"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats

                                                             

'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is one of John Keats' most famous poems. He's a Romantic poet, and he wrote it in 1819 along with a bunch of other odes - he was kind of going through a little bit of an 'ode period.' They're known as his 'Great Odes of 1819.' Some of the other ones are 'Ode to a Nightingale,' 'Ode on Melancholy' and 'Ode on Indolence.' An ode is really just a kind of poem that usually focuses on a single person or a thing or an event, and it's kind of a tribute to that thing. So if you were in love with someone you could write them an ode. You could write an ode to Chipotle if you love burritos as much as I do. You can really write an ode to anything; you just have to really be 'once more with feeling' about it.

As in "Ode to a Nightingale," the poet wants to create a world of pure joy, but in this poem the idealized or fantasy world  is the life of the people on the urn. Keats sees them, simultaneously, as carved figures on the marble vase and live people in ancient Greece. Existing in a frozen or suspended time, they cannot move or change, nor can their feelings change, yet the unknown sculptor has succeeded in creating a sense of living passion and turbulent action. As in "Ode to a Nightingale," the real world of pain contrasts with the fantasy world of joy. Initially, this poem does not connect joy and pain.

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.

The overall sense, at least until the concluding stanza, suggests a feeling of pleasure, bliss, and eternity, rather than of death. At the end of the poem, though, Keats returns himself—and the reader—to reality by noting that the world is a “Cold Pastoral!" (l. 45). The eternity initially suggested by the urn exists only artistically; it does not reflect life, which is not eternal. This is the aesthetic conflict Keats provokes and also resolves in “Ode on a Grecian Urn." These paradoxes suggest that the urn discloses a particular truth to man. The urn’s truth lies in its beauty. Yet that truth is that perfect beauty can only exist as it does on the urn: captured, frozen, artificial. The beauty in this truth is that we do not have to strive for perfection, then, because it is not possible for mortals. It was only possible in a world populated by deities.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn", then, is a journey into the interior of Keats’s mind and the soul, as well as a disclosure of his most closely held beliefs. The poet uses an external object, a Grecian urn, to provoke the reader to contemplate the same aesthetic conflict which has preoccupied him and his fellow Romantic poets so deeply. This particular ode, among all of his oeuvre, shows Keats in a particularly contemplative state. His observations of the urn have provoked considerations about the nature of truth, beauty, and the function of art, all of which were the primary concerns of the Romantic poets. While the urn keeps the reader grounded in the realities of the outside world, the reader is a companion to the poet, who manipulates extreme emotions and ultimately concludes that life can only be captured by living it experientially, not trying to replicate it in art forms. The ultimate irony, of course, is that Keats uses one art form, the poem, and specifically, the ode, to achieve the transmission of this artistic philosophy.