On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” is an ekphrastic poem—a poem that describes a work of visual art. The work of visual art in question, as the title reveals, is the Elgin Marbles, a set of Greek sculptures that once decorated the Parthenon in Athens. The sculptures would have been over 2,000 years old when Keats saw them on display in London. However, the poem is an unusual take on the typical ekphrastic poem. In fact, the first two lines of the poem do not describe the sculptures at all, and may even catch the reader by surprise: “My spirit is too weak—mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep” (Lines 1-2). These opening lines signal that what really interests Keats is not the Elgin Marbles themselves but the emotion that seeing these ancient sculptures evokes in him.

Keats does not describe the sculptures in so many words. He does not say what scenes, mythological or mundane, are portrayed by the sculptures, does not explain what condition they are in, does not remark on their historical context or significance. His ekphrasis, rather, is introspective. “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” is first and foremost a poem about The Burden of Mortality, which the speaker says “[w]eighs heavily on [him] like unwilling sleep” (Line 2). The question of how the Elgin Marbles are connected to mortality is quickly answered: In the poem, it is precisely the sight of these famous sculptures that inspires Keats’s reflections, and the toil depicted by them that “tells [him] [he] must die” (Line 4). The Elgin Marbles are decorated with scenes from Greek mythology as well as from daily and religious life. One frieze shows young men riding their horses; a series of pediment reliefs depicts the mythical battle between the hybrid Centaurs and the northern Greek warriors known as the Lapiths; the statues of the east pediment show the gods sitting together. All this detail Keats would have seen on viewing the Elgin Marbles, and yet he refers to these scenes only allusively in the poem, as the “imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship” (Lines 3-4) or “Grecian grandeur” (Line 12).

It is precisely the awe the speaker feels when looking upon the Elgin Marbles that fuels his melancholy meditation on mortality. He imagines himself as “a sick eagle looking at the sky” (Line 5), an image redolent of the Romantic poet’s fascination with the natural world but also of the ancient Greeks whose material culture so captivates Keats in this poem (and in other poems, too). In Greek religion, art, and literature, the eagle was a popular symbol of Zeus and the power of the gods; Keats’s sick eagle, likened via simile to the speaker, who experiences the burden of mortality “like unwilling sleep” (Line 2), is reminiscent of an image from an ancient Greek poem by Pindar—a poem that Keats very well may have known—in which “on the sceptre of Zeus his eagle sleepeth, slackening his swift wings either side, the king of birds, […] and he in slumber heaveth his supple back […]” (Pindar. “Pythian Ode 1.” Translated by Ernest Myers, 2017).

The speaker marvels at the timelessness of the sculptures, which retain the power to evoke a strong emotional response, even many centuries after they were first created. But behind this feeling is “an undescribable feud” (Line 10), for even the Elgin Marbles are not immune to “the rude / Wasting of old time” (Lines 12-13). The sculptures themselves would have shown considerable signs of damage. Keats turns to natural imagery to describe the feeling: The beautiful ancient sculptures are like “a billowy main” (Line 13) or “[a] sun” (Line 14), but at the same time, they are no longer what they once were, they are but “a shadow of a magnitude” (Line 14). Time brings an end to all things, including even the supposedly great achievements of civilization that make the speaker feel so insignificant and weak. It is not only the speaker who must die: Even awe-inspiring works of classical art like the Elgin Marbles, which captivate many generations, must ultimately pass away, just as the classical eagle of Keats’s poem is shown “sick” (Line 5) and dying, a far cry from the ancient image of the eagle sitting proudly on the scepter of Zeus.

However, the speaker finds a certain comfort in this burden of mortality. He says that “’tis a gentle luxury to weep” (Line 6) for his fate. It is a bittersweet feeling that the speaker describes, for though the burden of mortality is a heavy one to bear, it is also brought upon by the experience of beauty and monumentality. Of course, even that which is monumental is not immortal—hence the “most dizzy pain” (Line 11) of realizing that the Elgin Marbles are as subject to time as anything else. Yet there is a sense that it is in such transience that the meaning of human existence lies—that it is not magnitude but the “shadow of a magnitude” (Line 14) that gives things their beauty. Perhaps it is even possible again that in the final line of his poem Keats was thinking of Pindar, who in a different poem described human beings as “a dream of shadows” (Pindar. “Pythian Ode 8.” Translated by Ernest Myers, 2017).