Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats:

Summary and Analysis

Ode on a Grecian Urn is an ode in which the speaker addresses to an engraved urn and
expresses his feelings and ideas about the experience of an imagined world of art, in contrast
to the reality of life, change and suffering. As an ode, it also has the unique features that Keats
himself established in his great odes.

John Keats (1795-1821)

Like Wordsworth’s nature, Keats' imagination is a means to understand life, a means of the
quest for truth and beauty, and the most reliable mode of experience and insight. The speaker
in the poem begins with reality- an ancient marble urn with engravings around it. He
addresses to the urn as a virgin bride of quietness. Time is slow for it. It is unchanging, perfect
and silent. The carving around the urn is expressing the story of the pilgrims, lovers and other
mysterious people recorded in times of gods and men on its outside. In the poet's imagination,
this world and people are made immortal and beautiful by art.

The Ode on a Grecian Urn expresses Keats's desire to belong to the realm of the eternal, the
permanent, perfect and the pleasurable, by establishing the means to approach that world of
his wish with the help of imagination. This ode is based on the tension between the 'ideal' and
the 'real'. Keats here idealizes a work of art as symbolizing the world of art which represents
the ideal world of his wish at an even deeper level. Then he experiences that world thus
created through imagination. In this poem, the two domains of the transient real and the
permanent ideal are the two facets of a deeper reality, the reality of imaginative experience.
The perfect, permanent and pleasurable world of the Urn, or that of the ideal, stands against
the destructive corrupting and painful effects of time. Keats’ fascination with the immortality of
art is duly counterbalanced with his awareness that it is lifeless. He neither supports gross
realism against truly imaginative art, nor does he wander in imagination alone. Life
compensates for the incompleteness of art and art compensates for the transience of life.

This ode which represents Keats mature vision consists of one of his central philosophical
doctrines of art itself: "Truth is Beauty and beauty truth". This famous maxim of Keats has an
intellectual basis of truth and also an emotional basis in beauty. Art may appeal to the
sensuousness or just the emotion of common people, but Keats' response extends from the
sensuous to the spiritual and from the passionate to the intellectual. Keats establishes a
balance between the real and the ideal, and art and life, and he finds the deepest of reality in
its balance. This ode gives a much importance to passion as to the idea of permanence. It is
not a lyric of the escape of a dying young man, unwilling to face bitter life into the realm of
everlasting happiness, but is a poem that embodies his mature understanding.

Keats indicates a contrast between the unchanging 'Urn' and temporal life in the very
beginning of the poem, but shifting to the other side from where he seems to prefer warm life
against the 'Cold Pastoral' where he finally resolves the duality in his doctrine of beauty and
truth. The Ode begins with an apostrophe to the urn: "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, /
Thou foster child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian". Keats addresses the urn as a
bride of quietness that is still unravished by time. That reminds us of life that is ever ravished
by time. The urn narrates its history in a silent but musical form. The silent music which Keats,
the addressee, feels he can hear is sweeter than the music of the human voice for it is
permanent. Unlike the temporal presentation of poetry which is prone to narrate the histories
of human being, the urn narrates a 'leaf-fringed legend' as if it were in space rather than in
time. The narration of the urn is itself liberated from time.

The worlds of reality and of imagination (or the real and the ideal) are explicitly contrasted in
this ode. But the permanence of art created out of imagination is a complement to the
temporary aspect of life. The creation of art and its realization in the contemplation of a higher
reality is a complement to the tragic awareness of temporal and painful life. Even the realities
are of two kinds: the reality of life or the objective reality and the reality of art or the world of
imagination. On the one hand, the lover in the world of the urn can never kiss his beloved as
one can in real life. But on the other hand, the lover on the urn has the privilege that the
beauty of his beloved can never fade away – as it happens in real life. This is why the poet is
seeking for the reality of life to be like that of the ideal art. The urn's immunity to the time could
not be an absolute ideal without the consummation of love. But the temporary satisfaction in
life only intensifies the awareness of transience by consummation itself. The act of imaginative
experience can bring together the unheard into a lasting melody. The poet who is emotionally
involved with the picture of passion also has the unifying vision that reconciles the real with the
ideal by idealizing the real.

In short, the permanently ideal world of the urn is presented in the urn that is lifeless thing
when seen from the viewpoint of real life. But the idea that comes under the domain of
imaginative reality is reconciled in the act of imaginative creation of the urn’s legend.
Therefore, the real life is complemented and enriched by this ideal. Thus, the two domains of
the real and the ideal coming into conflict as usual, ultimately reconcile to make a more
permanent truth as asserted in the 'truth and beauty' maxim. To sum up, in this ode, Keats
begins by idealizing, personifying, and immortalizing a real object. This ideal at first clashes
with the real but is reconciled by imagination and insight at the end. The poem begins with an
address to the Grecian urn and with almost envious amazement, but it ends with the
realization that beauty or ideal is also a dimension of the truth of the real; the beauty of
imaginative experience is a part of reality or truth and the knowledge of all truth is beautiful.

In the Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats tries to state that neither the beauty of nature nor the
beauty of art can console us for the miseries of life. The life of the figures on the urn
possesses the beauty; the significance, and the externality of art; and this, in the third stanza
explicitly, and throughout the poem implicitly, is contrasted with the transitory-ness, the
meaninglessness, and the unpoetic nature of actual life.

The Ode is constructed pictorially in spatial blocks, for the eyes to take in serially. Keats had a
genius for drawing vivid and concrete pictures mostly with a sensuous appeal. The whole of
this poem is remarkable for its pictorial effects. The passion of men and gods, and the
reluctance of maidens to be caught or seized is beautifully depicted.