Page 302 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 28: John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode to Autumn

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Notes
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

28.1.2 Summary

In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is preoccupied
with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-
child of silence and slow time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He
wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where
they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and
wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and
timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

What makes the speaker question the Urn in the first stanza? What state of mind does
keat’s poem seems designed to bring about?
In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man
playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s
“unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells
the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve,
because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers
and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs
will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike
mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind
only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers
leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious
priest...”) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens,
and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn,
will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like
Eternity, “doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn
will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The
speaker says that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.

28.1.3 Form

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” follows the same ode-stanza structure as the “Ode on Melancholy,” though
it varies more the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of each stanza. Each of the five stanzas in
“Grecian Urn” is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise 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, but the second occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the
same 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) creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well. The first four lines
of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop it.
(As in other odes, this is only a general rule, true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as
the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)

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