Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

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Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

Summary

In the first stanza, the speaker, standing before an ancient Grecian

urn, addresses the urn, preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in

time. It is the "still unravish'd bride of quietness," the "foster-child of silence

and slow time." He also describes the urn as a "historian," which can tell a

story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn, and asks what

legend they depict, and where they are from. He looks at a picture that

seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women, and wonders

what their story could be: "What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? /

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"

In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the

urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a

glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper's "unheard" melody's are

sweeter than mortal melodies, because they are unaffected by time. He tells

the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in

time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third

stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers, and feels happy that

they will never shed their leaves; he is happy for the piper because his songs

will be "for ever new," and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will

last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into "breathing human

passion," and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a "burning forehead,

and a parching tongue."

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the

urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He

wonders where they are going ("To what green altar, O mysterious

priest..."), and where they have come from. He imagines their little town,

empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will "for evermore" be

silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the

final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like

Eternity, "doth tease us out of thought." He thinks that when his generation

is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic

lesson: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." The speaker says that that is the only
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...o human life.

The final two lines--in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking

its message to mankind--"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"--have proved

among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon. After the urn utters

the enigmatic phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," no one can say for sure

who "speaks" the conclusion, "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye

need to know"; it could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be

the urn addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it

would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: the urn may not need

to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the

complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and

self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary

human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has

rather the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the

complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is that

beauty and truth are one and the same. Which reading to accept is largely a

matter of personal interpretation.

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