Page 307 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes In Ancient Greece, all the gods were represented as looking like people, so you wouldn’t always be
able to tell the difference between them and people in a picture. The gods also liked to hang out
with humans.
Needless to say, it’s hard to tell if these people are mere mortals or gods.
The speaker is also wondering where the story takes place.
With his knowledge of Ancient Greece, he throws out a couple of names as guesses: Tempe and
“Arcady,” or Arcadia. (A “dale” is just a valley.)
Line 8-10

What men or gods are these? what maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Keats is playing a clever trick here. Under the guise of having the speaker try to figure out what’s on
the pictures, Keats is really telling us about the story.
The speaker repeats the question about “deities or mortals” in more causal language: are they “men
or gods”?
Here it helps to have a little background into a very common Ancient Greek theme: a bunch of
lustful guys chasing a bunch of nice girls around and trying to get some action. Very often the
males would be half-man, half-goat-type creatures called “satyrs,” but Keats doesn’t mention
anything about satyrs so we can’t jump to that conclusion.
If you want to have a more sinister interpretation, you can imagine that the women are being chased
against their will.
We’re going to give these couples the benefit of the doubt, though, and imagine that the women are
just being playful.
They are “loth,” or “loath,” to have sex, which means they are reluctant, but it could just be a
teasing reluctance.
In the picture, the guys are chasing the women in “mad pursuit,” which the women “struggle to
escape.”
This cat-and-mouse scenario seems to be a game. It wouldn’t make much sense to depict a serious
chase scene and then include people playing instruments like “pipes and timbrels” (a timbrel is like
a tambourine).
On the whole, everyone looks happy. But not just happy as in simply content.
We’re talking rowdy, crazy, best-party-of-my-life happiness. We’re talking “wild ecstasy.” Everyone
is running around and dancing.

Stanza II Summary
Lines 11-12
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
In this stanza, the speaker seems to have moved on to another of the pictures on the side of the urn.
As in the first scene, there is music playing. The music is being played on “pipes,” which is like a
primitive version of a flute. Unlike the wild party music of the first stanza, these pipes are “soft.”
The speaker arrives at a totally counter-intuitive conclusion. He says that the melodies you don’t
hear are “sweeter” than those you do.

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