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Ode on a Grecian Urn
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Ode on a Grecian Urn is a poem by John Keats written in 1819 and first published in January 1820. It was one of Keats's "Five Great Odes of 1819" which also included Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and To Autumn. Its inspiration is partly considered to be a visit by Keats to the exhibition of the Elgin Marbles and partly related to Keats's experience with the aesthetic theories of Benjamin Haydon, Keats's friend and painter, and his collection of Grecian prints.
The lyric poem is divided into five stanzas, each with ten lines, and reflects upon the images on an ancient Grecian urn with images of Ancient Greeks to whom the narrator addresses his discourse.
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Ode on a Grecian Urn is a poem by John Keats written in 1819 and first published in January 1820. It was one of Keats's "Five Great Odes of 1819" which also included Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and To Autumn. Its inspiration is partly considered to be a visit by Keats to the exhibition of the Elgin Marbles and partly related to Keats's experience with the aesthetic theories of Benjamin Haydon, Keats's friend and painter, and his collection of Grecian prints.
The lyric poem is divided into five stanzas, each with ten lines, and reflects upon the images on an ancient Grecian urn with images of Ancient Greeks to whom the narrator addresses his discourse. The poem transitions from a scene depicting a lover eternally pursuing a beloved without fulfillment to a scene that describes a village in which its people ventured off 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", a line which has provoked critical consideration.
Background
Ode on a Grecian Urn was composed at a leisurely pace. The actual date when Keats wrote the ode, along with Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy and Ode to a Nightingale is unknown because he only dated the poems as being written during May 1819. However, he worked on the four poems together and they are united in both their stanza forms and their themes. The exact order of the poems is uncertain, but they form a sequence within their structures although the actual order of the poems within the sequence is unnecessary. While Keats was writing Ode on a Grecian Urn and the other poems, his friend Charles Brown was busy transcribing copies of the poems and then submitting them to Richard Woodhouse.
The creation of the ode could not have happened until after Benjamin Haydon's articles on in the Examiner on 2 May and 9 May 1819, because both articles influence the theme of the poem. In the first article, Haydon's influence is found in his description of Greek sacrifices and worships along with an emphasis on a boy who is "wholly absorbed in the harmony of his own music" and that "all classes were crowding to sacrifice". The second article contrasts Raphael and Michelangelo, and Michelangelo's art "look as if they were above the influence of time; they seem as if they would never grow old, and had never been young". Later in the article, he described how medieval sculptures had an "immoveable stillness a look as if the figures were above the troubles of life, and saw through the imbecillity of appetite or passion". When the Examiner published Keats's ode, the articles by Haydon were also reprinted.
The relationship between Haydon and Keats proved as a strong influence on Keats's poems, and it was at Haydon's office that Keats was able to see various collections of prints that contained imaged Greek artwork including urns. One such work was an engraving by Henry Moses, which Keats most certainly knew. This experience recalled in Keats's mind his early experience with the Elgin Marbles: the exhibition of Greek artifacts on display at the British Museum, which was also the inspiration for his sonnet titled "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles". Keats's inspiration was not limited to simply Haydon or his first hand experience of the Elgin Marbles, but to many other contemporary sources.
Structure
The ode is an ancient form originally written for musical accompaniment. In general, the ode of the Romantic genre is a poem of 30 to 200 lines that meditates progressively upon or directly addresses a single object or condition. Ode on a Grecian Urn follows a strict structural pattern with each stanza containing 10 lines with ten syllables. The complex rhyme scheme of the poem shows a high level of complexity common among odes of Keats’ time.
Line Groupings
- The first four lines of every stanza have a structure of ABAB
- The remaining 6 lines of the First and Last stanza follow a pattern of CDEDCE
- The Third and Fourth stanzas end with a structure of CDECDE
- The Second stanza ends CDECED
The first four lines of each stanza are a Shakespearian based quatrain and the last six lines are a Miltonic based sestet.
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 really represented a manner rather than a set method for writing a certain type of lyric poetry. Keats’ 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 Classic literature, and the remaining six lines appear to break free of the traditional poetic styles of Greek and Roman odes..
Poem
In the first and last stanza of Ode on a Grecian Urn the poet addresses the urn itself from an outward perspective, allowing the narrator to speak directly to the object and to the reader at once. In the middle three stanzas, the poem focuses on the individuals painted on the urn and the relationship between the individual and art. . The narrator silences the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions . The narrator addresses the urn by saying:
- Thou still unravished bride of quietness!
- Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1-2)
because it is born from stone and made by the hand of an artist who does not communicate through words. As stone, it is able to slow time and become an eternal piece of artwork. As eternal, the urn is capable of producing a story that is outside of time, and that "sylvan historian" expresses
- A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
- What leaf-fringed 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 are too ambiguous to create a definite scene, but elements of it are revealed. There is a pursuit and a strong sexual element.
The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:
- 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: (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:
- 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 word “forever.” J. W. Myns Carr describes this phenomenon in “The Artistic Spirit of Modern Poetry”
Men and women perfect in the flesh, with their feet on perfect flowers, move across his fancy as in twilight. The poet has reached to their perfection, and returns laden with rich memories of the senses, but, being of his time, he could not cast off the somber uncertain cloud that hid the sun.
The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads to the lovers, nature, and all involved to be
- 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 28-30)
A new paradox arises in these lines because, according to Harold Bloom, "A mouth that has no moisture and no breath may be able to summon breathless mouths, but it can as easily be called death-in-life as life-in-death".
In order to overcome this merged life and death paradox, the poem shifts to a new scene with a new perspective:. The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow, an image that appeared in the Elgin Marbles, and Douglas Bush suggests that Keats could be drawing this image from the "lowing heifer" in the marbles, from Claud's Sacrifice to Apollo, or Raphael's cartoon "The Sacrifice at Lystra", which was also on display at the British Gallery in the spring of 1819 .
- 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 on 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, because the locations are not real.
With the final stanza, according to Bloom, "Keats begins... by reminding himself that it is only the artifice of eternity before him" when he says:.
- 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:
- 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 45-50)
Themes
Although the poem does not include the subjective involvement of the poet, the urn within the poem requires a human observer, as Walter Jackson Bate puts it: "the very origin of the urn presupposed the hope that it would be rescued into full existence by some later 'greeting of the Spirit'." The poem captures aspects of Keats's idea of "Negative Capability", as the reader does not know who the figures are on the urn, what they are doing, or where they are going. Instead, the speaker revels in this mystery, as he does in the final couplet, which does not make immediate, ascertainable sense but continues to have poetic significance nonetheless. The ode ultimately deals with the complexity of art's relationship with real life.
Throughout the poem, other paradoxes 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 causes Cleanth Brooks to argue that Keats contrasts the urn with the structure of the ode, which was originally intended to be sung.. Likewise, he points to another paradox that arises when the narrator finds immortality on the side of an urn meant to carry the ashes of the dead.
In her study of Ode on a Grecian Urn, Lilia Melani lists four paradoxes that lead to the ending lines on truth and beauty:
- the discrepancy between the urn with its frozen images and the dynamic life portrayed on the urn
- the human and changeable versus the immortal and permanent,
- participation versus observation
- life versus art
Because the ending couplet is in direct contrast to many of Keats' poems, for example "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or "Lamia", in which a man is deceived by a woman's beauty, literary critics have begun interpreting it in a new way. Critics such as Sonia Sikka conclude that the narrator, representative of Keats, is criticizing the Urn as he says that all it will ever need to know is that beauty is truth and truth beauty. This reading of the text suggests levels of both jealousy and disdain as the narrator admires the simplicity of the world depicted by the urn but finds it incapable of providing deeper meaning.
Critical response
I. A. Richards 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.
In response to Richards, T. S. Eliot argues 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.
Arthur Quiller-Couch seemingly agrees, 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."
Hugh Kenner, in The Pound Era states that Keats "interrogates an urn, and answers for it, and its last answer, about Beauty and Truth, may seem almost intolerably enigmatic" to describe what he believes to be a shortfall in Keats's ability to create a proper dialogue between the poet and the audience. Kenner uses Ode on a Grecian Urn to describe the difference between the protagonists found in the poems of Keats and Wordsworth and those found in the novels of 20th Century Literature And a novelist born half a century after Keats was to give fiction its characteristic 20th-century turn, inventing a protagonist who knew how to interrogate bloodstains, walking sticks, footprints, "Clues". (What Great issues, Watson, may hang upon a bootlace!) 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 concludes that Keats fails to provide his poet with enough characterization to be able to speak for the urn, a flaw that he considers to be corrected by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. The narrative of the poem that Kenner discusses is addressed in the works of Helen Vendler and Andrew Bennett. Vendler asserted that the poems were a study in aesthetics through the medium of reception as the urn was examined by the poet then re-examined by the reader , and Bennett builds on this idea by saying that "the audience is always already figured by narrative, then the intrusion of the 'otherness' of narrative into the self-identical lyric form of the ode necessarily produces an audience-effect" .
Rick Rylance, in “The New Criticism”, poses questions about the final lines of the poem and the direction of the word “ye” in line 50. He maintains that the ambiguity of the recipient of the Truth/Beauty statement led the New Critics to a new understanding of the final lines that was lost on Cleanth Brooks and other critics. However, he also quotes René Wellek’s assertion that reducing a poem to doctrinal statement "is disastrous to understanding the uniqueness of a work: it disintegrates its structure and imposes alien criteria of value" in an attempt to show the New Critics both found value in the dissection of a poem down to simple words such as “ye” and lost the overall meaning of the poem by focusing on small excerpts of poems such as Ode on a Grecian Urn .
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