On A Grecian Urn Essay, Research Paper

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Summary

In the first stanza, the speaker, standing before an ancient Grecian

urn, addresses the urn, preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in

time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence

and slow time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian,” which can tell a

story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn, and asks what

legend they depict, and where they are from. He looks at a picture that

seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women, and wonders

what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? /

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the

urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a

glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melody’s are

sweeter than mortal melodies, because they are unaffected by time. He tells

the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in

time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third

stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers, and feels happy that

they will never shed their leaves; he is happy for the piper because his songs

will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will

last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human

passion,” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead,

and a parching tongue.”

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the

urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He

wonders where they are going (”To what green altar, O mysterious

priest…”), and where they have come from. He imagines their little town,

empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be

silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the

final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like

Eternity, “doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation

is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic

lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says that that is the only

thing the urn knows, and the only thing it needs to know.

Form

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” follows the same Ode-stanza structure as

the “Ode on Melancholy,” though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the

last three lines of each stanza. Each of “Grecian Urn”’s five stanzas is ten

lines long, metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and divided

into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The

first seven lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the

second occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In

stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED;

in stanzas three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza

one. As in other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Melancholy”), the

two-part rhyme scheme (the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of

CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well.

The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza,

and the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is

only a general rule, true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as

the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)

Themes

If the “Ode to a Nightingale” portrays Keats’s speaker’s engagement

with the fluid expressiveness of music, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” portrays

his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian

urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s

viewing of it, exists outside of time in the human sense–it does not age, it

does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker’s

meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved

into the side of the urn: they are free from time, but they are simultaneously

frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is

“for ever young”), but neither can they have experience (the youth can never

kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their

homes).

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into

the urn; each time he asks different questions of it. In the first stanza, he

examines the picture of the “mad pursuit,” and wonders what actual story

lies behind the picture: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?”

Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres

of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of

questioning.

In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper

playing to his lover beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine

what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to

identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from temporality, and

attracted to the eternal newness of the piper’s unheard song, and to the

eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is “far

above” all transient human passion, which, in its sexual expression,

inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity–when passion is satisfied, all

that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a “burning

forehead,” and a “parching tongue.” His recollection of these conditions

seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he

abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures

on the urn as though they were experiencing human time, imagining that

their procession has an origin (the “little town”) and a destination (the “green

altar”). But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: if these

people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he

confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the

urn the whos and wheres of the “real story” in the first stanza, it is

impossible ever to know the origin and the destination of the figures on the

urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his

successive attempts to engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first

attempt gives way to a more deeply felt identification in the second, and in

the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the

processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the “little town” with a real

and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third

attempt fails simply because there is nothing more to say–once the speaker

confronts the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached

the limit of static art; on this subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn

can tell him.

In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from

his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its

existence outside of temporal change, with its ability to “tease” him “out of

thought / As doth eternity.” If human life is a succession of “hungry

generations,” as the speaker suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a separate

and self-contained world. It can be a “friend to man,” as the speaker says,

but it cannot be mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker

experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life.

The final two lines–in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking

its message to mankind–”Beauty is truth, truth beauty”–have proved

among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon. After the urn utters

the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” no one can say for sure

who “speaks” the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye

need to know”; it could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be

the urn addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it

would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: the urn may not need

to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the

complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and

self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary

human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has

rather the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the

complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is that

beauty and truth are one and the same. Which reading to accept is largely a

matter of personal interpretation.