Page 115 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes Thus, he was like the cold marble of the urn who was fixed and immovable. Keats states that
even when death claims him and all those of his generation, the urn will stay. And it will tell the
next generation what it has told Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” It means that one must not
try to look beyond the beauty of the urn and its images, which are representations of the eternal,
since nobody can see into eternity. The beauty itself is sufficient for a human; that is the only
truth that a human can fully understand. The poem ends with an endorsement of these words,
saying they make up the only axiom that any human being actually needs to know.

Did u know? Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a romantic ode, a dignified but highly lyrical
(emotional) poem in which the author speaks to a person or thing absent or present. In this
famous ode, Keats addresses the urn and the images on it. The romantic ode was at the
pinnacle of its popularity in the nineteenth century. It was the result of an author’s deep
meditation on the person or object. The romantic ode evolved from the ancient Greek ode,
written in a serious tone to celebrate an event or to praise an individual. The Greek ode
was intended to be sung by a chorus or by one person to the accompaniment of musical
instruments. The odes of the Greek poet Pindar (circa 518-438 BC) frequently extolled
athletes who participated in athletic games at Olympus, Delphi, the Isthmus of Corinth,
and Nemea. Bacchylides, a contemporary of Pindar, also wrote odes praising athletes. The
Roman poets Horace (65-8 BC) and Catullus (84-54 BC) wrote odes based on the Greek
model, but their odes were not intended to be sung. In the nineteenth century, English
romantic poets wrote odes that retained the serious tone of the Greek ode. However, like
the Roman poets, they did not write odes to be sung. Unlike the Roman poets, though, the
authors of nineteenth century romantic odes generally were more emotional in their
writing. The author of a typical romantic ode focused on a scene, pondered its meaning,
and presented a highly personal reaction to it that included a special insight at the end of
the poem (like the closing lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”).

6.3.2 Analysis

Form

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” follows the same ode-stanza structure as the “Ode on Melancholy,”
though it differs more in the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of every stanza. Every stanza
in “Grecian Urn” is ten lines long, metered in a fairly specific iambic pentameter, and divided
into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven lines of
each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme; however the second occurrences of the CDE
sounds follow a different order. In stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in
stanza two, CED; in stanzas three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one. As
in other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Melancholy”), the two-part rhyme scheme (the first
part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) forms the sense of a two-part thematic
structure also. The first four lines of every stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the
last six roughly explain or develop it. As in other odes, this is only a common rule, true of some
stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect thematic structure and rhyme
scheme closely at all.

!

Caution Deconstruction—taking a view that literary works are disorganized, illogical,
incoherent, essentially indeterminate, and employing a methodology of analysing works
to find mistakes, inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions—could, as a theory, have been

110 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY