Page 313 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes We already mentioned that the urn has decorative images of plants all over it, and now the speaker
is annoyed with the “forest branches” and the “trodden weed” that seem to be choking the poem
with vegetation. They get in the way and make the urn look crowded.
He’s starting to have some serious mixed feelings about this urn. He praises it and disuses it within
two lines. He’s basically saying, “You have a nice body, but you’re trying way too hard to look
fancy.”

Lines 44-45
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
If you thought his feelings were mixed before, these lines will really throw you for a loop.
He starts out by pointing his finger at the urn: “You! That’s right. You, the quiet one.” So far, it’s
been a fairly one-sided conversation (that tends to happen with inanimate objects), and now he’s
trying to get the urn to be more involved.
He says that the urn is so mysterious and baffling that it’s impossible to think about.
Our speaker uses the word “tease,” which has at least two meanings. The first is the one we’re
familiar with: mockery. The second is to separate or disentangle, like you might “tease” apart the
nest of wires behind your computer.
We think this second meaning is actually the primary one here. The poet compares the experience
of looking at the urn to thinking about eternity, an idea so lofty and hard to understand that trying
to think about it is like not thinking at all.
The speaker has been setting up this comparison between the world of the urn and eternity for the
entire poem. He views the urn as a world where things never change and can never be destroyed,
which is pretty much the definition of eternity. Except, of course, if the urn breaks.
Finally, he calls the scenes depicted on the urn a “Cold Pastoral.” Pastoral imagery concerns nature
and simple country life, so it’s an appropriate word in the context of images of peaceful towns,
young lovers, and bright, green trees.
But “cold”? Are these lines supposed to be a put-down, or are they actually a form of praise. They
sound more like a put-down – like the speaker changed his mind after all his talk about happiness
and warm bodies. He might be accusing the urn of being distant and uncaring.
But maybe he likes how the world of the urn seems so foreign from human life that it’s hard to even
think about.
You might compare the feeling to looking at remote stars and planets, which seem cold and indifferent
but also provide a sense of beauty and comfort.
Overall, it seems he understands the urn even less at the end of the poem than at the beginning.

Lines 46-48
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Old age” like the villain with a flamethrower in an action movie to “waste” an entire generation of
people – the speaker’s generation.
The speaker imagines that after everyone in his generation is dead, the urn will still be around.
The problems or “woe” of the present generation will have been replaced by new problems. But the
urn, like a good therapist and “a friend of man,” won’t be lacking in advice to give new generations.
In fact, it has always given the same advice to everyone, throughout history, which is.

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