Ode on a Grecian Urn

by John Keats

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
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,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
 Analysis of Literary Devices in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Literary devices are techniques that the writers use to convey their ideas, feelings,
and message to the readers. Keats has also used some literary devices in this poem
to adore the beauty of urn. The analysis of some of the literary devices used in this
poem has been listed below.

1. Consonance: Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same

line of poetry such as the sound of /l/ in “Will silent be; and not a soul to
tell” and /n/ sound in “All breathing human passion far above.”
2. Symbolism: Symbolism is using symbols to signify ideas and qualities,
giving them symbolic meanings different from literal meanings. Keats has
used a lot of symbols in this poem such as, “plants and trees” are the
symbols of youth and spring, “urn” itself is the symbol of time and life.
3. Personification: Personification is to give human attributes to animate or
inanimate objects. He has used personifications at several places in the
poem. He addresses the urn as “bride of quietness” and “Sylvan historian”;
“you soft pipe, play on” as if pipe and urn are humans that can perform
certain acts.
4. Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same lines
of poetry such as the sound of /o/ in “More happy love! more happy, happy
love!” and /i/ sound in “Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede.”
5. Metonymy: It is a figure of speech that replaces the name of things with
something it is closely associated. Here, Keats links the man’s heart to his
feelings of being “high sorrowful and cloyed.”
6. Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is meant to represent the
whole. He has used this device to express the downside of natural love as he
has used the words, “burning love” that is fever and “parching tongues” is
thirst.
7. Anaphora: It refers to the repetition of any word or expression in the initial
part of the sentencesuch as ‘forever’ in the first two lines and ‘happy’ in the
last two lines.
“Forever painting and forever young
Forever piping song forever new
A happy, happy boughs
More happy love, more happy happy love.”

8. Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sounds in

the same line of poetry such as the sound of /n/ in “Ye know on earth, and
all ye need to know. And /t/ sound in “”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is
all.”
9. Paradox: A paradox is a statement that may seem contradictory but can be
true, or at least makes sense. He has used paradox in the second stanza,
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard”, “Pipe to the spirit ditties of
no tone”, implying melodies are heard by the spirits and not by the ears.
10.Apostrophe: An apostrophe is a device used to call somebody from afar.
The poet addresses the “urn,” the pictures painted on the urn and the lovers
engraved on the urn.

The literary analysis unfolds that the poet has sketched a very vivid and realistic
picture of the images painted on the urn using the above literary devices.

Analysis of Poetic Devices in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is
the analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

1. Ode: An ode is a traditional poem that was originally meant to be sung. The
ancient Greeks used to sing their odes.
2. Stanza: Stanza is a poetic form of some lines. There are five stanzas in this
poem; each of them consists of ten lines.
3. End Rhyme: End rhyme is used to make the stanza melodious. Keats has
used end rhyme in this poem such as in the first and second lines of the first
stanza the rhyming words are, “time”, “rhyme”, “both”, “loath.”
4. Rhyme Scheme: The poem follows ABABCDCDECDE, then a variation of
CDE DCE rhyme scheme throughout the poem with iambic pentameter.
5. Iambic Pentameter: It is a type of meter consisting of five iambs. The
poem comprises iambic pentameter such as,
“thou still unravished bride of quiet”
Rhyme Scheme of ‘Ode on the Grecian Urn’

To identify the rhyme scheme, it is necessary to consider Keats' entire poem. It

features 5 stanzas, each with ten lines. Each stanza develops its own rhyme scheme
that follows the same pattern.

The first four lines of each stanza create an abab pattern of rhyme, while the final
six lines of each stanza follow the pattern of cdecde with occasional variation, such
as those found in the last six lines of the first two stanzas.

The line you mention is found in the final stanza of the poem:

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, cost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

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,

"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," --that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The first four lines here follow the abab rhyme scheme (brede/weed rhyme, as
do overwrought/thought).
 The final six lines follow the basic cdecde rhyme scheme but with a minor
variation: cdedce. (This is the same variation in rhyme scheme found in the last six
lines of the first stanza.) Pastoral/all, waste/sayst, and woe/know are the rhymes in
this last stanza. Woe and know make a perfect rhyme, while the other two are
approximate rhymes.

Rhyme
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" consists of five stanzas with ten lines in each stanza. The first seven lines in
each stanza consistently follow this rhyme scheme: ababcde; however, the last three lines of the stanzas
are not the same. For example, in the first stanza, the rhyme scheme of the last three lines is dce, and the
rhyme scheme of the last three lines in the third stanza is cde. I think that, through changing the rhyme
scheme for almost every stanza was one of Keats' ways of strengthening the "flip-flop" feel of the
speaker's emotions and realizations to which he comes.
Sound
When I first read the poem, I had a sense of knowing exactly what was going on, but at the same time I
was still a tad confused. This was probably due to the fact that, while the language that Keats used is
beautiful and artistic (possibly making it seem a bit harder to understand), some of it could also be
understood by a child - making it somewhat common. Through using two contrasting types of languages,
Keats made the poem beautiful and delicate; however, he also made it comprehensible and easy to
understand.
Form
The form of "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the form is obviously an ode. The Oxford English Dictionary
describes an ode as "a poem intended to be sung or one written in a form originally used for sung
performance." This is clearly evident, because the poem could easily be set to music, and when being
recited, it has a "sing-songy" feel to it.

Allusion in Ode on a Grecian Urn

As is common in the poetry of John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” owes much of
its subject matter to ancient Greek culture and mythology. The titular urn is an
ancient Greek artifact whose surface the speaker studies carefully. The images
painted onto the urn reflect scenes that are at once particular to Greek culture and
yet reflective of broader human experiences. The romantic chase takes place in
“Tempe or the dales of Arcady,” locations on the Greek peninsula, and yet the
 lover’s chase is a timeless part of human life. As Keats envisions it, the role of art
is to identify what is timeless in a particular image, object, or scene. His use of
allusion serves that very goal.

Greek History and Mythology: While many of the British romantic poets held a
fascination with classical antiquity, John Keats was particularly enchanted by it.
Many of Keats’s poems reflect his deep and wide knowledge of the ancient Greek
world. In the case of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the classical allusions begin in the
very title of the poem.

A “Grecian urn” is a Greek amphora, a ceramic vessel usually used to contain

wine. In ancient Greek culture, amphorae served an additional purpose as canvases
for elaborate paintings, many of which depicted myths and stories. The subject of
Keats’s poem is just such an amphora.

Keats references two locations in Greece: “Tempe” and “the dales of Arcady,”
both of which bear significance for Keats’s vision.

 Tempe is a valley in the northern Greek region of Thessaly. Tempe was thought to
be often visited by Apollo, the god of music and poetry, and the Muses, the
goddesses who deliver artistic inspiration.
 “Arcady” is an outdated term for Arcadia, a region in the heart of the
Peloponnesian peninsula in southern Greece. Because much of Arcadia is ringed
by mountains, it has long been an isolated region mysterious to outsiders. As a
result it has also long stimulated the imagination. In ancient Greek times, Arcadia
was considered the home of the nature god Pan. In Renaissance and romantic-era
Europe, Arcadia was imagined as a pastoral Utopia, a kind of heaven on earth.

Investigating language and tone in Ode on a Grecian Urn

 The urn was created at a specific moment in time – but in this poem it seems
to be beyond the reach of time and to abide in an eternity of beauty. Note in
two columns how Keats uses language to suggest both a) the specificity and
b) the timelessness of the urn?
o What do you notice about the verb tenses he employs?
 What is the effect of repetition in the poem?
 There are several invocations and exclamations in the poem. How do they
affect its tone?
 What examples can you find of ambiguity in the poem?
 o What does the uncertainty of meaning add to the poem’s overall
effect?

Structure and versification in Ode on a Grecian Urn

Stanza 1 opens with an address to the urn and this is followed by a series of
questions about the scenes that are painted on it, which stanzas 2 and 3 describe in
detail.

Stanza 4 again asks questions, this time focused on a scene of sacrifice: who are
the people coming to it? What is happening to the empty town from which they
have come?

Stanza 5 reflects on the speaker’s own reactions to the art which the urn represents.
It has a sort of immortality, surviving into an age very different from that which
created it. It is a glimpse of eternity but also a reminder that all which is human
fades away.

Ode on a Grecian Urn follows the same ode-stanza structure as the Ode on
Melancholy, although there is more variety in the rhyme scheme. Each of the five
stanzas is ten lines long, each one written in iambic pentameter, and divided into a
two-part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven
lines of each stanza rhyme ababcde, but the second occurrences of the cde sounds
do not follow the same order in the five stanzas. For instance, in stanza 1, lines 7-
10 are rhymed dce; in stanza 2, ced and so on.

As in other odes, the two-part rhyme scheme (the first part made of ab rhymes, the
second of cde rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well.
The first four lines of each stanza broadly set out the subject of the stanza, and the
last six generally explain or develop it.

Investigating structure and versification in Ode on a Grecian Urn

 Central to the poem’s structure is the contrast between life and art. Explain
how the shape of the poem helps to shape the reader’s responses to these two
concepts.
 Do you agree that both the structure of the poem and its versification draw
attention to themselves?
o Does Keats intend to give the impression that his poem has been as
artfully constructed as the ode about which he is writing?
  How do structure and versification contribute to the poem’s formal tone?

Ode on a Grecian Urn: Imagery, symbolism and themes

Imagery and symbolism in Ode on a Grecian Urn

The ode is literally a series of images which are described and reflected upon. The
Grecian urn symbolises an important paradox for Keats: it is a work of applied art
(urns being associated with death), silent, motionless and made out of cold
materials, yet at the same time it moves him with its vitality and its imaginative
depictions of music, passion and sacrifice. It is a symbol of beauty and of
immortality, whilst at the same time reminding human beings of just how brief
their own life and passions are in comparison.

The urn
The urn itself is referred to in a series of images:

 As a ‘bride of quietness’
 A ‘child of silence and .. Time’
 As a teller of pastoral stories
 A shapely yet silent ‘tease’
 A friend to humanity
 As a wise sooth-sayer.

The dominant image of the urn in the final stanza is as a ‘Cold Pastoral’. The
phrase suggests that although its beauty cannot fade, it cannot be part of the
warmth and emotional intensity which comes from being human.

Scenes depicted
Then there are the images depicted on the surface of the urn – and it is these which
are offered for description and contemplation. These images undoubtedly tell a
story, but at this distance in time we cannot know exactly what the story is. Instead
the urn and its decorations now stand for an ideal of artistic beauty. The images are
still bright and clear but the whole civilization that produced it has passed away –
and so the questions which Keats poses about it can have no definitive answers.
The urn’s images are permanent and not subject to the death and decay that beset
human beings. The urn is outside time and therefore avoids the fading beauty and
destruction to which human lives are inevitably leading. The images suggest both
the beauty of art and also its distance from everyday reality. The trees on the urn
will never shed their leaves. The people depicted will never lose their sense of
vitality; the lovers will always be young and passionate.

The fourth stanza and its image of the sacrifice prompts Keats to ask unanswerable
questions about the town from which the people have come – a town now devoid
of its inhabitants. Because life on the urn’s surface is frozen, the ‘little town’ will
for ever have empty, silent streets. The image may be beautiful but its implications
have darker overtones. The urn is immortal but reminds us of our own mortality.

Investigating imagery and symbolism in Ode on a Grecian Urn

 Some readers have suggested that the urn symbolises both the beauty of
perfection on the one hand – and cold sterility on the other. Do you agree
with this assessment?
 Analyse the effect of the images Keats uses to convey the story of each
scene on the urn.
 Do the images suggest that art is good and that life is bad – or is their effect
more complex than this?
 Investigate the opening image of the urn as a ‘bride’. How many
associations does this word have?
o Is Keats exploiting both the idea of fruitfulness as well as the possible
sterility of non-consummation?

Themes in Ode on a Grecian Urn

The temporal and the eternal

Keats dwells in this poem on the pleasure and pain of art. In stanza 4 the beautiful
procession is made permanent by the artist’s skill, so the people cannot return to a
town now made eternally desolate by their absence. The image also reminds us that
the real people who inspired the image are now dead in the remote past. Because
art fixes things and seems to make them eternal, it also reminds us that we have to
live in a world of inevitable decay.

Energy transfixed
Keats is also aware that, although the urn’s imagery is full of energy in its
depiction of dance and erotic pursuit, it remains itself a ‘still unravish’d bride of
quietness’, calmly transcending the excitement conveyed by its surface images.

In contemplating the timelessness of pictorial art, Keats is also conscious that

poetry works differently from pictures. An image can be seen and comprehended
in an instant; but the poet has to construct a narrative of events that happen in a
sequence. The poem’s speaker therefore imagines a story, even though it is one
that the urn’s artist has had to freeze in time:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare.

Keats was particularly moved by the dynamic nature of the images on the urn. His
friend Haydon was similarly impressed by this sort of art, writing in his diary:

the great principle of composition in Painting is to represent the event, doing and
not done … The moment a thing is done in Painting half the interest is gone; a
power of exciting attention depends … upon the suspense we keep the mind in
regarding the past and future.

Balance
Keats saw Haydon’s principle in the images on the urn: the coexistence of
excitement and frozen time. It was this which made the object the perfect
embodiment of the classical ideal (see Aristotle’s ideas on the golden mean.)
Different viewpoints
What also fascinated Keats was the difference in viewpoint between the people
depicted on the urn and that of the viewer. For instance in stanza 4 the
mysteriously moving group fails to see the pathos of its own situation. No one in
this group seems remotely aware that, for the group to exist, the town from which
they have come has had to be emptied: the procession is beautiful but the town left
behind is desolate.

Keats’ final aphorism

The poem’s final lines are famous but have also been much discussed and have
caused much critical disagreement. One reason for this is that there is disagreement
about the punctuation of lines. In the volume of poems that Keats published in
1820, they were presented as follows:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The confusion arises from the fact that there are no quotation marks in the version
printed in Annals of the Fine Arts later in the same year – or in the transcripts of
the poem made by Keats’ friends. This has caused critics to disagree as to whether
the urn speaks the whole two lines or whether the urn says just: ‘Beauty is truth,
truth beauty’ and the rest is spoken by the poem’s speaker. And is the ‘ye’ in the
last line addressed to the speaker, to the readers, to the urn or to the figures on the
urn?

There has also been dispute about what ‘all ye know’ means. Is it that we are
meant to believe that ‘beauty is truth’ is a profound philosophical statement or a
simplification of something very mysterious (i.e. all that we/ye are capable of
understanding)? It certainly seems to be a very definite and emphatic statement -
which concludes a highly indeterminate poem that dwells on mystery rather than
simply defined truths!
Investigating themes in Ode on a Grecian Urn
 How does the urn reflect Keats’ longing for permanence in a world of
change?
 What does this poem suggest about the role of art?
 What evidence is there that, in Ode to a Grecian Urn, Keats is meditating on
what happens when one creative imagination interacts with another?
 How does the poem treat the theme of time?
o In what ways does the urn link Keats’ present with the classical past?