18 pages • 36 minutes read
John KeatsOde on a Grecian Urn
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1820A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Urn
Many religions believe the body returns to dust as the spirit floats to God, and Greek urns are associated with death since they were often used to hold a deceased’s ashes. It is unknown if the urn of Keats’s poem was a burial urn, but like a solitary testament to life and death, the urn is silent, motionless, made of cold materials. The urn itself symbolizes the intertwining of life and death. In one scene, the urn’s etchings depict life and vitality. Images rooted in plant-life help shape the vitality of the moment as the speaker reflects that one scene on the urn tells “A flowery tale” (Line 4) and “leaf-ring’d legend” (Line 5). The poet imagines music filling the scene (Line 10), as “ye soft pipes, play on” (Line 12). The romantic scene conveys youth, one in which love and youth are undying: “For ever wilt though love, and she be fair!” (Line 20).
Contrasting this vibrant and joyful depiction of passionate youth, the second depiction portrays a priest preparing to sacrifice a cow. The poet opens the stanza with the question “Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” (Line 31), wondering about the anonymous, ancient villagers. Life and death further intertwine, since in the following line a “green altar” (Line 32) appears as well as a “mysterious priest” (Line 32). The poet sees the cow being led toward death (Line 33), much like humanity is led by time toward death. The etching grows ominous as the poet portrays the referenced geographic places as “emptied of this folk” (Line 37); the town’s emptiness parallels the emptiness of death, with a once thriving city emptied of its people and become nameless with the passing of time. The poem’s reliance on the concepts of art truth and beauty in its final lines, and how these intertwine with life and death throughout the poem, affirm for the speaker that beauty and truth are life’s foundations, enduring despite the temporality of life and the finality of death.
Music and Musicians
“Ode to a Grecian Urn” relies on musical imagery just as much as it relies on natural imagery. The line “What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” (Line 10) portrays music as a fully sensual experience. Some scholars interpret the “pipes and timbrels” (Line 10) as symbolic of poems and poetry. The speaker states “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on” (Lines 11-12). The sweet and unheard melodies can represent existing and not yet existing poems. They could also represent the poets memorialized and remembered by society and those who have yet to gain notoriety, and the beauty of the idealized potential of songs to come The “Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone” (Line 14) suggests that music, like mathematics, is considered a universal language. Music contrasts the mortality of humans with the immortality of the arts. Because music is timeless, it delays death, since the piper in the poem “canst not leave / thy song” (Line 16). When the speaker states the piper will continue “For ever piping songs for ever new” (Line 24), music stands for the imaginative possibilities of poetry, music, and art, which all combine in Keats’s poem.
The Ancient World
Keats’s poetry focused on the classical world, and he borrowed images and figures from antiquity for his poems. The urn, a relic from—and ultimately a representation of—the ancient world, is symbolic of the past. The speaker refers to the urn as a “historian” (Line 3), and the speaker perceives that only the urn can accurately tell the current generation about the ancient world, in turn communicating something about the universal nature of humanity. The ancient world manifests in other allusions, where people believed in multiple deities (Line 6), and ancient myths portrayed those gods interacting with humans. The speaker references Tempe (Line 7), which refers to the Vale of Tempe, a wooded valley in Eastern Greece, that is mentioned in Greek myth, notably the story of Eurydice and Orpheus. After referencing Tempe, the speaker alludes to the “dales of Arcady,” (Line 7) another location on the Greek peninsula. The urn also depicts a “green altar” (Line 32) and a “mysterious priest” (Line 32) as the priest leads a “heifer lowing at the skies” (33). The Ancient Greeks practiced animal sacrifice to communicate with the gods, heroes, and divine beings as a means of acquiring favors, protection, and help. The Ancient Greeks also practiced animal sacrifice to appease the deities, but this practice would have been seen as barbaric in 19th century England.
A representative of the ancient world, the urn’s existence represents a foundation which contrasts the natural world’s constant evolution. This parallels how the ancient world’s influence on society, religion, culture, and politics survived and spread to regions beyond its original borders. The speaker acknowledges this when stating the urn is a “silent form” (Line 44) which “dost tease us out of thought” (Line 44). Like the ancient world’s influence, the urn lasts “as doth eternity” (45) and “shalt remain” (Line 47) beyond the present generation. To conclude the poem, the speaker states “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’” (Lines 49-50). These final lines represent the ancient world; just as these two lines create the poem’s foundation, the ancient world and its pursuit for truth and philosophy created the foundation for Western societies and civilizations.
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