Ode on a Grecian Urn

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819, first published anonymously in Annals of the Fine Arts for 1819[1] (see 1820 in poetry).

Critics have also focused on the role of the speaker, the power of material objects to inspire, and the paradoxical interrelation between the worldly and the ideal reality in the poem.

By the spring of 1819, Keats had left his job as assistant house surgeon (where he dressed wounds), at Guy's Hospital, Southwark, London, to devote himself entirely to the composition of poetry.

Living with his friend Charles Brown, the 23-year-old was burdened with money problems and despaired when his brother George sought his financial assistance.

[11] Keats was also exposed to the Townley, Borghese, and Holland House vases and to the classical treatment of subjects in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.

[16] In 1819, Keats had 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.

Keats broke from the traditional use of ekphrasis found in Theocritus's Idyll, a classical poem that describes a design on the sides of a cup.

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.

The urn is an external object capable of producing a story outside the time of its creation, and because of this ability the poet labels it a "sylvan historian" that tells its story through its beauty:[24] Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery 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?

[25] The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:[26] 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; (lines 11–16)[23] There is a hint of a paradox in that indulgence causes someone to be filled with desire and that music without a sound is desired by the soul.

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".

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, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

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!

He relied on depictions of natural music in earlier poems, and works such as "Ode to a Nightingale" appeal to auditory sensations while ignoring the visual.

The images of the urn described within the poem are intended as obvious depictions of common activities: an attempt at courtship, the making of music, and a religious rite.

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".

[41] Helen Vendler expands on the idea, in her 1983 analysis of Keats's odes, when she claimed "the complex mind writing the Urn connects stillness and quietness to ravishment and a bride".

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?

[46] 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.

Arthur Quiller-Couch responded with a contrary view and claimed that the lines were "a vague observation – to anyone whom life has taught to face facts and define his terms, actually an uneducated conclusion, albeit most pardonable in one so young and ardent.

[53]In 1930, John Middleton Murry gave a history of these responses "to show the astonishing variety of opinion which exists at this day concerning the culmination of a poem whose beauty has been acknowledged for many years.

I am uneasy, however, about his final reference to 'the world-view ...' For the poem as a whole is equally an utterance by a dramatically presented speaker, and none of its statements is proffered for our endorsement as a philosophical generalization of unlimited scope.

[61] Not every 20th-century critic opined primarily on the quality of the final lines when discussing the success or failure of the poem; Sidney Colvin, in 1920, explained that "while imagery drawn from the sculptures on Greek vases was still floating through his mind, he was able to rouse himself to a stronger effort and produce a true masterpiece in his famous Ode on a Grecian Urn.

[64] Douglas Bush, following in 1937, emphasized the Greek aspects of the poem and stated, "as in the Ode to Maia, the concrete details are suffused with a rich nostalgia.

It lacks the even finish and extreme perfection of To Autumn but is much superior in these qualities to the Ode to a Nightingale despite the magic passages in the latter and the similarities of over-all structure.

In fact, the Ode on a Grecian Urn may deserve to rank first in the group if viewed in something approaching its true complexity and human wisdom.

[34] F. W. Bateson emphasized in 1966 the poem's ability to capture truth: "The Ode to a Nightingale had ended with the explicit admission that the 'fancy' is a 'cheat,' and the Grecian Urn concludes with a similar repudiation.

"[68] Ronald Sharp followed in 1979 with a claim that the theme of "the relationship between life and art ... receives its most famous, and its most enigmatic and controversial, treatment" within the poem.

"[7] Ayumi Mizukoshi, in 2001, argued that early audiences did not support "Ode to Psyche" because it "turned out to be too reflexive and internalised to be enjoyed as a mythological picture.