Page 304 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

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

Notes

The speaker recollection of these conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is
inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures
on the urn.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they were
experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the “little town”) and a
destination (the “green altar”). But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: If these
people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he confronts head-on 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.
It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage with
the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt identification in the
second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processional
purely on its own terms, thinking of the “little town” with a real and generous feeling. But each
attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails simply because there is nothing more 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, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.
In the final stanza, the speaker presents 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 succession of “hungry generations,”
as the speaker suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a separate and self-contained 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 imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind—
”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats
canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” no one can say for
sure who “speaks” the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It
could 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 seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: The urn
may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of
human life make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently
anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase
has rather the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life,
all human beings need to know on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is largely
a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.

28.1.5 Detailed Analysis

A man is whispering sweet nothings to a Grecian urn, an ancient Greek pot that is covered in
illustrations. He thinks the pot is married to a guy named “Quietness,” but they haven’t had sex yet,
so the marriage isn’t official. He also thinks that the urn is the adopted child of “Silence” and “Slow
Time.”
Then the speaker gives us the urn’s profession: it’s a “historian,” and it does a much better job of
telling stories than the speaker possibly could. The speaker looks closer at the urn and tries to figure
out what’s going on in the pictures that are painted on it. Illustrated on the urn is some kind of story
that might involve gods, men, or both. It looks like a bunch of guys are chasing beautiful women
through the forest. People are playing pipes and beating on drums. Everyone looks happy. The
scene is chaotic and the speaker doesn’t know quite what’s happening.

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