Ode on a Grecian Urn

Personally, I gravitated to the formal style and the visual descriptions of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, written by John Keats. The word "Ode" in the title implies something of a lyric or musical quality, which indicates inspiration gained through a Muse. Being an art major, I can relate to Keats’s generalization that all things in art, poetry, or music are beautiful; yet, I found it comforting in his use of the word “cloy’d” in line 29. Just as candy can become too sweet, I enjoy the idea that a beautiful image can become over described, making it trite and unimaginative. I found the true beauty of this poem resides in its paradoxes, such as the unheard pipes. If no one is in the forest to hear a falling tree there is the question of it making sound, just like the music being made in the image on the vase can only be heard in one’s imagination.




While the idea of the muse is stereotypically a product of Ancient Greece, the writer of this poem has chosen an urn, but more importantly the images on this vase, as a inspiration for this poem. Firstly, Keats speaks on the fact that the Urn, in physical form, is beautiful, timeless, and has remained an “unravished bride of quietness.” Diverging from the vase itself, to what its imagery represents becomes the main focus of the poem. In statements such as “for ever young” in line 27, Keats seems to equate beauty with youth and love. Then, in fourth stanza, the speaker recognizes that the figures on the vase exist outside of time, and the actual streets from which they came are now silent. Finally, Keats ends with the urn itself actually existing outside of time, since in the fifth stanza he states that it will remain after this generation dies. This poem culminates in Keats’s quoted statement, “beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” in the last couplet of the last stanza. Although Keats makes the statement that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” he also seems as if he is mocking this exclamation.

None of the deities or muses that Keats’s speaks of can ever truly find love if they are depicted in the stages leading up to it. Herein lies the paradox. If all things that are beautiful are truth, and truth beauty, then how can beings, without full knowledge of truth or love, be beautiful? The reader can assert their own interpretations and understandings of the importance of change, but if nothing can progress or change, and is only stagnant, is it beautiful? As an example, the speaker suggests that unheard melodies are sweeter than ones that actually one can hear. The reader may understand this to mean that the unheard music produced by the figures on the urn, seems much more beautiful than anything that is true to life. Yet, in a negative tone, which is felt by 29 and 30, the speaker states the musician producing this unheard melody is permanently tethered to his instrument under a tree “leaving [his] heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d.” It is possible that the speaker is unsure of beauty. Since this vase represents unattainable beauty, the speaker may just simply be acknowledging that. Overall, the urn teaches us that all things considered beautiful, can also be ugly, since there is no permanent truth.