, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

was one of a group of five odes that Keats wrote, probably in
May 1819. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is considered a Romantic
poem, although its subject, an urn from ancient Greece, is more
likely to be associated with the neo-Classical poetry of the
Enlightenment. Nevertheless, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" displays
Romantic traits, including bursts of ecstatic emotion: the poet
addresses the vase as  "Happy!" multiple times, and Keats
focuses not on classical heroes, gods or famous statesmen, but
on ordinary people heading to a festival. 

How does ode on a grecian urn depict the mutability of

human life and
permanence of art?
John Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is a formal lyric poem
whose metaphoric tension depends upon the dual nature of the
urn: While the beautiful urn itself is a symbol of the static quality
of art, at the same time, the figures painted upon upon this urn
symbolize the dynamic process of life, which Keats states are
in "slow time" and often silence since they are still art. Thus, as
an objet d'art, the urn is eternalized; however, as the depiction
of an experience, it is temporal.

This permanence of art and mutability of time is described

again in lines 11-20 in which the poet addresses the "fair
youth," remarking that he cannot leave his song, nor can the
trees shed their leaves. Nor can the youth ever kiss his lover,
whose beauty will not fade as do humans in life:

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss

Thus, if life forces change with the resulting imperfections of

age, art creates, what Keats wrote in one of his letters, a state
in which "all disagreeables evaporate," a state that Keats
yearned for with his poetry.

Further, however, Keats as poet acknowledges that there is

"still" imperfection in the ideal nature of art just as there are
flaws in the temporal nature of life. For, the lovers are frozen,
"[F]or ever panting, and for ever young" and though they are
preserved in their youth, they are unable to bring their love to
fruition as humans could.  Likewise, the urn's music lasts longer
than any music the poet may hear; however, its tones cannot
be heard and enjoyed as they can in life.

With these thoughts, the tone moves from one of ecstasy to

separation and melancholy as the poet ponders more
thoroughly this duality of the urn.  The paradox of the last line
points again to this duality.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all

We know on earth, and all ye need to know.

And, so, Keats is aware that he must search further than the
beauty of the
urn and its truth as art.  He must find a truth that extends
beyond the beauty of an artifact that, too, will eventually decay;
he must find truth that is  everlasting beauty where "all
disagreeables" such as "slow time" truly evaporate."

Theme of Ode on a grecian urn.

The second, third and fourth stanzas develop the theme of the
flawed nature of lifelessness in beauty: each marble,
immobilized scene on the urn is flawed while flawless. The
town following the priest of Hymen out to the marriage with the
wedding's sacrificial young cow is frozen in flawless beauty, but
the town is flawed by being desolate, without any who will ever
return. The "more happy, happy love" is "for ever warm"
"panting" and "young" and it is "far above" [far greater than] all
"breathing human passion" since it is flawed by being fragile
and changeable. The bride, groom and piper are frozen in
purity, beauty and musicality, yet the tune is toneless, the kiss is
undelivered, and the bride is ever a virgin. The love shown on
the urn is unlike human love that suffers emotional, spiritual
and physical depletion: "a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A
burning forehead, and a parching tongue."

Turning to the theme of Truth and Beauty, Keats ends his

narrative of musings by addressing the urn--decorated all over
with forest, men and maidens--and accusing it of escaping
understanding through contemplation in just the same way that
eternity escapes understanding through contemplation: neither
the urn nor eternity can be known through contemplation and
musings. He ends by recording the message the urn gives in
reply to his accusation: "Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty." The
paraphrase helps focus what Keats means:

PARAPHRASE: The urn answers back, "All you need to know

is that Beauty [the urn] is eternal, outlasting all other things
after they are dead and gone, and Truth shows itself [love,
nature, religion, marriage] in the Beauty that survives. This is all
you can know; musing and contemplation can gain you no
more knowledge than this."