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
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.