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Unit 6: Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

based solely on “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” because Keats himself had already written into Notes
his text those very incongruities and discordances that Deconstruction was established to
expose. The poem has in fact been deconstructing itself for more than 180 years, but for
many readers it took 1970s theorizing to make it permissible to say so in class. We now
understand, even with the most admired poems, that some conflicts are not resolved into
agreement, that some closures are not really achieved, and that readers who demand
agreement and closure must supply them interpretively, compensating for lacks in the
actual texts themselves.

Themes

If the “Ode to a Nightingale” depicts the speaker’s engagement with the fluid expressiveness of
music, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” shows the speaker’s attempt to engage with the static
immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through uncountable centuries to the
time of the speaker’s viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense as it does not age, it does
not die, and is certainly alien to all such ideas. In the speaker’s thought, this creates an intriguing
paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they
are concurrently frozen in time. They don’t have to confront aging and death as their love is “for
ever young”, and neither can they have experiences like the youth can never kiss the maiden; the
figures in the procession can never return to their homes.
In the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, the speaker attempts thrice to engage with scenes carved into
the urn; each time he asks dissimilar questions of it. In the first stanza, he observes the picture of
the “mad pursuit” and tries to understand the real story which lies behind the picture: “What
men or gods are these? What maidens loth?” Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos,
whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line
of questioning.
The speaker examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees, in the
second and third stanzas. In these stanzas, the speaker makes an effort to imagine what the
experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is attracted
to their escape from temporality and fascinated with the eternal newness of the piper’s unheard
song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is “far above”
all transient human passion, which, in its sexual expression, unavoidably leads to an abatement
of intensity—when passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful
heart, a “burning forehead,” and a “parching tongue.” The speaker’s recollection of these
conditions appears to remind the speaker that he is unavoidably subject to them, and he abandons
his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker tries to think about the figures on the urn as though
they were experiencing human time, visualising that their procession has an origin (the “little
town”) and a destination (the “green altar”). Then again all he can think is that the town will be
deserted forever: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense
the speaker challenges the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos
and wheres of the “real story” in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the
destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth stanza.
It is true that the speaker shows some progress in his successive attempts to get engrossed in the
urn. His idle inquisitiveness in the first attempt leads to a more intensely felt identification in
the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own worries behind and thinks of the
processional mainly on its own terms, thinking of the “little town” with a generous feeling.
However, all his attempts eventually fail. The third attempt fails just because there is nothing
left to say—once the speaker confronts the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he
has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, and there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

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