Page 117 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes In the final stanza, the speaker talks about the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to
engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its
ability to “tease” him “out of thought / As doth eternity.” If human life is a series of “hungry
generations,” as the speaker suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a self-contained and separate
world. It can be a “friend to man,” as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind of
aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human
life.
The final two lines, in which the speaker visualises the urn speaking its message to mankind—
”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” have proved to be amongst the most difficult to interpret in the
Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” nobody
can be sure about who “speaks” the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need
to know.” It may possibly 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 look like it is indicating his
awareness of its limitations: The urn need not know anything beyond the equation of truth and
beauty, but the problems of human life make it impossible for such a self-sufficient and simple
phrase to express adequately anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is the urn
addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of a significant lesson, as though beyond
all the complications of human life, all humans need to know on earth is that truth and beauty
are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal interpretation.

Figures of Speech

The main figures of speech used in the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn are metaphor and apostrophe in
the form of personification.
An apostrophe is a figure of speech in which an author speaks to a person or thing present or
absent. A metaphor on the other hand, is a figure of speech that compares two unlike things
without using the word like, as, or than. Personification is a kind of metaphor that compares an
object with a human being. In effect, it treats an object as a person, it is thus called personification.
Apostrophe and metaphor/personification occur concurrently in the opening lines of the poem
when Keats addresses the urn as “Thou,” “bride,” “foster-child,” and “historian” (apostrophe).
In speaking to the urn this way, he suggests that it is a human (metaphor/personification). Keats
also addresses the trees as persons in the third stanza and continues addressing the urn as a
person in the fifth stanza.

Example:
Assonance - Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
Alliteration - Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian, who canst
thus express
Anaphora - What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Self Assessment

Choose the correct answer:
1. According to the text, which of the following lines from John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” are possibly the most discussed and debated in English poetry?

112 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY