John keats
The artist
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Text Analysis
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John Keats (1795-1821)
• Life and works
• Productive Years
(1817-1821)
• Illness and Death
(1820-1821)
• The contradictions of
art
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
Analysis
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Life and works
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John Keats was born near London on October 31st, 1795. The first
son of a stable-keeper, he had a sister and three brothers, one of
whom died in infancy. When John was eight years old, his father
was killed in an accident. In the same year his mother married again,
but a little later separated from her husband and took her family to
live with her mother. John attended a good school where he became
well acquainted with ancient and contemporary literature.
In 1810 his mother died of consumption, leaving the children to their
grandmother. The old lady put them under the care of two guardians,
to whom she made over a respectable amount of money for the
benefit of the orphans. Under the authority of the guardians, he was
taken from school to be an apprentice to a surgeon. In 1814, before
completion of his apprenticeship, John left his master after a quarrel,
becoming a hospital student in London.
Under the guidance of his friend Cowden Clarke he devoted himself
increasingly to literature. In 1814 Keats finally sacrificed his medical
ambitions to a literary life.
He soon got acquainted with celebrated artists of his time, like Leigh
Hunt, Percy B. Shelley and Benjamin Robert Haydon.
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Productive Years (1817-1821)
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Keats travelled to the Isle of Wight on his own in spring of 1817. In the
late summer he went to Oxford together with a newly-made friend,
Benjamin Bailey. In the following winter, George Keats married and
emigrated to America, leaving the consumptuous brother Tom in
John's care.
Apart from helping Tom against consumption, Keats worked on his
poem "Endymion". Just before its publication, he went on a hiking tour
to Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown. First signs of his
own fatal disease forced him to return prematurely, where he found his
brother seriously ill and his poem harshly criticized. In December 1818
Tom Keats died. John moved to Hampstead Heath, were he lived in
the house of Charles Brown.
While in Scotland with Keats, Brown had lent his house to a Mrs
Brawne and her sixteen-year-old daughter Fanny. Since the ladies
were still living in London, Keats soon made their acquaintance and fell
in love with the beautiful, fashionable girl. Absorbed in love and poetry,
he exhausted himself mentally, and in autumn of 1819, he tried to gain
some distance from literature through an ordinary occupation.
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Illness and Death
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An unmistakeable sign of consumption in February 1820 however
broke all his plans for the future, marking the beginning of what he
called his "posthumous life". He could not enjoy the positive
resonance on the publication of the volume "Lamia, Isabella &c.",
including his most celebrated odes.
In the late summer of 1820, Keats was ordered by his doctors to
avoid the English winter and move to Italy. His friend Joseph Severn
accompanied him south - first to Naples, and then to Rome. His
health improved momentarily, only to collapse finally. Keats died in
Rome on the 23rd of February, 1821.
He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. On his desire, the
following lines were engraved on his tombstone: "Here lies one
whose name was writ in water."
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The contradictions of art
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Keats’s ideal of beauty and art is very complex and contains
many contradictions.
The figures on the urn are eternal, but there is a price to pay
for eternity:
immobility and lack of vitality.
Indeed the figures on the urn have been “frozen” in a state of
pure beauty – the girl will always be young and beautiful, the
leaves will never fall from the tree etc. – but at the same time
they are “ cold “, the people are made of marble.
Art therefore may be eternal but it also means death, and life
does decay but at the same time can be enjoyed.
This central ambiguity of the artwork is an example of Keats’s
notion of “negative capability” – the quality he thought
essential to the poet.
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The face of silence
Ode on a Grecian Urn
by John Keats
Analysis
II stanza
III stanza
IV stanza
V stanza
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I stanza
THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
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Analysis
I stanza
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• Summary
In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient
Grecian urn and addresses it.
He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in
time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of qiuetness,” the “fosterchild of silence and slow time.”
He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a
story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn
and asks what legend they depict and from where they
come.
He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men
pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story
could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
• II stanza
Analysis
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
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:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees 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,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
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Analysis
II stanza
• Here the speaker looks at another picture on the
urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying
with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The
speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodies
are sweeter than mortal melodies because they
are unaffected by time and they are the inspiration
of our personal imagination – the romantic concept of
the role of the artist – He tells the youth that, even
though he can never kiss his lover because he is
frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her
beauty will never fade – eternal youth associated with
eternal beauty .
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home
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Analysis
III stanza
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
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Analysis
III stanza
• In this stanza, the poet looks at the trees
surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they
will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the
piper because his songs will be “for ever new”,
and happy that the love of the boy and girl will last
forever, unlike mortal love – the immortality of art
– which lapses into “breathing human passion”
and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a
“burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
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Analysis
IV stanza
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 drest?
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
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
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home
Analysis
IV stanza
• Here, the speaker examines another picture on
the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a
heifer (young cow) to be sacrified.
• He wonders where they are going “To what green
altar, O mysterious priest…” and from where they
have come.
• He imagines their little town, empty of all its
citizens, and tells it that its street will “ for
evermore” be silent, for those who have left it,
frozen on the urn, will never return.
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home
Ode on a Grecian Urn
V stanza
Analysis
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
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.
Poems (published 1820)
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Analysis
V stanza
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In this final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn
itself, saying that it, like Eternity, “doth tease us out of
thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead,
the urn will remain, telling future generations (thus, historian)
its enigmatic lesson: Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The
speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and
the only thing it needs to know.
It also expresses the superiority of art over human passions.
If human life is a succession of “hungry generations, “ as the
speaker suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a separate and
self-contained world.” It can be “a friend to man,” as the
speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind of aesthetic
connection the speaker experiences with the urn is
ultimately insufficient to human life.
END
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Form
• Each of the five stanzas in "Grecian Urn" is ten lines
long, metered in a relatively precise iambic
pentameter, and divided into a two part rhyme
scheme, the last three lines of which are variable.
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Form
• In stanza one, lines seven through ten are
rhymed DCE;
• in stanza two, CED;
• in stanzas three and four, CDE;
• in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one.
As in other odes (especially "Autumn" and
"Melancholy"), the two-part rhyme scheme
(the first part made of AB rhymes, the
second of CDE rhymes) creates the sense
of a two-part thematic structure as well.
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Form
• As in other odes (especially "Autumn" and
"Melancholy"), the two-part rhyme scheme
(the first part made of AB rhymes, the
second of CDE rhymes) creates the sense
of a two-part thematic structure as well.
• The first four lines of each stanza roughly
define the subject of the stanza, and the
last six roughly explicate or develop it.
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Themes
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The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries
to the time of the speaker's viewing, exists outside of time in
the human senseit does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all
such concepts.
In the speaker's meditation, this creates an intriguing
paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the
urn:
They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen
in time.
They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is
"for ever young"), but neither can they have experience (the
youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the
procession can never return to their homes).
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• The speaker attempts three times to engage with
scenes carved into the urn;
• each time he asks different questions of it. In the first
stanza, he examines the picture of the "mad pursuit"
and wonders what actual story lies behind the
picture:
• "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?"
• Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos,
whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts,
and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of
questioning.
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In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the
piper playing to his lover beneath the trees.
Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the
figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them.
He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted
to the eternal newness of the piper's unheard song and the
eternally unchanging beauty of his lover.
He thinks that their love is "far above" all transient human
passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an
abatement of intensity--when passion is satisfied, all that
remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a "burning
forehead," and a "parching tongue.“
His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the
speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he
abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.
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• In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think
about the figures on the urn as though they were
experiencing human time, imagining that their
procession has an origin (the "little town") and a
destination (the "green altar").
• But all he can think is that the town will forever be
deserted:
• If these people have left their origin, they will never
return to it.
• In this sense he confronts head-on the limits of static
art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos
and wheres of the "real story" in the first stanza, it is
impossible ever to know the origin and the
destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.
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In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn
from his attempts to engage with the urn.
His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply
felt identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker
leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processional
purely on its own terms, thinking of the "little town" with a real
and generous feeling
He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal
change, with its ability to "tease" him "out of thought / As doth
eternity.“
If human life is a succession of "hungry generations," as the
speaker suggests in "Nightingale," the urn is a separate and
self-contained world.
It can be a "friend to man," as the speaker says, but it cannot
be mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker
experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life.
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Themes
• The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines
the urn speaking its message to mankind• "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," have proved
among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats
canon.
• After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase "Beauty
is truth, truth beauty," no one can say for sure
who "speaks" the conclusion, "that is all / Ye know
on earth, and all ye need to know.“
• It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it
could be the urn addressing mankind
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