What Does Ode On A Grecian Urn Mean

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TITLE PJ McDonough Poetry as Power p6 Ms. Schauble The second stanza of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” begins with the line, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” With this line Keats is saying that while spoken word is important and beautiful, a picture is worth 1000 words. The first four lines of the stanza set the stage for the story of the Urn to be told, and there is a clear separation between the first four lines of the stanza and the last six. Keats makes this separation obvious with his rhyming scheme. The first four lines of the stanza go ABAB with B being an implied rhyme, and the last six lines go CDECED. Each line of the second stanza has ten syllables except the …show more content…

This is especially shown in her poems “Hope is the thing with feathers (254)” and “My Life closed twice before its close (96)”. Neither poem relies on Dickinson’s traditionally dominant dash, but are similar in both rhyming scheme and meter, loosely following an ABCB and 8 6 scheme. In “254” hope is implied to be an unwavering bird within the soul. The bird sings to the speaker in the darkest and strangest times of their life asking little in return despite giving its whole self to the speaker. Just like the bird, Jesus is hope, giving his whole self to forgive the sins of man, and asking little in return. The poem is short and simple, but powerful in its message of the unwavering hope of Christianity, showing that Dickinson still believes in Christ despite not conforming to religious norms. Just like “ Hope is the thing with feathers” “My life closed twice before its close” is a short, straight-forward poem about God. The first line talks about three lives, two that have already been lived and one that is on the horizon. The speaker is at the dawn of a new chapter in their life, but is unsure what that new chapter holds or if it will be lived at all. This is seen in lines 2 through 4, “It yet remains to see / If immortality unveil / A third life to me” In the second stanza the speaker is dumbfounded by the vastness of life and cannot fathom the life lived in their previous two lives because of the evil that they have committed. In the seventh and eighth lines the speaker knows that the only known of heaven is parting with that bad and the only constant of hell is those who cannot leave their evil behind. Thus, they hoping for a third life to part with their wrongdoing. Although veiled behind her writing, Dickinson is worried about her own struggles with

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