The Reality Behind “Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats”
One of the most distinctive poems of Romanticism, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” had a great impact in the literary world, especially with its last sentence. As English Literature class students, this poem by Keats took weeks to analyze, but in the end, it was worth it. So let’s take a closer look at what lies in the subtext of this poem, which has been translated many times across the world.
Before we start, who is John Keats?
Keats was the eldest of four brothers; he was born in London in 1795. It can be said that his childhood was a blend of agony. He started working for a surgeon after losing his father at the age of 8 and his mother at the age of 14. Although he included writing studies in most of his life, life was trying to keep him from literature in some way. His passion for poetry led him to literature, not allowing him to start a medical career at the age of 21. He was even quoted as saying in a quote: “I find that I cannot exist without poetry — without eternal poetry — half the day will not do — the whole of it — I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan — I had become all in a Tremble from not having written any thing of late — “.
The writer Leigh Hunt and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon shared the same atmosphere with Keats, so that he expanded his artistic circle more and more. It is possible to see the inspirations of John Milton, Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser in his works. Although he never avoided reflecting on his creativity for a moment, he lost his brother to tuberculosis in 1818 and returned to the gloomy years, and even the poems he wrote to Fanny Brawne, whom he fell in love with the same year, could not get him out of this situation, and his health condition got worse. He could not be cured of his lack of money, nor could he marry Fanny. He was 25 years old when he started to suffer from tuberculosis, and at the end, he lost his life in Italy that year. In the course of 25 years, he left behind three books in which he used poetic language and images professionally: Poems (1925); Endymion (1818); Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).
“Ode on A Grecian Urn”
From well-created metaphors to historical references; from depictions to the concept of time, most of the terms are quite intuitive, but still we maintain questioning. In the poem, Keats tries to fit almost the whole world into a stationary object while pointing out literary addresses. While doing this, he used the ekphrasis technique, which means “a poetic act that is generally used while describing an artwork that is more directly calls to the audience. In other words, using artwork as a medium. When we take a glance at the mentioned urn (the Greek vase), it carries symbols in each part of it into his poem like a movie scene. The poetry of Keats mainly focuses on the closeness of art, beauty, and reality to each other and how he personally integrated them. (By the way, Ode on a Grecian Urn was only one of the odes of Keats out of five : “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode on Indolence”, “Ode on Melancholy”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, and “Ode to Psyche”).
“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?”
Here Keats first began his poem with an address to someone: “You, the restless bride of silence, feed the child of slow-passing time and silence!” In fact, it is clear from the second line that he addresses the vase itself. This personification leads us to believe that he sees the vase as an adopted child from eternity because he himself constantly keeps asking the question, “What if the time stopped for a moment?” in the poem. Generally, in this work, pastoral beauty shows up because it symbolizes spring with the Greek terms Tempe and Arcadia.
In the last lines, he always starts with a question pattern. It implies that he is actually in the flow with us and curious about the story with us as well. There is a girl on the vase, and a man is chasing her. He emphasizes again who these are, and what this visible escape means. Later, when we see the depiction of musical instruments and happiness, we realize that this is actually a chasing game.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on”
The melodies heard here are actually thought of by everyone as an element of harmony, but those that are not heard, the figures playing those musical instruments on the vase and having fun, will never hear the songs, but we will always wonder and try to force in our minds what kind of composition it is. For this reason, Keats wrote that what we imagine many times is more beautiful than some tunes that we have heard but were doomed to disappear in time.
“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!”
The trees on this vase, which were considered little capsules of time, will never shed their leaves; spring will last forever; even though the lovers can’t kiss each other, their happiness will never fade because they will always continue to love each other. Time had stopped in these lines of Keats. Even today, someone would come to the museum to see the vase and depict those figures in their own way. Every single pattern and symbol on the vase was stuck in that moment.
“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.”
.
.
…
Human life was finite; new generations would come and pass, but every moment on the vase, he would pause and play it over and over again, embracing the correct or incorrect predictions of people before he could intervene. At the end, the author immortalizes his poem with the implied words, “Beauty is truth; truth is beauty; this is the only thing we know and need to know on Earth”. Keats, who identifies with the subject he depicts throughout the poem, suddenly takes himself out of the picture at the end of the poem and conveys his reality to the reader, so we get a chance to stay alone among all these lines and extract our own meaning.
In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, do you think art could really freeze the moment, or was everything doomed to disappear?
References:
https://englishhistory.net/keats/letters/j-h-reynolds-17-18-april-1817/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn
https://onceuponawrittenword.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/the-cost-of-a-grecian-urn/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Keats
