About the poem:
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819 and published anonymously in the January 1820, Number 15, issue of the magazine Annals of the Fine Arts. The poem is one of several "Great Odes of 1819", which includes "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". Keats found earlier forms of poetry unsatisfactory for his purpose, and the collection represented a new development of the ode form.
Analysis:
Keats has created a Greek urn in his mind and has
decorated it with three scenes. The first is full of frenzied action
and the actors are men, or gods, and maidens. Other figures, or possibly
the male figures, are playing musical instruments. The maidens are
probably the nymphs of classical mythology. The men or gods are smitten
with love and are pursuing them. Keats, who loved classical mythology,
had probably read stories of such love games. In Book II of his Endymion, he recounts Alpheus' pursuit of Arethusa, and in Book III he tells of Glaucus' pursuit of Scylla.
The second scene is developed in stanzas II and
III. Under the trees a lover is serenading his beloved. In stanza I,
Keats confined himself to suggesting a scene by questions. The second
scene is not presented by means of questions but by means of
description. We see a youth in a grove playing a musical instrument and
hoping, it seems, for a kiss from his beloved. The scene elicits some
thoughts on the function of art from Keats. Art gives a kind of
permanence to reality. The youth, the maiden, and the musical instrument
are, as it were, caught and held permanently by being pictured on the
urn. And so Keats can take pleasure in the thought that the music will
play on forever, and although the lover can never receive the desired
kiss, the maiden can never grow older nor lose any of her beauty. The
love that they enjoy is superior to human love which leaves behind "a
heart highsorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching
tongue." The aftermath of human love is satiety and dissatisfaction. In
these two stanzas Keats imagines a state of perfect existence which is
represented by the lovers pictured on the urn. Art arrests desirable
experience at a point before it can become undesirable. This, Keats
seems to be telling us, is one of the pleasurable contributions of art
to man.
The third scene on Keats' urn is a group of
people on their way to perform a sacrifice to some god. The sacrificial
victim, a lowing heifer, is held by a priest. Instead of limiting
himself to the sacrificial procession as another scene on his urn, Keats
goes on to mention the town emptied of its inhabitants by the
procession. The town is desolate and will forever be silent.
The final stanza contains the beauty-truth
equation, the most controversial line in all the criticism of Keats'
poetry. No critic's interpretation of the line satisfies any other
critic, however, and no doubt they will continue to wrestle with the
equation as long as the poem is read. In the stanza, Keats also makes
two main comments on his urn. The urn teases him out of thought, as does
eternity; that is, the problem of the effect of a work of art on time
and life, or simply of what art does, is a perplexing one, as is the
effort to grapple with the concept of eternity. Art's (imagined) arrest
of time is a form of eternity and, probably, is what brought the word eternity into the poem.
The second thought is the truth-beauty equation.
Through the poet's imagination, the urn has been able to preserve a
temporary and happy condition in permanence, but it cannot do the same
for Keats or his generation; old age will waste them and bring them woe.
Yet the pictured urn can do something for them and for succeeding
generations as long as it will last. It will bring them through its
pictured beauty a vision of happiness (truth) of a kind available in
eternity, in the hereafter, just as it has brought Keats a vision of
happiness by means of sharing its existence empathically and bringing
its scenes to emotional life through his imagination. All you know on
earth and all you need to know in regard to beautiful works of art,
whether urns or poems about urns, is that they give an inkling of the
unchanging happiness to be realized in the hereafter. When Keats says
"that is all ye know on earth," he is postulating an existence beyond
earth.
Although Keats was not a particularly religious
man, his meditation on the problem of happiness and its brief duration
in the course of writing "Ode on a Grecian Urn" brought him a glimpse of
heaven, a state of existence which his letters show he did think about.
In his letter of November 22, 1817, to Benjamin Bailey, he mentioned
"another favorite Speculation of mine, that we shall enjoy ourselves
here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a
finer tone and so repeated."
Thank you...
I have taken this analysis of ode from this site.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/k/keats-poems/summary-and-analysis/ode-on-a-grecian-urn
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