John Keats: 'Ode on a Grecian Uru'

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

John Keats: ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’

                                         I

                                    Though still unravish’d bride of quietness,

                                       Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

                                    Sylvan historian, who canst thou express

                                    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

                        5          What leaf-dring’d legend haunts about the shape

                                       Or deities or mortals, or of both,

                                         In Temple or the dailes of Arcady?

                                    What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

                                    What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?                                                                                                                    

10       What pipes and timbrels?  What wild ecstasy?

                                                                        II

                                     Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheared

                                       Are Sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

                                    Not to the sensual ear, but more endear’d,

                                    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

15.     Fair youth,  beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

                                    Thy song, nor ever can those tress be bare;

                                    Bold Lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,

                                    Though winning near the goal – yet do not grieve;

                                    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

20.     Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

                                                III

                                    Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed

                                      Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;

                                    And happy melodist, unwearied,

                                      Forever piping songs forever new;

25      More happy love! more happy, happy love!

                                    Forever warm and still to be enjoy ‘d,

                                       Forever panting, and forever young;

                                    All breathing human passion far above,

                                    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,

30     A burning forehead,  and a parching tongue

                                                IV

                                    Who  are these coming to the sacrifice?

                                    To what green altar, O mysterious priest

                                    Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

                                       And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?

35     What little town by river or sea shore,

                                    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

                                    Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

                                    And, little town, thy streets for evermore

                                    Will silent be, and not a soul to tell

40     Why thou art desolate can e’ er return

                                                V

                                    O Attic shape! Fair attitude! With breed

                                       Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

                                    With forest branches and the trodden weed;

                                       Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

                                    As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

                                    When old age shall this generation waste,

                                    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

                                    Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

                                       ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all

                                    ‘Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

POETS BACKGROUND

        On October 31, 1795, John Keats was born into the family of a livery-stable keeper in Moorfields, London.  He was educated at Clerke’s School, Enfield, where he was significantly encouraged and influenced in his formative years as a poet by the school’s proprietor, Mr. Clerke.  Having lost his parents by the time he was still a teenager, Keats was taken care of by a guardian, Richard Abbey, until he left school.  Keats was to become a surgeon, hence, he was apprenticed too an apothecary.  Though he passed his qualifying examinations, Keats’ passion for literature led him to abandon surgery.

     Because of his close association with Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, Keats was helped to publish two of his sonnets in May and December of 1816 editions of the ‘Examiner’. He got to know Percy Bysshe Shelley through his friends, Hazlitt and Hunt.  Shelley had a great interest in him and his poetry career, therefore, he greatly influenced his works.  Though his early published works received severe criticism from literary analysts and were a financial failure, Keats’ desire for writing never ceased.  He was always writing even at the terrible time of nursing his sick brother, Tom, who eventually died in 1818.  He was a sonneteer, a lyric poet, and also a romantic poet.  He wrote great odes among which are ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Ode to Autumn’, Ode to a Nightingale’, Ode to Psyche’ and Ode on Indolence’.

    Keats died at a very young age of twenty-four, but he was a literary  giant  who made his mark in the English poetry of his time.  He died in Rome in 1821 and wished that this epitaph be written on his tomb:  ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’.

 BACKGROUND TO THE POEM

This poem is written in the romantic tradition.  The Romantic Movement started in the late eighteenth century and lasted into the nineteenth century.  Romanticism emerged in a spirit of rebellion against the persistence of neo-classical writers on the dogma of reason.  The neo-classicists favoured rational discipline with emphasis on strict order and decorum in the arts; the romanticists opted for emotion and liberty in all its ramifications.

Romantic poetry recognized the inspirational power of nature; therefore, it held it in reverence.  For this reason, romantic poets meditated quietly on the beauty, the pleasure, and the grandeur of nature.  Romantic poetry was practiced on the recognition of the individual’s liberty to express his passion emotion, and imagination freely even when it is against reality.  This is why romantic poetry is called escapist poetry.

In this poem, Keats imagines an urn of the Grecian type (belonging to/from Greece which is decorated with pictorial figures and events.  In his imagination, he tries to interpret the pictorial decoration on the urn as a way of making comments on life and how he sees it.  Because it is an ode, the poem is evocative, and because it is a romantic poem, it is fantastic.

The first three stanzas of the poem apparently give the poet’s interpretation of what is depicted on one side of the urn.  Here, he likens the urn to an innocent, beautiful young lady who has long been preserved.  He now sees the picture on it as telling the story of an attempt by young men and gods to woo young innocent girls who seem to refuse being loved.  He sees the young men (stanza II) as playing a pipe and singing lover’s song in order to win the heart of the girl who is not responding.  The poet encourages him not to give up as anything worthwhile is not cheaply gotten.  He praises the music of the young lover as being more than the ordinary music.  In stanza IV, Keats turns his attention to another side of the urn which has the picture of a priest leading a cow to an altar for sacrifice.  But the town left behind by the priest is desolate; this causes Keats to reflect deeply on the picture and to lament the desolation because since the picture is permanent, the desolation will remain permanent.  Stanza V is a general comment on the urn as a work of art; that works of art will outlive many generations of men.  This can be simply summarized as; ‘art is long; life is short’.

  THEME

The two major themes expressed in this poem are:

(a)   That it is not good to entertain despondency because with persistent determination, nothing is unachievable.  This manifests in the lover’s story (stanzas I-III).

(b)  That life is short; but art is long.  This is shown in the permanence of the urn and the pictures depicted on it.

             When old age shall this generation waste,

              Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe…

                                    (Lines 46 and 47)

FORM AND STRUCTURE

This poem is divided into five stanzas, and each stanza has ten lines.  Unlike the other poems in this selection, Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn’ does not operated the straight margin form, rather it uses a kind of zig-zag indented margin.  The poem exhibits a conspicuous contraction of words as manifest in: unravish’d leaf-fring’d legend, endear’d enjoy‘d, cloy’d, lead’st, e’er, and say’st.  The lexical choice of the poem has a strong leaning towards the classical usage as shown in the use of words such as ‘canst, ‘adieu’, ‘thou’, ‘ye’. ‘dost’, ‘doth’, ‘morn’ and ‘drest’.

Because of its romantic tradition, the poem romanticizes nature in a language that is highly elevated, and a style that cleverly blends power description, rhythm, classical allusion, and imagery.  As characteristic of romantic poetry, the poem hunts at innocence, solitude, and rusticity of pastoral life as it makes very frequent   reference to items or phenomena in nature. ‘flowery tale’. Leaf-fring’d legend, ‘happy boughs’, ‘spring adieu’, ‘by river or sea shore,’ forest branches and trodden weed.  All these constitute the imagery used by Keats to freely express his deep fantasy and to make the general comment on human life as ephemeral.

This poem has both rhythm and rhyme.  The rhythm is achieved through the patterned metric movement of the verses, and this enhances the Lyricism of the poem.  Each of the five stanzas has some kind of alternate rhyme; however, the first four lines of every stanza of the poem rhyme abab.  The whole poem can structurally be divided into three in terms of the development of the storyline. The first three stanzas tell the story of efforts being made by a man to secure the love of an innocent girl, and his near-despondency.  Stanza four is a reflection on another side of the urn and it describes the leaving of a desolate little town by a priest who heads for an altar of sacrifice with a decorated cow. Stanza five is a general remark on the fact that a piece of art work will outlive not only the artist who made it, but generations of men.

  LANGUAGE AND TEOHNIQUE

The language of this poem is highly elevated and figurative.  It is not within the reach of anyone who does not understand the principles guiding the writing of romantic poetry, the use of imagery and basic things about the classical period because the poem is solidly composed from a blend of all these.  Because it is an ode, the poem directly addresses the urn and the individuals who appear in the pictorial decoration on it, therefore, direct questions are asked and imperative statements are made. Since the poem is a descriptive interpretation of the pictorial decoration on a Grecian urn, the descriptive technique is used.  Among the figures of speech used are. 

                       

Alliteration:            lines    2, 3, 8-10, 12, 16, 17, 21, 25, 35, 42, and 49

                        Personification:     lines         14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, etc.

                        Simile:                       lines          44- 45

                        Metaphor:               lines         1, 2, 22, 32 etc.

                        Apostrophe:             lines       1, 2, 12, 15-20,38-40

                        Rhetorical question:    lines      5-7, 8, 9, 31, 32-34, 35-37

                        Paradox:                         lines   11-12

                        Repetition:                    lines   16, 21, 24-27, and 49

                        Structural repetition:   is also used here for both emphasis and

                                                               balance in sentence pattern.  Examples of this

                                                                are lines 27 and 30.

                      Classical allusion:           line 7

            In the main, Keats uses this poem to reflect on the beauty of a piece of art work and compares it enduring quality to the transiency of man’s life.  Circumstances surrounding Keats probably led him to reflect on the shortness of human life, both his parents died while he was still very young, and his brother, Tom, also died about the time he was writing this poem.  Keats himself was suffering from tuberculosis, a disease which was seemingly incurable then.  He died shortly after he wrote this poem.

REVISION QUESTIONS

1.       Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is a romantic poem.  Discuss.

2.       Comment on the language and structure of this poem.

3.       What is an ode and how does this poem qualify to be one?

4.       Write out the rhyme pattern of each of the five stanzas.

5.       What structural and rhetorical devices are used by Keats in ‘Ode on a

  Grecian Urn that makes the poem to have high literary quality?

By Eguriase  S.  M.  Okaka.