Page 314 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

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

Lines 49-50 Notes
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Beauty and truth is the same thing. That makes no sense at all. If beauty and truth is the same thing,
then why do we have two different words for them?
One of the sneakiest things about these lines is how they sound so darned confident, as if “Beauty is
truth, truth beauty” were on a par with “Gravity makes things fall down.”
We want to respond: “First of all, we didn’t already know that beauty and truth were that same
thing. Second, if you think we already knew that, why are you telling us? Third, why do you think
this is all we ‘need to know.’ How does this information help us, at all?”
To our knowledge, the urn has yet to respond to our inquiry. But we can try to say a bit about what
these lines could mean.
To say that beauty and truth are the same thing has usually been taken to mean that there is no truth
outside of art. We’re talking about big truths, like meaning-of-life truths.
We also think he’s using “beauty” to refer to more than just pretty pictures and writings. He’s
referring to anything that gives us that sense of grandeur and a meaning larger than ourselves,
including the art of the universe: nature.
Truth is not something that can be “thought.” It’s too remote and complicated, like the idea of
eternity. It can only be felt.
The speaker thinks that we don’t need truths that can be expressed in words. The experience of
beauty is enough. Enough for what? Well, perhaps to lead a good, fulfilling, meaningful life. There
are lots of things we’d like to know about the world, like why suffering exists. But we don’t need to
know such things. Beauty is the only absolutely necessary idea.
This last point is actually super-radical, and it’s what makes Keats one of the most Romantic of the
Romantics. If you take it to the extreme, you don’t need any of the truths of religious or philosophical
texts, history books, celebrity magazines, or wherever else people get their ideas. You don’t need
truths that are passed down through tradition.
Needless to stay, British conservatives hated Keats, whom they considered a wild-eyed liberal,
which he kind of was.
You may just want to throw up your hands and decide these lines are absurd. You’d be in good
company. T.S. Eliot, a poet, was never shy about voicing his opinions.
But for many people, they express truth in exactly the way they suggest: not with some kind of
intellectual argument, but through their rhythm and melody – their beauty.

28.2 Ode to a Nightingale

28.2.1 Text

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,

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