"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 (see 1820 in poetry).
The poem is one of the "Great Odes of 1819", which also include "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". Keats found existing forms in poetry unsatisfactory for his purpose, and in this collection he presented a new development of the ode form. He was inspired to write the poem after reading two articles by English artist and writer Benjamin Haydon. Through his awareness of other writings in this field and his first-hand acquaintance with the Elgin Marbles, Keats perceived the idealism and representation of Greek virtues in classical Greek art, and his poem draws upon these insights.
In five stanzas of ten lines each, the poet addresses an ancient Greek urn, describing and discoursing upon the images depicted on it. In particular he reflects upon two scenes, one in which a lover pursues his beloved, and another where villagers and a priest gather to perform a sacrifice. The poet concludes that the urn will say to future generations of mankind: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". Critics have debated whether these lines adequately perfect the conception of the poem. 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.
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" was not well received by contemporary critics. It was only by the mid-19th century that it began to be praised, and it is now considered to be one of the greatest odes in the English language.Sheats 2001 p. 86 A long debate over the poem's final statement divided 20th-century critics, but most agreed on the beauty of the work, despite certain perceived inadequacies.
Background
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. These real-world difficulties may have given Keats pause for thought about a career in poetry, yet he did manage to complete five odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode to Psyche", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode on Indolence", and "Ode on a Grecian Urn".Bate 1963 pp. 487–527 The poems were transcribed by Brown, who later provided copies to the publisher Richard Woodhouse. Their exact date of composition is unknown; Keats simply dated "Ode on a Grecian Urn" May 1819, as he did its companion odes. While the five poems display a unity in stanza forms and themes, the unity fails to provide clear evidence of the order in which they were composed.Gittings 1968 p. 311
In the odes of 1819, Keats explores his contemplations about relationships between the soul, eternity, nature, and art. His idea of using classical Greek art as a metaphor originated in his reading of 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. Keats also had access to prints of Greek urns at Haydon's office,Gittings 1968 pp. 305–319 and he traced an engraving of the Sosibios Vase, a Neo-Attic marble volute krater, signed by Sosibios, in The Louvre,Louvre Museum: Volute krater "Sosibios" accessed 5 January 2017. which he found in Henry Moses's A Collection of Antique Vases, Altars, Paterae.Motion 1999 p. 391Blunden 1967 p. 103
Keats's inspiration for the topic was not limited to Haydon, but embraced many contemporary sources.Magunson 1998 p. 208 He may have recalled his experience with the Elgin MarblesGittings 1968 p. 319 and their influence on his sonnet "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles".Gumpert 1999 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. Many contemporary essays and articles on these works shared Keats's view that classical Greek art was both idealistic and captured Greek virtues. Although he was influenced by examples of existing Greek vases, in the poem he attempted to describe an ideal artistic type, rather than a specific original vase.Motion 1999 pp. 390–391
Although "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was completed in May 1819, its first printing came in January 1820 when it was published with "Ode to a Nightingale" in the Annals of Fine Art, an art magazine that promoted views on art similar to those Keats held.Motion 1999 p. 390 Following the initial publication, the Examiner published Keats's ode together with Haydon's two previously published articles.MacGillivray 1938 pp. 465–466 Keats also included the poem in his 1820 collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems.Matthews 1971 pp. 149, 159, 162
Structure 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. When he turned to the ode form, he found that the standard Pindaric form used by poets such as John Dryden was inadequate for properly discussing philosophy.Gittings 1968 pp. 310–311 Keats developed his own type of ode in "Ode to Psyche", which preceded "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and other odes he wrote 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.Bate 1963 pp. 498–500 The technique of the poem is ekphrasis, the poetic representation of a painting or sculpture in words. 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 Theocritus describes both motion found in a stationary artwork and underlying motives of characters, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" replaces actions with a series of questions and focuses only on external attributes of the characters.Kelley 2001 pp. 172–173
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is organized into ten-line stanzas, beginning with an ABAB rhyme scheme and ending with a Miltonic sestet (1st and 5th stanzas CDEDCE; 2nd, 3rd, and 4th stanzas CDECDE). The same overall pattern is used in "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", and "Ode to a Nightingale" (though their sestet rhyme schemes vary), which makes the poems unified in structure as well as theme. 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.Swanson 1962 pp. 302–305
Keats's metre reflects a conscious development in his poetic style. The poem contains only a single instance of medial inversion (the reversal of an iamb in the middle of a line), which was common in his earlier works. However, Keats incorporates spondees in 37 of the 250 metrical feet. 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. In the second stanza, "Ode on a Grecian Urn", which emphasizes words containing the letters "p", "b", and "v", uses syzygy, the repetition of a consonantal sound. The poem incorporates a complex reliance on assonance, which is found in very few English poems. Within "Ode on a Grecian Urn", 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".Bate 1962 pp. 133–135, 137–140, 58–60
Poem
The poem begins with the narrator's silencing the urn by addressing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions.Sheley 2007
The urn is a "foster-child of silence and slow time" because it was created from stone and made by the hand of an artist who did not communicate through words. As stone, time has little effect on it and ageing is such a slow process that it can be seen as an eternal piece of artwork. 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:Bloom 1993 p. 416
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 with a strong sexual component.Bloom 1993 pp. 416–417 The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:Bloom 1993 p. 417
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. There is a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:
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:
A new paradox arises in these lines because these immortal lovers are experiencing a living death.Bloom 1993 p. 418 To overcome this paradox of merged life and death, 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, Claude Lorrain's Sacrifice to Apollo, and Raphael's The Sacrifice at LystraBush 1959 p. 349The Raphael is one of the Raphael Cartoons then at Hampton Court Palace. The Claude is now usually called Landscape with the Father of Psyche sacrificing to Apollo, and is now at Anglesey Abbey. It was one of the pair of "Altieri Claudes", among the most famous and expensive paintings of the day. See Reitlinger, Gerald; The Economics of Taste, Vol I: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices 1760–1960, Barrie and Rockliffe, London, 1961, and Art and Money , by Robert Hughes. Image of the Raphael, and image of the Claude
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 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. The final stanza begins with a reminder that the urn is a piece of eternal artwork:Bloom 1993 pp. 418–419