Ode on a Grecian Urn

-John Keats(1795-1821)

John Keats was an extrodanary English romantic poet counting among names as
Lord Byron and Percy Shelly. His father inherited a livery stable in London after
being the stableman and married his employer’s daughter. Unfourtenatly his father
died from an accident with one of the horses and his mother left him with his brothers
and sister, at the age of 8 years old.
Despite his small height he was a boy full of energy and he had the luck to have as a
mentor Charles Cowden Clarke the son of the private school masterhead Reverend
John Clark where he studied in Enfield. His mentor led him into his passions of
writing and reading and introduced him to poets as big as Spanser’s waist.
After refusing the path of medicine, John Keats fell in love with the art of poetry and
under Leigh Hunt’s precious indications he begin to write only in 1816 in which
debuts with ‘On first looking into Chapman's Homer’.
As independent as he was ,he had been criticised by many people as Percy Shelly
which describes him as a ‘pale flower’ or Lord Byron which wrote about him that ‘ he
was snuffed out by an article’. Bloockwood’s magazine said that he was ‘ hopelessly
vulgar, a writer who wanted to be a poet of nature but thought, as a social-climbing,
undereducated Londoner ’. In other words the envy of the others made her presence
felt just because John Keats was promoted at first by Leigh Hunt. All of these
attacks were obviously motivated by political prejudice and class snobbery, things
well known by our beloved author.
He turned for a short time in the paths of journalism and began planning plays but
just in the favorure of money to help his ill brother who dies anyway of the same
disease as his mother: tuberculosis.After a short time he fell in love with the girl next
door Fanny Brawne , but he is suspected now by the same annoying disease that
killed his family.
In this agitated periods of time, Keats manages somehow to reach the point of his
career between Jan&Sept 1819 . In the masterpieces you can feel the fact that his
passion for poetry is so strong that he loses his own identity in a total indentification
with the object he reflects on. In the end he dies in 1821 in Rome . We can say that
he sacrificed himself in the name of poetry and I say this because I think that not so
many people can easly detached them, from their ego, and succeed to dedicate
themselves to art.

The Poem Summary

Ode on a Grecian Urn represents mostly the ideea of conservation in time.
Here, we can see that the poet has some kind of intimacy with the ’Urn’. He dosen’t
respect the URN, he does more than that, he admires her by naming her a bride. In
my opinion, in this line, this ideea of bride seems that is the ideea of pure and
inocence(‚unravished’). ‘Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness’
The urn receives life and it’s adopted by the Silence and Time, meaning that after
years and years of being celebrated and used in ceremonial ways maybe, the
quitteness settles on her and as time is passing by she becomes immortal.
By ‚Sylvan Historian’ the poet mean a forest storyteller ( from latin sylvan=forrest and
historian=history=historia/story/tale). As the speacker confesses the urn is a better
story teller than us. While we expres our art through words and rhymes, she tells us
stories in imagies.
Now the speacker take a closer look to the urn and he’s trying to figure a picture of
the whole action. While the image is framed by vegetal motifs like leaves and
flowers, he asks himself who are those people there, are they gods or humans?
Where are they? What are they doing and so long. With some other words while the
speacker is amazed by the whole new world that he discover, the poet tells us an
actually storry about men and gods living togheter and having fun.
Looks like the speaker changed the image of the urn and here we can find more
hearing pictures as melodies played by pipes.The songs are sweeter, and this
picture in our head looks so alive but they are frozen somehow somewhere over in
time.The song played in his head is actually better than anything he ever heard, that
means that he prefers the fantasy world rather than the real one.
On the third imagine of the urn we can see an animal sacrifice.Our ‘heifier’ is sent
now to the vegetal altar and she anticipates the ritual.The cow is an holy object ment
for the pleasures of gods.Also here we can imagine together with the speaker the
citadel which is peacefull and empty because everyone is coming to celebrate the
holy day.
At some point the speaker realises the ideea that we are going to die but the urn, the
story of the urn will live forever until the end of time.  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —
that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” : this is one of the best lines
of the poem where the urn itself talks: she talks about the beuty of time and as the
lovers painted on the urn, they are paused to touch and to continue to live that
moment as long as the urn will live.
Form and metre
Genre: ode.
Form: five stanzas of 10 lines
Meter: iambic pentameter.
Rhyme scheme: abab(cdecde)
The title
The word ode wasan’t a very used word until the romanticism appeared. Keats really
want to make sure that his audiance will understand that he will going to talk about
the ancient Greece. An ode is a short lyric poem that praises an individual, an
ideea, or an event .Ancient Greece was associated with learning and high culture,
but also with noble country living and a slow pace of life.So Keats praises the ideal
world of intelectuals and pace.

Themes

 Innocence
The urn is itself represents the innocent world. This world isn’t affected by the
change of time.
 Transience
Because the urn is frozen in time, the people on this urn don’t have to deal with
changes in their world. They live the same moment forever.
 Wisdom and knowledge