Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn
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? 10
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
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! 20
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, not ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 30
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. 40
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
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. 50
________
Written May 1819. Just as the Ode to a Nightingale contrasts the world of natural beauty with the trials of human life, so this ode contrasts them with the world of art, typified in the unchanging figures on a Greek vase.
Keats did not take the urn of the poem from any particular known vase, but from several shown in engravings by Henry Moses and by F. and P. Piranesi, mixed perhaps with images from the Elgin Marbles and from French classical paintings. The permanence of this ideal work of art is set against the fever and impermanence of human endeavour. Wordsworth had anticipated this idea in a sonnet, which Keats perhaps read.
l. 7. - "Tempe" - A vale in Thessaly.
l. 7. - "Arcady" - Arcadia, a district of Greece.
ll. 11-12. - "Heard melodies...sweeter" - Even music is more permanent when one cannot hear the melodist who plays it, but when one receives a spiritual impression of it.
l. 28. - "breathing" - Living.
ll. 29-30. - Compare Ode to a Nightingale, stanza III.
l. 41. - "O Attic shape! Fair attitude! - not a clumsiness, but a deliberate use of sound in an almost Elizabethan way, in which Shakespeare would have delighted. Some critics have found weakness in this last stanza.
l. 41. - "brede" - embroidery, ornament.
l. 45. - "Cold Pastoral !" - cold, because carved in marble.
ll. 49-50. - Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
The message of the poem is contained in this message of the Urn to those who regard it.
This Platonic identification of truth with beauty was always close to Keats's thought, and appears not only in his letters but in his conversation. Severn quotes him as saying of Greek art and the spirit of the past that "It's an immortal youth, just as there is no Now or Then for the Holy Ghost."
In thre stress of this time of his life, this view of the essential truth of imagination speaking through the beauty of art struck Keats most forcibly, and gave rise to the almost proverbial expression with which the poem ends.
________
Come back to the table of contents
