Ode on a Grecian Urn

Tracing of an engraving of the Sosibios vase by Keats

The English poet John Keats wrote "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in 1819. His desire to write about Grecian art followed his reading articles on the subject written by his friend, Benjamin Haydon. The articles possibly recalled in Keats's mind his experience with the Elgin Marbles and other pieces of Greek art located in England. Like his other "Great Odes of 1819", the poem ignored several of the accepted conventions of theme, content, and style. When creating the poem, Keats regarded the more commonly used forms of lyric poetry as unsatisfactory for his purposes and he experimented with the odal hymn to re-imagine the ode form.

Divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the ode contained a narrator's discourse on a Grecian urn of Keats's invention. The poem focuses on two central scenes: one in which a lover eternally pursues a beloved without fulfillment, and another of a villager about to perform a sacrifice. The final lines of the poem declare that "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". These last lines have been the main focus of critical debate, and critics are divided in their opinions on the poem, placing particular emphasis on whether the last two lines either increase or diminish the overall beauty of the poem. Critics have also focused on other aspects of the poem, including the role of the narrator, inspirational qualities of real-world objects, and the paradoxical relationship between the world the poem creates and the one in which the reader resides.

Background

John Keats in 1819, painted by his friend Joseph Severn

During the spring of 1819, John Keats (1795–1821) left his surgeon's job at Guy's Hospital, Southwark, London, to devote himself entirely to the composition of poetry. Living in the home of his friend Charles Brown, the twenty-three-year-old Keats was burdened with money problems and despaired when his brother George sought his financial assistance. While these real-world difficulties may have given Keats some pause for thought about a career in poetry, he did manage to complete five odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode to Psyche", "Ode on Melancholy" and "Ode on Indolence".^[1] The poems were transcribed by Brown who later provided copies to the publisher Richard Woodhouse. The poem's exact date of composition is unknown; Keats simply dated it May 1819, as he did its companion odes. All four poems display a unity in stanza forms and themes, but their precise order of composition is uncertain. The structures unify the poems as a set but they lack a fixed order.^[2]

The odes, especially "Ode to a Nightingale", were Keats's attempt at discussing the relationships between the soul, eternity, nature, and art, which he was busy contemplating throughout 1819. His idea of using Greek art as a metaphor originated in his reading Haydon's Examiner articles of 2 May and 9 May 1819. In the first article, Haydon described Greek sacrifice and worship, and, in the second article, he contrasted the artistic styles of Raphael and Michelangelo in conjunction with a discussion of medieval sculptures. Additionally, Keats had access to prints of Greek urns at Haydon's office,^[3] and he was familiar with Henry Moses's A Collection of Antique Vases, Altars, Paterae and made a tracing from an engraving of the so-called "Sosibios Vase" in this publication.^[4][5]

Keats's inspiration for the topic was not limited to Haydon, but embraced many contemporary sources.^[6] He may have recalled his experience with the Elgin Marbles^[7]> and their influence on his sonnet "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles".^[8] Additionally, Keats was exposed to the Townley, Borghese, and Holland House vases and to the classical treatment of subjects in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Many contemporary essays and articles on these works shared Keats's view that Greek art was both idealistic and captured Greek virtues. Although he was influenced by these ideas on classical art, his poem is unique; the urn that he describes as the subject of the poem is based on no known original, and is of his own creation.^[9]

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" was first printed in January 1820 Annals of Fine Art, an art magazine that promoted similar views on art to those that Keats held.^[10] Following the initial publication, the Examiner published Keats's ode along with reprinting Haydon's articles.^[11] Keats also included the poem in his 1820 collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems.^[12]

Structure

In 1819, Keats attempted to write sonnets but found that the form did not satisfy his purpose because the pattern of rhyme worked against the tone that he wished to achieve. When he turned to the ode form, he found that the standard Pindaric form used by poets such as John Dryden would be inadequate to properly discuss philosophy.^[13] Keats developed his own type of ode in "Ode to Psyche", which preceded "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and other odes written by Keats in 1819. Keats's creation established a new poetic tone that accorded with his aesthetic ideas about poetry. He further altered this new form in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by adding a secondary voice within the ode, creating a dialogue between two subjects.^[14]

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" relies on ten line stanzas with a rhyme scheme that begins with a Shakespearian quatrain (ABAB) and ends with a Miltonic sestet (CDECDE). This pattern is used in "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", and "Ode to a Nightingale", which makes the poems unified in structure as well as theme.^[2] The word "ode" itself is of Greek origin, meaning "sung". While ode-writers from antiquity adhered to rigid patterns of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, the form by Keats's time had undergone enough transformation that it represented a manner rather than a set method for writing a certain type of lyric poetry. Keats's odes seek to find a "classical balance" between two extremes, and in the structure of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", these extremes are the symmetrical structure of classical literature and the asymmetry of Romantic poetry. The use of the ABAB structure in the beginning lines of each stanza represents a clear example of structure found in classical literature, and the remaining six lines appear to break free of the traditional poetic styles of Greek and Roman odes.^[15]

His metre reflects a conscious development within his poetic style. Within the poem, there is only a single instance of medial inversion of an accent, which was heavily found in his earlier works. However, Keats incorporates spondees in 37 feet, approximately 14.8% of the time. Caesurae are never placed before the fourth syllable in a line. The word choice represents a shift from Keats's early reliance on Latinate polysyllabic words to shorter, Germanic words. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" also reveals a consonantal syzygy within the second stanza with its emphasis on "p", "b", and "v" sounds, but the unity only appears in that stanza. The poem also incorporates a complex reliance on assonance, which is found in very few English poems. Within "Ode on a Grecian", an example of this pattern can be found in line 13 ("Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd") where the "e" of "sensual" connects with the "e" of "endear'd" and the "ea" of "ear" connects with the "ea" of "endear'd". A more complex form is found in line 11 ("Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard") with the "ea" of "Heard" connecting to the "ea" of "unheard", the "o" of "melodies" connecting to the "o" of "those" and the "u" of "but" connecting to the "u" of "unheard".^[16]

Poem

First known copy of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", transcribed by George Keats in 1820

The poem begins with the narrator silencing the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions.^[17] The narrator addresses the urn by saying:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness!

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1–2)

The urn is a "foster-child of silence and slow time" because it is created from stone and made by the hand of an artist who does not communicate through words. As stone, time has little effect on it and aging is such a slow process that it is capable of being seen as an eternal piece of artwork. The urn is an external object capable of producing a story outside of the time of its creation, and because of this ability the poet labels it a "sylvan historian" that tells:^[18]

A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

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?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 4–10)

The questions presented in these lines are too ambiguous to allow the reader to understand what is taking place in the images on the urn, but elements of it are revealed. There is a pursuit and a strong sexual element.^[19] The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:^[20]

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: (lines 11–14)

There is a hint of a paradox in which indulging causes someone to only want more and a soundless music is desired by the soul. There is also a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:^[20]

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! (lines 17–20)

In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not "bid the Spring adieu". The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the words "for ever". The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads the lovers, nature, and all involved to be:^[20]

For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (lines 27–30)

A new paradox arises in these lines because these immortal lovers are experiencing a living death.^[21] In order to overcome this merged life and death paradox, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective.^[21] The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, Claude Lorrain's Sacrifice to Apollo, and Raphael's "The Sacrifice at Lystra":^{[22][A 1]}

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 its 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. (lines 31–40)

All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures up the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside of art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, as the locations are not real.^[23] The final stanza begins with a reminder that the urn is a piece of eternal artwork:^[24]

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

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! (lines 41–45)

There is a limit within the audience to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind. The poem concludes:^[24]

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,

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

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (lines 46–50)

Themes

"Ode on a Grecian Urn", like many of Keats's odes, discusses art and art's audience. In earlier poems, he relied on depictions of natural music, and works such as "Ode to a Nightingale" appeal to auditory sensations while ignoring the visual. Keats reverses this when describing an urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in order to focus on artifice. The image of an urn was also used in "Ode on Indolence", with Keats depicting an urn with the figures Love, Ambition and Poesy. Of these three, Love and Poesy are discussed again within a focus on representational art, and Keats's emphasis is on how the urn, as a human artistic construct, is capable of relating to the idea of "Truth". The images of the urn described within the poem are intended as obvious depictions of standard forms, and they describe an attempt at courtship, the making of music, and a religious rite. The figures are supposed to be beautiful, and the urn itself is supposed to be realistic.^[25] Although the poem does not include the subjective involvement of the poet, the urn within the poem implies a human observer that draws out these images.^[26] Furthermore, the lyrical basis of the poem contains bits of narration that further create an audience for the poem. As is common to Keats's odes in general, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" relies on a narrator that believes that the urn does not depict a story while the poem describes his searching for the background to the urn's events. This creates a response to art in general in a manner similar to how a critic would respond to the poem itself. This twofold narrative structure culminates in the poem's final lines. The ambiguous nature of the ending causes the reader to question who is speaking, to whom they are speaking, and what is being meant, encouraging the reader to interact with the poem in an interrogative manner.^[27]

As representing art, an urn cannot completely represent poetry, but it does serve as one component in describing the relationship between art and humanity.^[28] The nightingale of "Ode to a Nightingale" is separated from humanity and does not have human concerns. The urn, as a piece of art, requires an audience and is in an incomplete state on its own. This allows the urn to participate with humanity, to put forth a narrative, and allows for the imagination to operate. Also, the symbol of the urn enables the narrator to ask questions, and the silence of the urn reinforces the imagination's ability to operate. This interaction and use of the imagination is part of a greater tradition called ut pictura poesis – the contemplation of art by a poet – which serves as a meditation upon art itself.^[29] In this meditation, the narrator dwells on the aesthetic and mimetic features of art. The beginning of the poem posits that the role of art is to describe a specific story about those the audience is unfamiliar with, and the narrator wishes to know the identity of the figures in a manner similar to "Ode on Indolence" and "Ode to Psyche". The figures on the urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" do not have identities, but the first section ends with the narrator believing that if he knew the story, he would know the names. The second section of the poem, describing the piper and the lovers, meditates on the possibility that the role of art is not to describe specifics but universal characters, which falls under the term "Truth". The three figures would represent how Love, Beauty, and Art are unified together in an idealised world. Since the urn would depict an idealised scene in which the three figures are immortalised, the narrator is implying that art represents the feelings of the audience. The audience is not supposed to question the events but instead to rejoice in the happy aspects of the scene in a manner that reverses the claims about art in "Ode to a Nightingale". Similarly, the response in the second section is not compatible with the response to the first.^[30]

The two contradictory responses found in the first and second part of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are inadequate for completely describing art, because Keats believes that art is not to provide history or ideals. Instead, both are replaced with a philosophical tone that dominates the mediation on art. The sensual aspects are replaced with an emphasis on the spiritual aspects, and the last scene describes a world contained unto itself. The relationship of the audience to the world is not to learn facts or to benefit itself, but merely to emphatically connect to the scene. The narrator contemplates in the scene where the boundaries of art lie and how much an artist can represent on an urn. The questions the narrator asks reveal a yearning to understand the scene, but the urn is too limited to allow such answers. Furthermore, the narrator is drawn into the scene in a manner that allows him to visualise more than what actually exists as he enters into a cooperative state with art. This conclusion on art is both satisfying, in that it allows the audience to actually connect with the art, and alienating, as it does not provide the audience the benefit of instruction or narcissistic fulfillment.^[31] Besides the contradictions between the various desires within the poem, there are other paradoxes that emerge as the narrator compares his world with that of the Ancient Grecians on the urn. In the opening line, he refers to the urn as a "bride of quietness", which serves to contrast the urn with the structure of the ode, a type of poem originally intended to be sung. Another paradox arises when the narrator finds that immortality on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.^[32]

Critical response

The first response to the poem came in an anonymous review in the July 1820 Monthly Review, which claimed, "Mr Keats displays no great nicety in his selection of images. According to the tenets of that school of poetry to which he belongs, he thinks that any thing or object in nature is a fit material on which the poet may work [...] Can there be a more pointed concetto than this address to the Piping Shepherds on a Grecian Urn?"^[33] Another anonymous review followed in the 29 July 1820 Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review that quoted the poem with a note that said that "Among the minor poems, many of which possess considerable merit, the following appears to be the best".^[34] Josiah Conder, in a September 1820 Eclectic Review, argues that:

Mr Keats, seemingly, can think or write of scarcely any thing else than the 'happy pieties' of Paganism. A Grecian Urn throws him into an ecstasy: its 'silent form,' he says, 'doth tease us out of thought as doth Eternity,'—a very happy description of the bewildering effect which such subjects have at least had upon his own mind; and his fancy having thus got the better of his reason, we are the less surprised at the oracle which the Urn is made to utter:

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

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

That is, all that Mr Keats knows or cares to know.—But till he knows much more than this, he will never write verses fit to live.^[35]

George Gilfillan, in an 1845 essay on Keats, placed the poem among "The finest of Keats' smaller pieces" and suggested that "In originality, Keats has seldom been surpassed. His works 'rise like an exhalation.' His language has been formed on a false system; but, ere he died, was clarifying itself from its more glaring faults, and becoming copious clear, and select. He seems to have been averse to all speculative thought, and his only creed, we fear, was expressed in the words— Beauty is truth,—truth beauty".^[36] The 1857 Encyclopedia Britannica contained an article on Keats by Alexander Smith, which stated: "Perhaps the most exquisite specimen of Keats' poetry is the 'Ode to the Grecian Urn'; it breathes the very spirit of antiquity,—eternal beauty and eternal repose."^[37]

I. A. Richards, an English literary critic who analyzed Keats's poems in 1929, relied on the final lines of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to discuss "pseudo-statements" in poetry, saying:

On the one hand there are very many people who, if they read any poetry at all, try to take all its statements seriously – and find them silly [...] This may seem an absurd mistake but, alas! it is none the less common. On the other hand there are those who succeed too well, who swallow 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty....,' as the quintessence of an aesthetic philosophy, not as the expression of a certain blend of feelings, and proceed into a complete stalemate of muddle-mindedness as a result of their linguistic naivety.^[38]

In response to Richards, poet and critic T. S. Eliot argued that the final lines were:

a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue. And I suppose that Keats meant something by it, however remote his truth and his beauty may have been from these words in ordinary use. And I am sure that he would have repudiated any explanation of the line which called it a pseudo-statement [...] The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or perhaps the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me.^[39]

Arthur Quiller-Couch seemingly agreed, claiming that the lines were "a vague observation – to anyone whom life has taught to face facts... actually an uneducated conclusion, albeit most pardonable in one so young and ardent."^[40]

Earl Wasserman, in 1953, responded to the discussion over the final lines and claimed, "the more we tug at the final lines of the ode, the more the noose of their meaning strangles our comprehension of the poem [...] The aphorism is all the more beguiling because it appears near the end of the poem, for its apparently climactic position has generally led to the assumption that it is the abstract summation of the poem [...] But the ode is not an abstract statement or an excursion into philosophy. It is a poem about things".^[41] Walter Evert, discussing the debate in 1965, justified the final lines of the poem in order to declare "The poem, then, accepts the urn for the immediate meditative imaginative pleasure that it can give, but it firmly defines the limits of artistic truth. In this it is wholly consistent with all the great poetry of Keats's last creative period."^[42] Rick Rylance picked up the debate again in 1990 and explained that the true meaning of the final lines cannot be discerned merely by studying the language. This poses a problem for the New Critics, who were prone to closely reading a poem's text.^[43]

Walter Jackson Bate, in 1962, argued that, "the Grecian Urn possesses a quiet and constrained composure hardly equalled by the other odes of this month and perhaps even unsurpassed by the ode To Autumn of the following September [...] there is a severe repose about the Ode on a Grecian Urn; it is both 'interwoven' and 'complete'; and within its tensely braced stanzas is a potential energy momentarily stilled and imprisoned."^[44] In 1964, literary critic David Perkins claimed in his essay "The Ode on a Nightingale" that the symbol of the urn "may possibly not satisfy as the principal concern of poetry [...] but is rather an element in the poetry and drama of human reactions".^[28] Hugh Kenner, in 1971, explained that Keats "interrogates an urn, and answers for it, and its last answer, about Beauty and Truth, may seem almost intolerably enigmatic".^[45] To Kenner, the problem with Keats's Beauty and Truth statement arises out of the reader's inability to distinguish between the poet, his reflections on the urn, and any possible statement made by the urn. He concluded that Keats fails to provide his poet with enough characterization to be able to speak for the urn.^[45]

In 1984, Helen Vendler argued, "The simple movement of entrance and exist, even in its triple repetition in the Urn, is simply not structurally complex enough to be adequate, as a representational form, to what we know of aesthetic experience – or indeed to human experience generally."^[46] Andrew Bennet, in 1994, continued the discussion the final lines and the poem's effectiveness and said, "What is important and compelling in this poem is not so much what happens on the urn or in the poem, but the way that a response to an artwork both figures and prefigures its own critical response".^[47] In 1999, Andrew Motion claimed that the poem "tells a story that cannot be developed. Celebrating the transcendent powers of art, it creates a sense of imminence, but also registers a feeling of frustration."^[48]

Notes

References

Bibliography

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• Bate, Walter Jackson. The Stylistic Development of Keats. New York: Humanities Press, 1962. OCLC 276912.
• Bennett, Andrew. Keats, Narrative, and Audience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. ISBN 0801406226
• Blunden, Edmund. Leigh Hunt's "Examiner" examined. Hamden: Archon Books, 1967.
• Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1947. OCLC 265162960.
• Bush, Douglas. "Introduction" in John Keats: Selected Poems and Leters. Ed. Doublas Bush. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.
• Carr, J. W. Comyns. "The Artistic Spirit in Modern Poetry". New Quarterly Magazine, Vol. 5 (1876), pp. 146–165. OCLC 2264902.
• Eliot, T. S. "Dante" in Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1932.
• Evert, Walter. Aesthetics and Myth in the Poetry of Keats. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. OCLC 291999
• Gittings, Robert. John Keats. London: Heinemann, 1968.
• Gumpert, Matthew. "Keats's 'To Haydon, With a Sonnet on Seeing the Elgin Marbles' and 'Seeing the Elgin Marbles'". Explicator (22 September 1999).
• Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. University of California Press, 1971.
• MacGillivray, J. R. "Ode on a Grecian Urn", Times Literary Supplement (9 July 1938): 465–466.
• Magunson, Paul. Reading Public Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
• Matthews, G. M. John Keats: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble Publishers, 1971. ISBN 0389044407
• Motion, Andrew. Keats. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ISBN 0226542408
• Perkins, David. "The Ode on a Nightingale" in Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Walter Jackson Bate, 103–112. Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.
• Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929.
• Rylance, Rick. "The New Criticism". Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism. Ed. Martin Cole et al. 730–731. London: Routledge, 1990.
• Sheley, Erin. "Re-Imagining Olympus: Keats and the Mythology of Individual Consciousness". Harvard University. Reprinted in "Romanticism on the Net", No. 45 (November 2007). Accessed 6 December 2008.
• Sikka, Sonia. "On The Truth of Beauty: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Keats". The Heythrop Journal, Vol. 39, No. 3 (1998), pp. 243–263. doi:10.1111/1468-2265.00076. Accessed 2009-11-03.
• Swanson, Roy Arthur. "Form and Content in Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'". College English, Vol. 23, No. 4 (January 1962), pp. 302–305.
• Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
• Wasserman, Earl. The Fine Tone. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.

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