Role of Works of Art in Ode on a Grecian Urn and Musée des Beaux Arts

While differing in technique and subject matter, John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) and W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940) demonstrate how using the rhetorical device of Ekphrasis in poetry helps to guide the reader to the central themes and messages of the poem. Both poems confront and explore the works of art differently: while Keats uses the rustic urn (in which scenes and myths are depicted upon it) to confront the nature as well as the limits of the world of art and fantasy; Auden uses Brueghel’s painting, The Fall of Icarus, in his second stanza to help reinforce the speaker’s comments (stated within the first stanza) on the apathy or indifference that seems to be present within the human condition in regards to human suffering. In comparing these two poems, it is evident that there are many different ways and techniques that ekphrasis can be used within poetry, also demonstrates how the work of art being described in the poem becomes instrumental in conveying a poem’s complex ideas in an effective and meaningful way.

Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is written in iambic pentameter, featuring five stanzas (signatory of the ode), mainly making use of poetic devices such as apostrophe, personification, and paradox. Throughout the poem, the urn is personified through metaphor as the speaker describes the urn as a “still unravish’d bride” (1), the “foster-child of silence” (2), and the “Sylvan historian” (3). These descriptions of the urn are also paradoxical, as although the urn is an old and rustic artefact it is simultaneously being described as something young and naïve. Also paradoxical within these lines is in describing the urn as silent, also calling it a sylvan historian suggests that it has the capacity ...

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...ect the meanings of the poem as well as provide context to these meanings. While ekphrastic poems are retelling a story, it is in this retelling that the work of art can help bring together a poem’s elements so that the poem feels more like a cohesive whole. Poems such as “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Musée des Beaux Arts” provide good examples of how confronting works of art can help to better convey a poem’s meaning and how techniques of confronting works of art can bring together these poetic elements.

Works Cited

Auden, W.H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” The Broadview Anthology of Poetry. Ed.

Godrick-Jones, Amanda, and Herbert Rosegarten. Peterborough, Ont:

Broadview, 2008. Print.

Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The Broadview Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Godrick-

Jones, Amanda, and Herbert Rosengarten. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview,

2008. Print