Ode on a Grecian Urn
(Greek)
Thou
still unravish'd bride of quietness, (pure,
chaste)
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express (relating to woods/forests)
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What
leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both, (gods)
In
Tempe or the dales of Arcady? (name
of places in Greece)
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What
mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What
pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard
melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not
to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair
youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold
Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though
winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For
ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah,
happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your
leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And,
happy melodist, unwearied, (without
being tired)
For
ever piping songs for ever new;
More
happy love! more happy, happy love!
For
ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All
breathing human passion far above,
That
leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, (over-satiated)
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (dry,
very thirsty)
Who
are these coming to the sacrifice?
To
what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st
thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And
all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What
little town by river or sea shore,
Or
mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And,
little town, thy streets for evermore
Will
silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic
shape! Fair attitude! with brede (carved
with the shapes of Attica, like a braid)
Of
marble men and maidens overwrought,
With
forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou,
silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As
doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When
old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than
ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty
is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Ode
on a Grecian Urn was written by John Keats in 1819. It is a complex, mysterios
poem with a simple setup. An undefined speaker looks at a Grecian urn, which is
decorated with evocative images of rustic and rural life in ancient Greece.
These scenes fascinate, mystify and excite the speaker equally and it seems to
him that they have captured life in its fullness but they are frozen time. The
speaker’s response shifts through different moods, and ultimately the urn
provokes questions more than it provides answers. The poem’s ending has been
and remains the subject of varied interpretation. The urn seems to tell the
speaker- and, in turn, the reader-that truth and beauty are one and the same.
Keats wrote this poem in a great burst of creativity that also produced his
other famous odes. Though, this poem was not well received in Keats’ day, it
has gone on to become one of the most celebrated in the English language.
Summary of the Poem
In the first stanza
of the poem, the speaker addresses the urn and calls it ‘unravished bride’ and ‘Sylvan
historian’. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. He
describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He wonders about the
figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where
they come. 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” melodies 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 from where they have come.
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.
Major Themes in the Poem.
Mortality
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
is a complex meditation on mortality. Death preoccupies the speaker, who
responds by seeming to both celebrate and dread the fleeting nature of life.
The scenes on the urn depict a Classical world that has long since passed—and
yet, in being fixed on the urn itself, these scenes also evoke a sense of
immortality. The urn is therefore a contradiction—its scenes speak of vibrant
humanity and, because they are frozen in time, seem to represent a kind of
eternal life. At the same time, everything and everyone in the urn’s world is
no more. Sensing this contradiction, the poem can be read as a process of
response, in which the speaker tries to make sense of mortality—both that of
others and their own—without ever coming to a comfortable resolution.
Importantly, one of the
main purposes served by an urn was to hold the ashes of the dead. Though it
can’t be said definitively that this is the sort of urn Keats had in mind when
writing this poem, he would no doubt have been aware of this as a possible interpretation.
The urn is the sole object of contemplation in the poem, and accordingly
death—and the fleeting nature of human life—is present from the beginning.
The speaker projects
their anxiously shifting thoughts about mortality onto the urn, which seems to
stand for both life and death at the same time. At points in the poem, the
pictures on the urn seem to come alive for the speaker. Stanzas 2 and 3 are full
of praise for the scenes at hand, in which the urn’s figures appear blissful
and carefree. Lovers at play, pipe-playing musicians, and bountiful nature all
create a “happy, happy” feeling in the speaker. Here, then, the speaker
celebrates life, and the scenes frozen on the urn represent a kind of victory
of life over death. Indeed, the speaker praises the lovers on the urn as “For
ever panting, and for ever young,” and notes that the tree beneath which they
sit will never “be bare.”
But the pictures on the
urn are ultimately just that—pictures. All the lives depicted by the urn—and
the maker of the urn itself—are long gone. They only seem alive
because they are rendered so well, performing actions that speak of vitality
and humanity yet are not themselves full of life. What’s more, though the
maiden depicted “cannot fade,” neither can her lover have “thy bliss”—that is,
he can never kiss her in his frozen state. This complicates anxiety about the
inevitable march of time, given that to stop time essentially stops not just
death, but life as well. Mortality is thus presented not
simply as an end to but also a distinct part of
life.
This realization dawns
on the speaker through the course of the poem. Arguably, this is marked when
the speaker introduces their own mortality in line 8 of stanza 3: “All
breathing human passion far above.” This moment brings to mind the speaker’s
own breath settling on the object of contemplation. To breathe is to be
alive—and to be reminded, in this case, of inevitable death.
From this point onwards,
the poem becomes less celebratory and more anxious. The busy scenes on the urn
seem to speak of an emptiness intimately linked to mortality. In stanza 4, for
example, the speaker is vexed by the fact that the people depicted on the urn
can never return to their “desolate” hometown.
By the poem’s close, the
urn becomes “cold” to the speaker—that is, its inanimate quality offers no
lasting comfort to the speaker’s contemplation of mortality. Ultimately, the
speaker turns this realization on their own generation, which will be laid to
“waste” by “old age.” The speaker, then, grapples with the question of
mortality throughout the poem. At first, the beauty of the urn seems to bring
its characters back to life, as the stillness of the images makes their lives
immortal. Eventually, though, reality sets in, and the urn makes mortality all
the more present and undeniable.
Art, Beauty, and Truth
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
examines the close relationship between art, beauty, and truth. For the
speaker, it is through beauty that humankind comes closest to truth—and through
art that human beings can attain this beauty (though it remains a bittersweet achievement).
At its heart, the poem admits the mystery of existence—but argues that good art
offers humankind an essential, if temporary, way of representing and sensing
this mystery.
The poem’s famous ending
is vital to understanding the speaker’s position on art, beauty, and truth, and
contextualizes the lines that have come before. The speaker’s concluding
sentiment—"Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—demonstrates that, in the context
of this poem, beauty and truth are one and the same. Art’s role is to create this
beauty and truth, but the speaker doesn’t present beauty and truth as clearly
definable aspects of human existence. The speaker feels this connection intuitively—and
the one-way conversation with the urn, and what it represents, is an attempt to
make sense of these intuitions.
The speaker does,
however, foreground the aesthetics of the urn throughout the poem, and matches
the seductive beauty of the object with a sensuous and delicately crafted
linguistic beauty of its own. Though the poem cannot—and doesn’t try to—pin
down the precise relationship between art, beauty, and truth, its language
works hard to be beautiful and to demonstrate that beauty is something valuable
and essential to humankind. As one example of this above, the way the gentle
/f/ sound in “soft pipes” seems to make the /p/ sound of “pipes” itself become
quieter. Just as the maker of the urn tried to give an authentic and beautiful
account of the world in which it was made, the poem tries to bring “truth” and
“beauty” to its rendering of the urn.
The poem, then, offers
no easy answer to the question of the relationship between art, beauty, and
truth. But it does argue unequivocally that these three are co-dependent,
essential to one another. Furthermore, it may be that the strength of this relationship
is partly dependent on its mystery. Perhaps “All ye need to
know,” then, suggests people need to be comfortable in not knowing too.
The last lines, taken out of context, might suggest that this is a poem in
praise of beauty. Yet the speaker’s position is ultimately much more nuanced.
The inanimateness of the urn’s scenes becomes representative of humankind’s
desire to represent itself and its world.
Whether or not people
can achieve lasting beauty through art, the speaker feels deeply the importance
of trying. With the urn’s scenes frozen in time, the melodies of the pipes
cannot be heard, the trees cannot shed their leaves, and the people walking can
never arrive at their ceremony. In short, everything is paused in eternity.
This means that the beautiful sound of the pipes is, in fact, a kind of
silence. The scenes thus become not just pictures of human life, but also
abstract representations of beauty—they are pure beauty,
untainted by having to actually exist or eventually die. If beauty is something
to be aspired to, as the last lines seem to suggest, then the beauty of the urn
is more absolute because it represents the idea of beauty itself—not just an
attempt to make it. The poem, then, takes on a complex philosophical quality,
considering beauty both as something that has to be aspired to by humans and as
an abstract concept that perhaps ultimately lies out of human reach.
History and the Imagination
In “Ode on a Grecian
Urn,” the speaker makes a powerful effort to bring history to life. The poem
functions as a kind of conversation, between an early 19th century speaker on
the one hand and Ancient Greece on the other. Of course, this conversation can
only really happen in one direction—it is up to the speaker to imagine the
lives and stories that, though once real, now only exist in the urn’s pictures.
Overall, the poem argues that imagination is key to understanding and
sympathizing with what has come before—but that this effort can never give a
full picture of the richness and detail of worlds that are long gone.
Part of the speaker’s
fascination with the urn is that it is a genuine historical object that was
created around the time of historical moment that it depicts. The craftsmanship
of the urn, combined with sheer luck, has allowed a small part of the history
that it embodies to survive for millennia. The speaker foregrounds the
importance of objects in relation to history by calling the urn a “Sylvan
[rural] historian,” instantly drawing a link between the speaker’s own
historical moment and the urn’s and noting that the urn has survived as a
“foster-child of silence and slow time.” The speaker thus emphasizes both the
immense length of time in which the urn has existed but also its “silent,”
inanimate quality. That is, without an effort of the imagination on the part of
the viewer, the urn itself says nothing about history. The poem thus partly
becomes a real-time example of this effort to actively engage with the past.
Eventually, the speaker
finds the urn to be “cold”; it cannot satisfy the speaker’s desire to bring the
ancient world back to life. That, of course, doesn’t mean the effort is wasted.
Just as the urn itself could never give a full account of the world at the time
it was made, neither could the speaker truly hope to get a full sense of
history through the urn.
Nevertheless, a feel for
the world of Ancient Greece—however in complete—has been achieved. The
imaginative work of the speaker brings the imagination of the reader to life,
and an atmosphere of a particular point in history is
therefore brought to life too. The cow being led to the sacrifice, for example,
seems to both ground the action of the urn in Ancient Greece and bring it
momentarily to life—the speaker imagines the cow lowing towards the sky, a
detail that seems specifically aimed at making the scenario more vibrant and
present for the reader.
The poem acknowledges
that no generation can ever have a full account of the world as it was before.
Objects and imagination, though, help to tell history’s stories. And just as
the urn allowed the speaker to explore this subject within the form of the poem,
the poem itself becomes an object that allows its readers to explore both the
historical atmosphere of the urn and get a sense for the 19th
century moment in which the poem was written; the Romantic poets had a deep
interest in the Classical world, and this ode shows a speaker trying to make
sense of the relationship between those two distinct historical moments.
No object—whether an urn
or a written account—can ever bring a historical moment into the present to be
experienced in full detail. But objects together with the imagination do help
to bring stories of the past to life, and it is in these stories that one
generation relates to those that came before. The urn’s world as described in
the poem is full of human activity that felt familiar in the 19th century and
still feels familiar now; history and the imagination therefore help humankind
to relate to its past, and see what one moment has in common
with the next.
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