ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

-JOHN KEATS

John Keats is considered as a most typical representative of Romantic poetry.  He educated himself and drew inspiration from Spencer and Chapman.   “Ode on a Grecian Urn” depicts the relationship between art and life.  Keats must have seen the Elgin Marbles brought from Athens to the British Museum in 1816. But the poem was not inspired by any single urn.  Keats unifies in the Grecian urn all the beauty he has seen in a number of vases in the British Museum.

Keats begins his poem with an address to the Grecian urn which remains unbroken and safe from the ravages of time.  It is fresh and virgin life.  The silent centuries have been its guardians.  It’s a real parent, the artist is unknown.  The urn is addressed as a historian which has recorded a glimpse of the pastoral life with woodland scenes and flowers.   The poet is eager to know the interesting legends engraved around the urn.  He passes to direct consideration of the sculptured legends.  The repeated questions are they “deities of mortals”, “Men are gods” shifts to the central contrast between the unending happiness arrested in art and the brevity of happiness in mortal life.

The flute-players, the youth singing under the trees, the lovers about to kiss, the silent music of the marble pipes, the unuttered song and the love never reaches friction all this life of imaginary and imagination.  It is more real and more enviable than the human life of audible melody and tangible embraces.  The friction of human love never brings real happiness.  Pictured love has all the joys and none of the pangs that growth with actual human passion and satiety.  The ideal of fulfill men is contrasted with the actual experience of love’s sad satiety.

The second scene is a luminous friction of pagan ritual of sacrifice to a village deity.  By arresting the scene of the people sacrificial procession on the urn, the sculptor has maid the town permanently desolate.  Here the poet not only animates the marble but ghost beyond it to create the while landscape of rivers and sea source and city in which the craven figures can live and move.

The final stanza, the poet seeks to convey and understand the significant of the urns.  The beauty on the urn the epics is the beauty of human feelings captured in intense moments of life.  The urn celebrates those human attitudes which defeat time and mutability.  The moral of the urn is-generations of men purl and died but amid the changes and changes of this mortal life.  Beauty and flute are permanent forever.

As he is describes the scenes and figure painted on the urn and realize there beauty.  He is let reflect on human life in general and to the conclusion that there is nothing to be had from the world worth wide except beauty.  Hence the main theme of the poem was the supremacy of ideal art over nature because of its unchanging expression of perfection.  The preservation of beauty and love in enduring marble and the permanence of art with contrast the transistorizes of human life also form the theme of the poem.