Beauty in an Ode
John Keats strives to blend his opinion into his written works as he goes along perfecting his craftsmanship. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” he not only expresses how he feels about love and beauty in the world, but also brings attention to how idealistic he finds the Greeks and their ways to be – the word “ode” actually being Greek in origin, translating to “sung” – while gently touching on how art interacts with the human mind. Whilst describing the scene depicted around a Grecian urn, Keats delves into how the frozen, beautiful moments depicted on this work of art dance with his imagination and stream of thought.
The entire first stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is used to set the stage for a first-person narrator to express the thoughts and feelings he gets when looking upon this piece of artwork. In the very first line, Keats silences the voice of the urn, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” followed by an acknowledgement to its agelessness, “Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,” (Keats 1-2). The action in the first line opens up the road for the viewer’s imagination to play with the urn’s pictures and expresses adoration for artwork and its timelessness in the latter. He follows by trying to gain a deeper understanding of the depicted images by asking the urn a series of questions, none of which the urn is capable of answering, “What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” (8-10). This shows how art can run with imagination if one becomes inquisitive about what they’re looking at. He continues to comment on art’s beauty into the second stanza and mentions the eternity of beauty, but by bringing nature into the picture, “beneath the trees, thou canst not leave” (14). By turning the reader’s attention briefly to an image of nature that also has a very lengthy life, Keats draws a parallel between beauty, nature, and art – they all live and interact with one another on the same field. He goes a little more in depth on this at the beginning of the third stanza as he’s describing a tree on the urn, “Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;” (21-24).
At the end of the second and third stanzas Keats talks about the couple on the urn who are a moment away from a kiss. They represent the relationship between passion and beauty within art. He throws love onto the same field as beauty, nature, and art by telling this couple frozen in time that they should be grateful to never reach their lover’s embrace (18). By being placed on the urn, they will never have to watch their loved one grow old or die, “She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, / For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” (19-20). They will always be held within the exciting moment of anticipation right before a kiss (27-30). They will never argue, never stray from one another, and always remain in happiness. The fourth stanza briefly describes the scene on the other side of the urn of a procession of people going forth to a sacrifice. Here again Keats asks questions of the urn that will forever remain unanswered, such as who the people are (31).
The poem ends with Keats again admiring the artwork as a whole for its beauty and agelessness before determining what the urn is telling him. He ends with the statement, “…to whom thou sayst, / ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ (49-50). This is what Keats has learned since dwelling upon the artwork of the urn: He has been debating on beauty, the different things that portray it well, and the urn is telling him that they are the only truth he needs. All we as humans recognize (or want to recognize) as true on earth are the things that we find beautiful. That’s why we create artwork that captures the truth we know. Debatably, the beautiful things are the reason we keep going through this life: if everything were ugly, we wouldn’t want anything to do with it. So we hang on to the beauty of the earth.
After fiddling with sonnets and finding their form unsatisfactory, Keats turned to writing odes but changed the voice of the lyrical ode by adding a second speaker – in this case, the urn at the end – to create a dialogue. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” the second speaker is used to portray the interactivity of humanity and art. Art is created to express a thought or feeling and the humanity that takes a moment to listen will hear those messages. Unfortunately (or fortunately), everyone may hear a different message when viewing the same piece of art – simply because none of us think exactly alike. This is why Keats questions to the urn go unanswered: There is no one who can ever know the absolute true answers. He acknowledges this lack of response when talking about the town of people going to the sacrifice, “And, little town, thy streets for evermore / Will silent be; and not a soul to tell / Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.” (37-40). His yearning to further understand the scene will never be satisfied.
Even though the urn was likely created to hold some sort of historical storytelling purpose also, Keats chooses to focus on the more philosophical thoughts that come with meditating on art. He focuses on how the work speaks to him in a spiritual way as opposed to discussing the senses that could be touched by the scene he’s viewing. Rather than seeing eternity in the pottery itself, the trees, and the forever enamoured lovers, one could find steadfastness in the pottery, a quiet breeze in the trees, and imagine the tenderness in a lovers touch or the softness of their kiss. Since Keats has chosen to ignore this train of thought (perhaps because it didn’t evoke those feeling within him), he is expressing the limitations of art. He goes strictly with what he can see and the stories his imagination wonders about instead of placing himself within the scene and, say, becoming one of the townspeople running to sacrifice the cow to their deity. For him, the exercise of viewing artwork is strictly mental: He probably wouldn’t get a chill when looking at a detailed painting of the Antarctic wasteland, or feel a little warmer at a painting of the Sahara desert. Everything he experienced only went on in his thoughts so that’s what he chooses to portray to his readers.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” is Keats’ explanation of beauty. He tells us where he finds it, how his mind plays around with it, and how he experiences it as he meditates on the images shown around the outside of an ancient urn. By constantly stressing eternity and the everlasting with the lifetime of the trees and the longevity of the urn, he emphasises that beauty, art, nature, and love are also things that will never die. They will forever interact and influence humanity as we grow and evolve. He encourages humanity to be inquisitive of the world around them and spend some time meditating on artwork (kind of like the intention of this assignment). Even though Keats leaves out the sensual feelings one may receive from art, he thoroughly describes the puzzle game his imagination begins to play with the images and the stories they tell him – wondering who the villagers are, being happy that the couple are forever stuck in the best moment that comes with falling in love, and understanding that certain things can last forever. In this lyrical poem, Keats tells us the truth in what beauty is.
Works Cited
Wordsworth, Jonathan, and Jessica Wordsworth. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, Penguin, London, 2005, pp. 343–344.
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