Page 303 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
1. In 1999, ...... claimed that the poem “Tells a story that cannot be developed.
(a) Harry Patch (b) Andrew Motion
(c) Carol Ann Duffy (d) England
2. This posed a problem for the ......, who were prone to closely reading a poem’s text.
(a) Literary criticism (b) New historicism
(c) New criticism (d) Literary theory
3. It is one of his “Great odes of 1819”, which include ......, ode on Melancholy, ode to a
Nightingale and ode to Psyche.
(a) Ode on a Grecian Urn (b) Romantic poetry
(c) Negative capability (d) Ode on Indolence
4. The technique of the poem is ......, the poetic representation of a painting or sculpture in
words.
(a) Aristotle (b) Ekphrasis
(c) Poetry (d) Homer
5. There is a hint of a ...... in that indulgence causes someone to be filled with desire and that
music without a sound is desired by the soul.
(a) Aristotle (b) Paradox
(c) Bertrand Russell (d) Ambiguity

28.1.4 Themes

If the “Ode to a Nightingale” portrays Keats’s speaker’s engagement with the fluid expressiveness of
music, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of
sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s
viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense—it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is
alien to all such concepts. In the speaker’s meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human
figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in
time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is “for ever young”), but neither can
they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never
return to their homes).
The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks
different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the “mad pursuit” and wonders
what actual story 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.
In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath
the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be
like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to
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,
inevitably 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.”

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