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2.about

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" was written by the influential English poet

John Keats in 1819. ", the year in which Keats contracted
tuberculosis. He told his friends that he felt like a living ghost, and
it’s not surprising that the speaker of the poem should be so
obsessed with the idea of immortality. Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian
Urn’ is about the beauty in classical art and the everlastingness of
art, especially the Grecian urn. Through this poem, the poet
explores the complex emotions raised in his heart after seeing the
urn.

The poem consists of a person talking to a kind of fancy Greek pot

known as an "urn" that was made of marble. Keats would have
been able to see many urns from Ancient Greece at the British
Museum, the world's biggest archeological treasure-trove. Urn is
decorated with evocative images of rustic and rural life in ancient
Greece. These scenes fascinate, mystify, and excite the speaker
in equal measure—they seem to have captured life in its fullness,
yet are frozen in time. The speaker's response shifts through
different moods, and ultimately the urn provokes questions more
than it provides answers. The poem's ending has been and
remains the subject of varied interpretation.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” examines the close relationship between
art, beauty, and truth. For the speaker, it is through beauty that
humankind comes closest to truth—and through art that human
beings can attain this beauty (though it remains a bittersweet
achievement). At its heart, the poem admits the mystery of
existence—but argues that good art offers humankind an
essential, if temporary, way of representing and sensing this
mystery. The speaker does, however, foreground the aesthetics of
the urn throughout the poem, and matches the seductive beauty
of the object with a sensuous and delicately crafted linguistic
beauty of its own. Though the poem cannot—and doesn’t try to—
pin down the precise relationship between art, beauty, and truth,
its language works hard to be beautiful and to demonstrate that
beauty is something valuable and essential to humankind.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" reflects the immortality of art by emphasizing the

contrast between human life, where change is never ending, and the
unchanging scenes on an ancient urn. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" reflects the
immortality of art by focusing on the unchanging nature of a scene
depicted on an ancient Greek urn. Unlike human beings, who will pass
through time, the figures depicted on the urn will always be frozen at a
joyful moment when they are forever young, full of love, and enjoying a
blissful time at a spring festival. Even the trees will remain forever in first
bloom: they will never be part of the cycle of mortal life in which they
shed their leaves, die, and are reborn again. Likewise, the town that has
emptied so that its people can enjoy a religious festival will never be
repopulated. The poem is comparing art to life, and during a moment of
ecstatic identification, the speaker is longing to become part of the scene
on the urn. He expresses the deep human desire to capture a moment of
bliss and never let it go—but he understands that only art can do this. He
is seeing and envying the way a work of art never changes and is thus
immortal.
1.critical

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" was written by the influential English poet

John Keats in 1819. ", the year in which Keats contracted
tuberculosis. He told his friends that he felt like a living ghost, and
it’s not surprising that the speaker of the poem should be so
obsessed with the idea of immortality. Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian
Urn’ is about the beauty in classical art and the everlastingness of
art, especially the Grecian urn. Through this poem, the poet
explores the complex emotions raised in his heart after seeing the
urn.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of the most celebrated romantic poems by
the great Romantic poet John Keats. The poem captures the poet’s
subjective approach to an ancient Grecian urn and a traditional physical
object like the urn has been used as metaphor to signify abstract ideas
such as truth and eternity. In the poem, Keats explores the power and
permanence of art as typified by the urn and establishes its connection
with transient life. It also graphically furnishes the contrast between the
ideal and the real.

The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is Keats's own "silent form" meant to perform a similar

function— "tease us out of thought"—as that of the original Greek urn, that, ironically, does not

exist (unlike Keats's poem about it). In this poem, Keats (or at least,
the speaker in the poem) mulls over the strange idea of the
human figures carved into the urn. They are paradoxical figures,
free from the constraints and influences of time but at the same
time, imprisoned in an exact moment. For all that they don’t have
to worry about growing old or dying, they cannot experience life
as it is for the rest of humanity.

The poem opens with a description of the urn as a bride, a foster-child, a

historian. All these personifications subtly indicate the permanence of the
urn over time. The poet describes the pastoral scenes engraved on the
surface of the urn and establishes its supremacy by saying that “Heard
melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; . .” The world
depicted on the urn’s surface is an ideal one. Its per-eminence is
established through its immutability — “Fair youth, beneath the trees,
thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare”. In the
ideal world of the urn, it is eternal spring. ‘The weariness, the fever, and
the fret’ can never touch the figures on the urn. They are forever happy as
they are not subject to sufferings and pains, decay and death — “Ah,
happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the
Spring adieu; / And, happy melodist, unwearied, / Forever piping songs for
ever new.” In contrast, human beings on earth are subject to all types of
maladies, troubles and woes. The contrast is striking —”Forever warm and
still to be enjoyed, / Forever panting, and forever young; / All breathing
human passion far above, / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
/ A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” The urn is immune from the
negative aspects of time. It will continue to exist to teach human beings
great lessons. In the concluding stanza, the poet completes the
connection between the abstract and the concrete. “Beauty is truth, truth
beauty” sums up the relationships described throughout the poem.

tone is quite interesting, as Keats seems truly awed and astonished by the
urn he reflects over. His diction is rather elevated. The poem is written in
pentameter, throughout, which leads to a very flowing rhythmic effect;
the rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual, but Keats breaks the form with
this five-part poem"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is itself a well-formed
work of art. It consists of five rhymed stanzas; each stanza has
ten lines, and each line consists of ten syllables, usually of iambic
pentameter. The feel of the rhythm is established in the first line:
Thou still / unrav / ish'd bride / of qui / etness. Keats uses language
and an ancient Grecian urn, to link abstract concepts to real, concrete
things. Using iambic pentameter, and a unique rhyme scheme, and some
devices of figurative language, Keats sets up a melodic, beautifully
flowing poem which explores the relation between art and life, the ideal
and the real.

The major literary devices that are used in Keats’ ode. This ode
begins with an apostrophe. Keats directly invokes the urn at the
beginning. It also occurs in the following examples: “O mysterious
priest” and “O Attic shape!” Keats uses metaphors in “unravish’d
bride of quietness,” “foster-child of silence and slow time,”
“ditties of no tone,” etc. The first three lines are paradoxical. In
these lines, the poet refers to the Grecian urn from
three perspectives. Each reference is contradictory to the other. It
also occurs in the following lines: “Though winning near the goal
yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy
bliss”

The last two lines of this poem “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on
earth, and all ye need to know” are much-debated by literary critics.
The personified “Grecian urn” utters these lines to humankind. These lines mean the thing of
beauty is truth and vice versa. That is what one needs to know on earth.