Seminar Paper

- Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats -

Maria-Antonia Vlad

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Faculty of Letters and Arts

Specialization: Chinese-English Language and Literature, 2nd year

The first son of a stable-keeper, and a well known English Romantic lyric poet John Keats
(1795 –1821) contributed to the improvement of vivid images of the poetry of his time. He
responded more intuitively than the other poets to the classical legends of ancient Greece,
medieval romance, and English woods and fields. The element of freedom is present in John
Keats’ poetry, and his spirit is delightful in a manner that he describes the beauty of nature,
the vividness of sensation, the charm of fable and romance, and anticipation of the future.
Keats represented human life as an adventure, a journey through dark chambers in the search
of truth and beauty. He expressed his ideas through rich and ambiguous tropes and
vocabulary. He was progressing very fast toward maturity and perfection.

The period between 1785 and 1830 is called ”The Romantic Period”. This was a complex and
diverse time during which England changed from a primarily agricultural society to a modern
industrial nation. Furthermore, major changes occurred in literature where the imagination of
many writers was preoccupied with revolution. During this period, imagination and emotional
sensitivity, human passion and expressiveness, the sense of freedom and the representation of
common people became a trend. Keats established an axiom that describes the role of poetry
in that time: ”if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at
all”. It was a time when even people of business and people of fashion read, a time of literary
excitement, expectancy, discussion, and disputation such as England has not known (Colvin,
2011).

”Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a poem in five stanzas written by John Keats. It was first
published in 1820 in a journal called ”Annals of the Fine Arts”, followed by Keats’s third and
final publication ”Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems”, and was
considered one of the greatest achievements of Romantic poetry. The ode describes a scene on
an urn that represents two lovers chasing one another in a pastoral landscape but also a world
of ancient Greeks who achieved a perfect balance between form and beauty.
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The poet begins to reflect on the static image of frozen people that appear on the urn. Those
people are just representations of human bodies and they cannot accomplish anything, but
they can live permanently. Humans, on the other hand, have their own purpose in life, and
they can lean on their passions, but their morbid condition will result in a short life. One of
the main ideas of the ode is the poet’s aspiration to find an answer from the ancient object that
persisted in time and that knows all the human life mysteries.

Romanticism is a literary movement and a reaction to the dramatic changes arising out of the
Industrial Revolution, characterized by imagination, emotion, a more common language, and
the presence of feelings such as melancholy and passion. ”Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a
Romantic poem that addresses beauty as an essence that attributes to the happiness of human
beings. Some major themes of this poem are the natural and artificial beauty, the ambiguity
between a mortal and immortal world, and the importance of the artist’s role. The Romantic
symbols found in this ode are the urn, the bride and the priest, the two lovers, the pastoral and
wonderful places (the fortress on the mountain, the isolated streets and the seashore), nature
presented, and the excitement and mystery of the poetry around the idea of a perfect endless
life.

The first stanza begins with the poet addressing to the urn as ”thou”, then creating the
personification of the object as a pure bride, a lonely child, and a forest-dwelling historian:
”Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness/ Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,/ Sylvan
historian, who canst thus express”. The connection between these three characters can
represent the idea that the bride and the child are pure and inoffensive human beings who
dwell in silence, and the historian also needs to be quiet in order to contemplate and write.
These characters create the image of an introverted human being that the poet attributes to the
urn. The way that the poet describes the urn can reveal a profound admiration for this ancient
object, the desire to discover the mystery of mortal human life and to become immortal. He
asks the urn to tell its ”flowery tale”, its story that is ”more sweetly than our rhyme”, which
means that what the urn has to say is worthier than people’s expressiveness in art.
Additionally, the poet finds some human shapes on the urn, but he is unable to recognize what
they really represent. He comes with a series of repeated questions regarding the condition of
the characters depicted on the urn: ”What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape/ Of
deities or mortals, or of both/ In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?/ What men or gods are these?
What maidens loth?”. These verses also show the poet’s ambivalence regarding the nature of
the beings sculptured on the urn. He uses playful paradoxes in order to find out about the
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actions of those beings: ”What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?/ What pipes and
timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”. However, these rhetorical questions show the poet’s
excitement in finding a response, but also anxiety followed by the fact that he will not receive
the message he wished for. The alliterations (”leaf-fring’d legend”) and assonances (”Thou
still unravish’d bride of quietness”) create the effect of a delighted tone and better-rhymed
verses. The visual images of ”Sylvan”, ”Arcady” and ”Tempe” signify the pastoral imagery of
antiquity. The beginning of first stanza starts with a silenced setting where the characters
seem to be lifeless and it ends with a more dynamic atmosphere.

The second stanza begins with the verse ”Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are
sweeter (...)” and reveals the poet’s preference for the classical pictures from the urn more
than for the ”heard melodies” of the poetry. The melodies he can imagine are sweeter than the
melodies he can hear. In other ideas, the tales he can create in his imagination from the
engravings in the urn are sweeter than the tales he can write and express in his ”rhyme”. The
poet addresses this time to the urn as a ”Fair youth” and encloses it in a series of ”canst not”
and ”nor ever” negations, assuming the fact that the youth cannot leave his song like the trees
that are never bare. This idea constitutes the fantasy of impossible ideals, a never-ending song
in a never-ending spring with an immortal love between beautiful human figures. The poet
tries to represent a world where everything is frozen from the passing of time and a world
where everything is always the same. In the same way, these negations show the poet’s
grievance and longing for a superior condition. The images on the urn show classical
characters: two forever young lovers, yet not alive. The bold lover (the piper) goes on playing
his unheard melodies for his lover beneath the trees. This visual image represents the absurd
idea of an idealized love that is much sweeter than the love consumed by humans. Through
the repetition (”never, never”) the poet refuses to accept his mortality condition and pleads for
a permanent condition. The alliteration (”lover, never, never” and in ”leaves”, ”grieve”,
”ever”, ”never”) accentuates the sorrowful state of the poet.

The third stanza idealizes a perfect world where the poet lives in an immortal condition, a
world that will be the same forever. The repetition of the word ”happy” (”Ah, happy, happy
boughts!/ (...)/ And, happy melodist) and the assonance (“More happy love! more happy,
happy love!”) emphasize the excitement. The trees are happy because they can not shed their
leaves and the Spring, a state of potential and renewal, will remain the same. Another
character appears in this stanza, the ”unwearied” melodist who plays songs without ceasing
(”And, happy melodist, unwearied/ For ever piping songs for ever new”). Moreover, the songs

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will be always new, something that artists and poets can not achieve because they need time
to write about their thoughts and to exercise their vocabulary and it suggests that the melodist
has a superior position. The anaphora (”For ever piping songs for ever new”, ”For ever
painting, and for ever young”, ”More happy love! More happy, happy love”) emphasizes the
poetic effect and show a desolate state of the speaker who tends to confuse the real world with
his fantasy and the idea that the happiness exists only in art. The tone is idealistic, but it
dissolves in the last three verses and transforms into a painful disappointment when the poet
return to reality. The final three lines abandon happiness and portray real love as akin to an
illness (”leaves a heart high-sorrowful”). Love symptoms such as sweetness, feverishness and
thirst are similar to those of tuberculosis. In this stanza, the words are used in a balanced way,
so that the poet is careful to repeat the words ”happy” and ”for ever”, positive words that
show a perfect scenario of the world, for six times. Also, the word ”for ever” can present the
cause of which the speaker can be ”happy”, the effect.

The fourth stanza presents a pastoral procession in which a mysterious priest leads a heifer to
a green altar in a small seaside town or on a mountain fortress. In this stanza, the poet shows
complete desolation and despair. He is reflecting on the ”little town by river or sea shore”, an
isolated place that has been emptied of its inhabitants due to a sacrifice ritual. Also, the poet
recognizes that the urn holds the ashes of the dead and the artist of the urn can never return
from the past: ”thy streets for evermore/ Will silent be; and not a soul to tell/ Why thou art
desolate, can e’er return”.

In the last stanza. The urn is apostrophized again: ”O Attic shape! Fair attitude!” and ”Cold
Pastoral!”. Assonance in the first line emphasizes the urn’s dual character as both friend and a
stranger. It will be unchangeable for future generations (”Thou shalt remain, in midst of other
woe/ Than ours, a friend to man,”), but its pastoral scene and all its stories will be eternal, but
cold (”As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!”). After "old age" has wasted its generation, the
ancient object will remain to witness other humans' invocations ("in midst of other woes").

The poet switches from emotive engagement and figurative visions to more objective diction.
There is some uncertainty about the poem’s famous conclusion: ”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
- that is all/ Ye know on earth, and ye need to know”. The ambiguity is given to the fact that
the receiver of the speaker’s message is unknown. This may be the reader, the urn, or the
other figures that the poet described. The statement ”Beauty is truth” is a profound
metaphysical proposition, an overstatement representing the limited point of view on the urn.

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According to the poem, the "truth" presented is human mortality, and the way the poet
describes the situation as beautiful may suggest that he accepted his ephemeral existence.
Moreover, this statement can refer to the definition of poetry and literature as well, that is, the
one that will not give us answers, but will give us something to think about.

Regarding the poetic devices, the ode has a iambic pentameter with cross rhyme and a
measure of 8-12 syllabes. End rhyme is used to make the stanzas melodious (the words
”time”, ”rhyme”, ”both”, ”loth” in the first stanza and ”unheard”, ”endear’d”, ”kiss” and
”bliss” in the second stanza).

A lot of critics expressed their opinions about John Keat’s ”Ode on a Grecian Urn”, mostly on
the final famous lines (”Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know”) that engendered disagreement among some of the greatest critical minds of
the century. One of the critics admitted that ”The message of the Grecian Urn has unhappily”
and another commentator found it ”depressing” and ”great a deal of paper”. H.W. Garrod
commented that the lines ”are difficult and that every reader finds a certain difficulty when
reading the final stanza. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the most widely read and
respected authors during the eighteenth century, analyzed with curiosity the poem of John
Keats. Shaftesbury observes the identical nature of the beauty and the truth: ”For all beauty is
truth. True features make the beauty of a face; and true proportions the beauty of architecure
(...) In poetry, which s all fable, truth is still the perfection” (Solomon, 1975). Shaftesbury
also explores the human apprehension of beauty in the line ”O Attic shape! Fair attitude!”.
According to him, consideration of the beauty of shape alone can lead the reader to
discovering what beauty actually is. In his analysis of the poem, Keats led Shaftesbury to a
better understanding of his writing, and he insisted that beauty was the recognition that only
the immortal and immutable could be beautiful.

To sum up, the main themes of ”Ode on a Grecian Urn” focus on the relationship between
true and false. It also emphasizes the relationship between reality and imagination, natural and
artificial beauty, and the prices of both mortality and immortality. The poet is ambivalent
about these ideas and prefers to see the multiple angles of life. His desire to find an answer to
the mysteries of the tales in the urn will be transformed into rhetorical questions about the
ancient Greek object, but nobody will be able to offer him an answer. The poet’s ambiguous
last lines can be interpreted in at least two ways: beauty can signify mortality as the speaker

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accepted his condition or it can represent the idea of eternity and his craving for an endless
life.

Bibliography:

1.

Colvin, S. (2011). Life of John Keats. The Project Gutenberg. doi:ISO-8859-1

2. Solomon, H. M. (1975). Shaftesbury's Characteristics and the Conclusion of "Ode on
a Grecian Urn". 24, pg. 89-101. Preluat pe 10 16, 2022, de pe
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30212774

3. Mukherjee, H. S. (2021). John Keats’s Odes: A Balm to a Tired some Soul: With
Reference to Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn (...). International Journal of
English Literature and Social Sciences.

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOmQNP26Lak

5. GUTHRIE, C. (2017, 12 20). John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Poetry

Foundation. Preluat pe 10 16, 2022, de pe
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/145240/john-keats-ode-on-a-grecian-urn

6. https://literarydevices.net/ode-on-a-grecian-urn/
7. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ode-on-a-Grecian-Urn