Keats and the Senses of Being: "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

(Stanza V)

ABSTRACT: With its focus on the pathos of permanence

versus temporality as human aporia and on the function
— the Werksein — of the work of art genuinely
encountered, John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn is a
particularly compelling subject for philosophical
analysis. The major explications of this most
contentiously debated ode in the language have largely
focused, however, on various combinations of the
poem’s stylistic, structural, linguistic, psychological,
aesthetic, historical, symbolic, and intellectual-
biographical elements. My paper articulates a bona fide
philosophical approach to the ode’s famously
controversial fifth stanza (the one containing the Urn’s
declaration: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"). I
demonstrate how William Desmond’s metaphysics of
Being-specifically his analysis of the univocal,
equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological senses of
being-affords the groundwork for a "hermeneutics of the
between" that elucidates the ode’s culminating stanza
with all of the cogency and nuance that one would
expect to derive from a systematic ontology.

In what ways are philosophy and literature mutually

elucidating? More specifically, how can a systematic
metaphysics serve as a vehicle of insight into the way
that literary art renders, in solution as it were,
ontological truths that orchestrate our experience of the
ideal? I’d like briefly to address these questions by
considering the concluding stanza of John Keats’s "Ode
on a Grecian Urn" in terms of four complementary
ontological keys. These four senses of being — the
univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the
metaxological—are the heart of a compelling ontology
detailed by William Desmond in his treatise on Being and
the Between (1995). 

The closing stanza of Keats’s ode, which has beguiled

and perplexed readers for nearly 180 years, is among
the most exhaustively explicated passages of poetry in
the language. And a case can be made that the best,
perhaps the only, justification for offering a novel
reading of those ten lines at this late date is to
demonstrate how they stand to "educate humanity" at
the most significantly general level — the level of being.
An ontological reading of the sort I have in mind will
focus on the Werksein of the poem. In other words, it
will approach Keats’s work in conjunction with what
Heidegger identifies as the "question of Being." In this
connection, I would argue that Desmond’s four-fold
ontological classification serves uniquely valuable
hermeneutic ends when adopted as an approach to
Keats’s ode, especially to the often-misconstrued
concluding stanza.

What inspires the present effort is not any univocal

desire to "solve" Keats’s ode by proffering some
"definitive" explication. Such attempts amount to little
more than what the poet himself characterized as an
"irritable reaching after fact and reason"— the antithesis
of "negative capability." On the contrary, the reflections
I offer, like the rapt meditation of the Keatsian persona
who encounters the urn, have their source in the
philosophically seminal wonder that any genuine
engagement with the ode — with participation in its
Werksein — excites. I turn now directly to the "Ode on a
Grecian Urn" and, specifically, to the ontological truths
that the concluding stanza depictively affirms when read
in the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and
metaxological keys.
The viewer of the urn is struck, in the concluding stanza,
by how a "silent form" captures and preserves in its
frieze the dramatic peak of aesthetic, erotic, and
devotional mindfulness. An uncanny "foster-child of
silence"— an analogue of "eternity" in its ideal
remoteness from the corrosive efficacy of time — the
urn is a seductively inscrutable presence that both
accommodates and transcends the reasoning that is
attuned to the univocal sense of being. Such reasoning
construes the world in accord with Pascal’s esprit
geometrique, in light of which mathematical precision is
the measure of ultimate truth and reality. The univocal
sense of being — for which ambiguity or paradox is
problematic — sponsors a type of rationality that takes
as axiomatic the notion that intelligibility is a function of
modes of thought that are linear, formally logical, or in
Keats’s terminology "consequitive."
Resistant to the requisites of discursive intelligibility,
however, the urn "teases" the viewer "out of thought,"
though it does not thereby completely elude univocal
determination. For it is unambiguously, determinately a
"Cold Pastoral": the sculpted pastoral figures and
scenes are, like the urn’s numinous silence, remote from
the "breathing," the heat, the "panting" of ephemeral
earthly life. 
While from a univocal standpoint the urn exists
"objectively" at an inert remove from the time-bound,
flesh-and-blood existence whose trace remains figured
about its outer surface, the viewer does not turn away
from it, in the end, toward life. Nor does his metonymic
appellation, "Cold Pastoral!" signify an ironic attitude, as
some readers believe. Rather, the speaker perceives the
urn as a source of perpetual solace and assurance of
ideal value in a world of time and change. An archetypal
emblem of the work of art, the vase is a figurative
repository of otherwise fleeting moments of idyllic
happiness. Univocally apprehended, it speaks to each
generation in unambiguously ideal terms. A
transtemporal "thing of beauty" it betokens and invites
our "participatory enactment" (Stambovsky 1988) of a
transcendent vision, a vision in which beauty is truth
and vice versa. Several of the prominent critics who
have read this epigram and its context univocally have
concluded that it’s simply an intellectual lapse, a flaw,
in an otherwise remarkable poem; others have striven to
explain it in light of definitive concepts of truth and of
beauty. Perhaps the bottom line from the univocal
perspective is that the urn’s message equating beauty
and truth, a message that univocally minded readers
explain determinately in one way or another, is given as
the single thing that we mortals need to know about
what an ideal aesthetic object communicates in the
language of the human spirit.

If from the univocal orientation we move to one keyed to

the equivocal sense of being, we read the ode’s
concluding stanza with an eye toward what is, in
Desmond’s words, indeterminate beyond univocal
determinacy." This translates into semantic and
conceptual indeterminacies that attune us to the urn’s
strangeness, its otherness. In this frame of reference
the urn, "Cold" yet "pastoral," is irresolvably
paradoxical. It beguiles us out of univocal modes of
thought such that the unambiguously ideal character of
the message that the sculpted figures convey to
succeeding generations of viewers is salvifically
accessible only by way of visionary "erotic self-
transcendence" (Desmond’s phrase, in which he intends
"eros" to be understood Platonically, as a general urge,
inspired by an experience of deficiency or lack, toward
ideal fulfillment or wholeness). If we approach it in this
way as a regulative ideal, the beauty/truth equation —
like the urn, and any genuine work of art — resists the
"fixed univocalization" of a single application or
meaning.

More generally, the urn, an overdetermined "Attic

shape," speaks to the equivocal sense of being in both
negative and affirmative respects. Negatively, the time-
bound speaker encounters the timeless artifact in way
that progressively realizes the latter’s alien character,
its "otherness." The reflective engagement thus
culminates in the exclamation "Cold pastoral!", which
suggests the urn’s radical alterity vis-à-vis the "heat" of
the human activity and passions that the marble legend
depicts. Affirmatively, on the other hand, the
progressive "othering" that occurs through the ode
amounts to a pluralizing of being that contributes to a
"community of irreducible," because equivocally cast,
others. We see this most saliently in the ode’s closing
lines, which give voice in an aesthetic register to the
community of art and life. Established in the viewer’s
encounter with the urn in its irreducible totality, this
community — by extension, possible for us to the degree
that we find ourselves visionary participants in the
Werksein of the poem — is something concentrated in
the voice with which the urn speaks through the
beholder. The message, though, is among the most
notoriously plurivocal of any oracular dictum that occurs

in major English poetry. Indeed the beauty/truth

equation is often explained as an instance of
"nonmediation"— incommunicable mystery — merely
"posing as" an expression of genuine "intermediation"
between the urn and the viewer. In other words, the urn
is read as speaking in a radically autonomous voice. But
this is to miss the urn’s progressive "othering" through
the ode (from an equivocal orientation, the "negative"
aspect of the poem). This "othering," however, is a
process of definition that calls attention to the viewer’s
own consciousness as the theater — the intermediating
moment — of the artifact’s communicative efficacy,
"other" though it be in its ideal remoteness from the
living experience of time and change. 

The irresolvable indeterminacy that attaches to how,

finally and in specific detail, we are to interpret the
hyperuranian revelation attributed to the urn is
something that gets mooted when we read the ode in
the dialectical key. In Desmond’s words, dialectic 

is concerned with the articulation in intelligible saying

of that interplay [among self and other], with respect to
both mind and being. Moreover, it is intimately linked
with the sameness of univocity and the difference of
equivocity, and most especially with the oscillation
between them. (134)

Self-mediation is the defining moment of dialectical

determination, something in light of which we can read
the ode’s fifth stanza (and with it the urn’s utterance) as
not, in the last analysis, equivocal. In fact, it is entirely
delimitable as an evolving episode of the viewer’s
meditative observation and reflection.

The dialectical sense directs attention to two cardinal

interrelated facets of the ode that fully emerge in the
last stanza. The first is that at bottom the poem is as
much about its own reflective medium — the persona’s
engaged awareness — as it is about the urn itself. The
second feature disclosed by a dialectically keyed
reading is that the ode unfolds largely by virtue of the
resolution of indeterminacies. These indeterminacies
evidence the equivocal status of our pathetic
temporality — the self-consuming character of our most
cherished aesthetic, passional and devotional
experience — in the presence of an atemporal, ideal
incarnation of that experience. Dialectically conceived,
the ode fulfills the promise of an encounter between two
antipodal poles of truth: the earthly and the ideal. 
If this encounter appears paradoxical from a univocal
viewpoint, that paradox is resolved when we privilege
the equivocal sense of being and, consequently, the
temporal and the eternal seem to negate each other:
ideal love, for instance, vanishes in time, while the
urgency that attaches to the ineluctably fugitive
character of temporally realized values is neutralized in
the timeless calm of the ideal. When we apprehend them
in the dialectical key, the mortal viewer and the ideal
urn — and by extension, the time-bound reader and the
timeless poem — mutually and transformatively define
each other through a process of mediation. This occurs
as an episode, as an adventure, of the viewer’s
conscious life as he scrutinizes and reacts to the urn. As
such, the encounter is a self-mediating drama that gets
played out entirely in the beholder’s consciousness. It is
the adventure of how the urn as artwork — the ideal as a
presence — communicates sustaining value to the
pathetically transient world of human experience. In the
climactic synthesis when the Keatsian persona utters
the vessel’s visionary message, he remains at once
dialectically other to the urn while he self-
transcendently speaks as the urn. On this reading, the
indeterminacy that we associate with the beauty/truth
equation, expressed both for and by the urn, gets recast
as "the doubling of the voice of being" (Desmond’s
phrase). This doubling is manifest in the registers, the
timeless and the temporal, in which the ideal speaks to
us — on the one hand, in the "silent voice" of the urn
and, on the other, in that of the poet speaking audibly as
the urn.

I turn, lastly, to a metaxological frame of reference, one

that complements readings of the ode that derive from
the univocal, equivocal, and dialectical senses of being.
A metaxological approach to the concluding stanza is
open, in Desmond’s words, "to plurality, but knows also
the interstices of being that resists any easy assertion
of continuity and facile reconciliation." In Keats’s ode,
the elements of being that resist facile reconciliation
are, on the one hand, the pathos of human temporality
(Unamuno’s "tragic sense of life") and, on the other, the
visionary transformation of that pathos — of that pathos
as ideally rendered — in the timeless work of art. The
metaxological orientation thus leads us to rethink "the
mediated wholeness of the dialectical." From this
perspective, "Mediation is an intermediation where
there is an infinitely open doubling of being, redoubling
beyond self-closure, both inwardly and outwardly"
(Desmond 200-01).

To rethink the unity of the ode in this way is to

incorporate within a more open sense of being the
determinacies that characterize univocal thinking as
well as the ambiguity and heterogeneity to which the
equivocal sense adjusts our focus. And this leads us to
be more particularly "mindful of the recalcitrances and
breakdowns and tensions of opposition" which we
invariably face in any living encounter with the ideal.
Moreover, the metaxological sense of being will not let
us rest content with the culminating synthesis
postulated by a dialectical account of the ode’s closing
lines. If we construe them from the metaxu (i.e.,
ontologically from the "between"), these lines bring
dramatically to life not a totalizing self-mediation of the
viewer’s consciousness but rather an intermediation
between the viewer as self and the urn as other. And
they do so in a way that famously resists discursive
modes of disposing of the Keatsian persona’s perplexity
as he puzzles over the sculpted legend’s provenance and
exact meaning. To discern this is to appreciate how the
ode’s epigrammatic close, like the marble figures that
ornament the urn, sets in relief what Desmond would
call the double presencing of agapeic mind — mind
called to self-transcendence — a double presencing that
is operative throughout the poem. The viewer’s agapeic
mindfulness in contemplating the urn is an order
consciousness that, unlike the totalizing self-mediation
of dialectical thought, is as much open to, and an index
of, an exogenous reality as it is a thing in itself. It is,
moreover, the medium that testifies to the
"communicative being," a "coming into the between,"
whereby the urn and the speaker intermediate each
other. In other words, the beauty/truth declaration
dramatizes how, in Desmond’s idiom, the Keatsian
persona let "the promise of" ideal "plenitude" in the urn
as other—what we might term the urn’s salvific vision of
the whole — "come to manifestation in the Between and
out of [the viewer’s] own resources" (408). The viewer’s
perplexity through the course of the ode changes to
fascination and wonder bordering on astonishment as he
encounters what the urn’s figures make accessible
through participatory enactment of the artwork’s
Werksein: namely, the consolation that time-
beleaguered mortal existence finds in the ideal. This is
the core of Keats’s profound drama of the artist’s
agapeic mind come to life in the "communicative being"
of the artwork — the ode’s as well as the urn’s. 

From this standpoint, the urn and the viewer — just as

the ode and the reader — go "toward the other," each
delivering "itself over to the other." The speaker,
delivered to the urn, becomes its voice. The urn, after
resisting the viewer’s queries, speaks as other through
the latter. Encountered in this way, "Ode on a Grecian
Urn" demonstrates how both the numinous work of art —
any genuine work of art — and the conscious life of the
beholder become "available for the other," as Desmond
would put it; and in so doing, it discloses how each
thereby affirms its being, its reality, by virtue of "its
communication of itself to the other." 
As the voice of "posthumous agapeic mind" (Desmond),
the declaration that beauty is truth, truth beauty
communicates a "love of being in its intrinsic good"
(558). In one respect this equation simply assumes and
generalizes Coleridge’s dictum about the willing
suspension of disbelief, an attitude that underwrites our
enjoyment of fictive drama from a visionary stance. This
attitude places us at a remove from the paralyzing, the
disgusting or the otherwise morally and cognitively
benumbing shocks that all too often accompany our
perceptions of beauty and truth, shocks that deaden us
to any intermediation of the two. Only in the "silence" of
that visionary remove from the "burning" and the
"parching" of "breathing human passion" are we capable
of being ideally alive to the "astonishing gift of being."
The urn — indeed, Keats’s ode — thus speaks to us
agapeically, in a "silent" voice that calls to us from a
realm that transcends "our differentiation of the good
and evil" (Desmond 538).

The oracular statement at the close of the poem "gives

a voice to the silent" vessel, as to an "elemental thing"
(Desmond) a thing that in its enigmatic character "asks"
the beholder’s "gift" of voice, a thing that climactically
offers itself "in a pact of speaking" (460). But as the urn
speaks, even in the viewer’s intermediated voice, the
latter himself exists poised — as may we in relation to
our lifeworld as transformed by the Werksein of Keats’s
ode — in a more profound silence, one described by
Martin Buber as a silence toward the Du, the silence of
all tongues, the taciturn waiting in the unformed,
undifferentiated, prelinguistic word [that] leaves the Du
free and stands together with it in reserve where the
spirit does not manifest itself but is. (I and Thou 89).