JOHN KEATS'S ODE ON A GREECIAN URN

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

Keats as a Poet

John Keats (1795-1821) was the pure poet among all the Romantics. He was not only the last but the most perfect of the Romanticists. He was devoted to poetry and had no other interest. Unlike Wordsworth who was interested in reforming poetry and upholding the moral law; unlike Shelley who advocated impossible reforms and prophesied about the golden age; and unlike Byron who made poetry a vehicle of his strongly egoistical nature and political discontents of the time; unlike Coleridge who was a metaphysician and had philosophical concerns; and unlike Scott who relished in story telling, Keats did not take much notice of the social, political and literary turmoils, but devoted himself entirely to the worship of beauty, and writing poetry as it suited his temperament. He was, above all, a poet and nothing else.

Unlike Byron who was a Lord and unlike Shelley who belonged to an aristocratic family, Keats came of a poor family, and at an early age he had to work as a doctor’s assistant. But his medical studies did not hamper his passion for poetry. His first volume of poems appeared in 1817 and his long poem Endymion in 1818 which opens with the following lines:

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases; and it will never

Pass into nothingness;………………….”

The poem was severely criticized by contemporary critics. Besides this a number of other calamities engulfed the life of Keats. He lost his father when he was nine; the family had a saga of death due to tuberculosis and he himself suffered this deadly disease. These misfortunes were intensified by his disappointment in love for Fanny Brawne. In spite of all this he remained undaunted and even under the shadow of death and in the midst of the most excruciating suffering Keats brought out his last volume of poems in 1820. This volume was the most enduring moment of his poetic career. It included three narrative poems Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Lamia; the unfinished epic Hyperion; the ODES; La Belle Dame Sans Merci and a few sonnets.

Among his ODES, those To A Nightingale, On A Grecian Urn and To Autumn stand out distinctly above the rest and are among the best in the language. The Ode on a Grecian Urn ends with most memorable lines in the whole of Keats’ poetry:

“Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty;--- that is all

Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know”

The Ode to Autumn in which Keats has glorified Nature, is a poem that has never been surpassed in its richness and colour.

Though Keats died young and had only a few years in which he could effectively write poetry, his achievement is so great that one wonders what he might have accomplished had he lived longer. For a long time his poetry was regarded merely sensuous having no depth. But after the publication of his letters (published 40 yrs after his death) the poems were reinterpreted and asserted that they are based on mature thinking. Though his first approach was sensuous, he was a worshipper of beauty. His sensitive imagination thrilled to every touch of beauty. He was as sensitive to the beauty of art and literature as to that of life and nature.

Keats interpreted and loved nature more for her own sake. He had grown up neither like Wordsworth under the spell of lake and mountain nor in the glow of dreams of the Golden Age like Shelley, but he was gifted with an insight into all the beauties and sympathy with all the life of the woods and fields.

Keats is a master in giving beautiful word pictures. In Ode on Melancholy he gives a life like image in order to express the idea of earthly joy which is essentially transitory:

“Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu……………………”

He portrays autumn as a person:

“Sitting careless on a granary floor

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind”

The best illustrations of Keats’ pictorial quality are to be found in Endymion and The Eve of St. Agnes.

Keats was a perfectionist and a pain staking artist. He chiseled each word and line before finally using it in his poems. He used words and phrases which served his own purpose and was not guided by the prevailing poetic diction of his time. He quite consciously uses language as Spenser and the Elizabethans.

THE POEM

Ode on a Grecian Urn is one of the most famous poems of Keats. The poem was inspired by the sight of an ancient Grecian urn which contained beautiful paintings on it. The ancient Greeks used to preserve the ashes of their dead ancestors in small pots called urns and decorated their outer surface with fine paintings of men, animals and other objects of nature. When Keats saw one of those urns he was so fascinated by the paintings on it that he felt transported to the ancient times in Greece. He could clearly visualize the life which the Greeks lived in ancient days and their manners and customs. He therefore looked upon those paintings as historical records. He also recognized the superiority and permanent nature of art as compared to the ephemeral and fleeting nature of life in man and Nature. What gives permanence and beauty to a work of art is the truthful representation of life and nothing that is ugly can be true. Thinking along this line Keats ends his poem with the following memorable lines:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” that is all

Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

Central Idea:

The central idea in the poem is the belief that whereas the brief experience of beauty is fleeting, the embodiment of the same experience in art is a source of joy which is eternal. Human life and happiness may be brief, yet art may enshrine them with an ideal beauty that out lives the years. The figure on the urn and all the symbolized are gone, but art has given them a lasting durability and so links the ages together. The urn is the happiest stroke of invention, the sudden and surprising detachment of beauty from the flow of time and change. In the words of Sidney Colvin, the main theme of the poem is the vital difference between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, which is forfeiting reality, gains in exchange permanence of beauty and the power to charm by imagined experience, even richer than the real.

This idea has also been expressed in the last stanza of the poem. According to Keats, Beauty and Truth are not two separate things but one and the same; what is beautiful must be true and what is true must be beautiful.

Paraphrase:

Stanza 1: The poet’s imagination is set at work on seeing the Grecian urn. The urn is wedded to quietness, the quietness of art, but still it tells the tale of Greek life in the past through the pictures carved on it. The poet is keen to know whether it depicts the life of the Vale of Tempe or that of the dales of Arcady, and whether the figures carved on it are men or gods. Who are the young lovers? Who are the maidens that are being pursued? Why are they trying to escape their lovers? What do the pipes and timbrels signify?

Stanza 2: Music that we hear by our physical ears is, no doubt, sweet, but the music which is heard only through the imagination is sweeter still, because it is permanent and because it appeals directly to the soul. The poet, therefore, asks the musicians carved on the urn to continue their delightful music and thus fill his soul with their silent melody. Then he turns to the picture of the youth playing on the pipe under the green shady trees. He will never cease playing and the trees under which he sings will never shed their leaves. He will ever enjoy the permanence of art. Similarly, the lover on the urn trying to kiss his beloved can never actually kiss her, though he seems very near to kissing her. But he need not be unhappy. He should console himself with the thought that his beloved will ever retain her beauty and he will always love her. Art has conferred immortality on his love and her beauty.

Stanza 3: In this stanza the poet dwells more firmly on the permanence of art. The green trees carved on the urn will never shed their leaves, and will thus enjoy permanent spring. The musician will never get tired; he will play on forever, and his song will ever remain young and passionate. It will always be a source of joy for him, for every moment he will be expecting to kiss his beloved. His love will ever remain calm and elevated, quite different from human love which brings sorrow and suffering in its train.

Stanza 4: There is another picture also, that of a number of people going to make sacrifice. A priest is seen leading a heifer to the sacrifice on some green altar. The heifer is looking up and lowing to the sky. Her soft sides are decorated with flowers. There are a large number of people following the priest, and the poet imagines that the town, out of which they have come, must be practically empty. The poet will like to know if the town is situated by a river or on the sea shore, or is it built on a hill top with a fort in its midst. However, this much is certain; the town will ever remain silent and its streets, empty. Art has caught a moment in the life of these people and made it immortal.

Stanza 5: The poet addresses the Grecian Urn embroidered all over with pictures of men and women, of forest trees and trodden weeds and says that it baffles and perplexes the human mind as does eternity itself. It is as mysterious and unknowable as eternity. When the present generation has died out, the urn will live in the midst of the future generations and try to lessen their suffering by its friendly message. It will tell them that Beauty and Truth are identical and an understanding of this principle alone is sufficient for man during his earthly existence.

Critical Appreciation

The Ode on Grecian Urn was written in the spring of 1819. It could not have been inspired by any single urn, because no unknown urn of antiquity portrays both a Bacchanalian procession, i.e. a scene of dancing, singing, and merry making and a pastoral sacrifice. Keats must have imagined the urn he describes, by a mental combination of subjects derived from different urns. Weekes suggests that the inspiration for this ode must have been partly derived from a marble urn belonging to Lord Holland and still preserved at his residence. This urn has carved on it the scene of a pastoral sacrifice in outline; and of course, no subject is commoner in Greek sculpture than a Bacchanalian procession. Keats combines both these scenes on the imaginary urn described in the ode.

The ode has been developed through many sources. It has Keats’ vision of a Greek vase having some figures engraved on it. This urn, said to be Lord Holland’s, represents the scene of a sacrifice. An altar bearing fruits is craved in the midst. Nearby stands a priest and above a figure playing on a pipe. Other details recalling Keats’ conception are two trees, and a bull that is brought to be slain. But the poem was a result of Keats’ very long contemplation from the time when he wrote “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”. His love of Greek art, his sense of the nearness of pain and pleasure, of the contrast between the stormy nature of the passions, and the severity of the ideal, of the charm of the old pagan worship….. all are blended here. By intense meditation on a thing of beauty, Keats rises to the inspired affirmation of the last two lines.

The theme of the poem is the human and the mutable on the one hand, the immortal and essential on the other. At first sight the theme in Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn cannot be distinguished. The theme in both the poem is the belief that whereas the brief experience of beauty is fleeting, the embodiment of the same experience in art, marble or song is a source of joy and it never perishes.

The solace of romance is exchanged for the solace of art in the Ode on a Grecian Urn. Human life and happiness may be brief, yet art may enshrine them with an ideal beauty that outlives the years. The figures and all they symbolized are gone, but art has given them a lasting durability and so links the ages together. The Grecian urn is the happiest stroke of invention, the sudden and surprising detachment of beauty from the flow of time and change. In the words of Sidney Colvin the main theme of the poem is the vital difference between life, which pays for its unique prerogative of reality by satiety and decay, and art, which is forfeiting reality, gains in exchange permanence of beauty and the power to charm by imagined experience, even richer than the real.

From the drowsed intoxication of the senses the poet rises to a glorious clean eyed apprehension of the spiritual eternity which art, with its unheard melodies, affords. The three consummate central stanzas have themselves the impassioned serenity of great sculpture. Only less noble are the splendid imagery of the opening, and the immortal paradox of the close.

The poem is remarkable for two things……it is the poet’s most mature, almost final word, on his vision of Hellas (Greek life, culture and art) and it has been interpreted in quite different way and has given rise to endless controversy. Robert Bridges criticizes the poem as having only one static idea. He finds no development of thought in it and says “the poem is unprogressive, monotonous and scattered, the attention being called to fresh details without result.” But according to C M Bowra the poem has a beginning, a middle and an end. In the first stanza we have the introduction, in the second, third and fourth we get the exposition of the main theme, and in the fifth, the conclusion.

The Ode opens with an invocation, and the Urn is referred to as the ‘un ravished bride of quietness’. Thus the Urn is a symbol of calm repose and timelessness. The two opening lines together constitute one of those rich passages which have been described by Rossetti as the “pillars of Hercules of the human language”. Then follows a string of questions, questions which are at the same time pictures;

“What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”

The poet then proceed to answer the question in the second and third stanzas and in this way the main subject of the poem, that is, the legend carved on the vase, is described. It is the scene of a Bacchanalian procession consisting of the flute players, that youth singing under the trees, and the lover about to kiss. The scene makes the poet think; the cavern life…. the silent music of the marble pipes, the unuttered song the bold lover on the point of kissing, the beautiful maiden….all this imagined life is more real than the human life of audible melody and physical embraces. The lover carved on the Urn is happier, for he may not enjoy the fruitition of love, but he would always love and his beloved would retain her beauty forever;

“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss

For ever will thou love and she be fair!”

The in a higher philosophical conception Keats says;

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes, play on

Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.”

Thus the poet prefers spiritual enjoyment to the sensual enjoyment.

In the fourth stanza there is another scene on the Urn which shows a procession which is going to sacrifice a calf. It is headed by a priest. Keats here is again catching his poise and asks his mysterious priest about the procession. Why is the animal dressed with garlands? Why does the animal cry? The poet, in contrast to himself in the preceding stanza, has kept a distance and “designed a succession of effects.” The poet’s mind moves backward to the possible city from which the priest, the heifer and the people going out to the sacrifice, have come:

“What little town by river or sea shore

Or mountain built with peaceful citadel

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

In the answering lines Keats gives a picture of the town which the people in the procession have vacated. The town is painted as situated near the river at the foot of a hill and on top there is a fortress. The town is empty. The town, Keats says, will always remain desolate and no one will ever tell its tale.

In the last stanza we are told that the Urn is a beautiful object in Greek art. Its surface is carved with many beautiful objects. There are pictures of men and women on that. It includes the carved patterns of wild branches and the grass which is walked over by three revelers. Keats mentions the Urn again as a silent form and sustains the object’s former association in the second line of the poem. It is in this last stanza that the poet purports to convey to his readers that it is imagination alone that can enable us to see into the life of things; intellect can lead us nowhere. The work of art, like the Urn awakens our imagination and thus seduces us from thought. They are as remote and eternal as eternity itself. They lie outside the scope of ordinary thought, as well as outside ordinary emotions. Hence the Urn is referred to as ‘cold pastoral’ which in a “silent form, dost tease us out of thought as doth eternity.” And then in the concluding lines the poet gives his message;

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty ….that is all

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

These concluding famous lines have given rise to an endless discussion and a variety of interpretations. For Robert Bridges they redeem a poor poem: for Quiller- Couch they are an uneducated conclusion and for T S Eliot they are a serious blemish on a beautiful poem. Prof. Garrod takes ‘truth’ to mean ‘reality’ and rightly explains the lines thus; ‘there is nothing real but the beautiful and nothing beautiful but the real.’

Prof. C M Bowra narrows the application of the message by saying that it should not be taken to mean a complete philosophy of life but a theory of art, “a doctrine intended to explain Keats’ own creative experience.” These lines according to C M Bowra tell us “what great art means to those who create it, while they create it, and so long as this doctrine is not applied beyond its proper confines, it is not only clear but true.”

Earl Wesserman traces the poem wholly as a drama of symbols. The images are shown developing from the beginning to the end. The title itself shows that it is a commentary on the object seen through artistic sensibility. Keats keeping himself away from the Urn is observing the drama going on the Urn. But at the same time the poet is experiencing the drama himself.

The Urn is symbolic of eternity and timelessness. It is a piece of art. All art can be appreciated not by thought or intellect but by emotions or imagination. To Keats truth is beauty and beauty is truth. If the beauty of art is searched to the very depths of speculation, truth will be found there. “Saddened by the mutability of natural beauty, Keats sought consolation in the more permanent beauty of art.”

In the words of C M Bowra “the Ode on a Grecian Urn moves from eager curiosity to delighted amazement, exalted rapture and devout solemnity; it closes on a note akin to revelations, paradoxical clarity….. the poem has more than a direct line of development. It has its contrast of height and depth and the richness which these add to it.”