"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem by John Keats, first published in January 1819 (c.). Its inspiration is considered to be a visit by Keats to the exhibition of Greek artifacts accompanying the display of the "Elgin Marbles" at the British Museum. The poem captures aspects of Keats's idea of "Negative Capability", as the reader does not know who the figures are on the urn, what they are doing, or where they are going. Instead, the speaker revels in this mystery, as he does in the final couplet (mentioned below), which does not make immediate, ascertainable sense but continues to have poetic significance nonetheless. The ode ultimately deals with the complexity of art's relationship with real life. The poem begins:
- Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
- Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
and ends with the famous lines:
- 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
- Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
Due to uncertainty over where the punctuation is placed, it is impossible to know whether the last lines are spoken by the urn, or representative of the poet's view. Also, it may be that only "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is spoken, and the rest is the poet's comment. This has led to significant critical division over the meaning of the famous Ode. Because this ending couplet is in direct contrast to many of Keats' poems, for example "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or "Lamia", in which a man is deceived by a woman's beauty, literary critics have begun interpreting it in a new way. It is now believed that the narrator, representative of Keats, was criticizing the Urn, saying that all it will ever need to know is that beauty is truth and truth beauty. This is also a sign of jealousy as the narrator admires this simplicity just as he criticizes yet admires the characters on the urn, who will never achieve climax yet are forever passionate.
Style
The ode is an ancient form originally written for musical accompaniment. The word itself is of Greek origin, meaning "sung." While ode-writers from antiquity adhered to rigid patterns of strophe, anti strophe, and epode, the form by Keats's time had undergone enough transformation that it really represented a manner-rather than a set method for writing a certain type of lyric poetry. In general, the ode of the Romantic era is a poem of 30 to 200 lines that meditates progressively upon or directly addresses a single object or condition. In addition to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats wrote odes about the season of autumn and the song of a nightingale as well as about indolence, melancholy, and even the poet John Milton's hair. Keats's odes are characterized by an exalted and highly lyrical tone, and while they employ specific stanza forms and rhyme schemes, these can vary from ode to ode.
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