THE GRECIAN URN:
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPROACH
By JAMES DICKIE, M.A., Len.L, Ph.D.
LECTURER IN ISLAMIC STUDIES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LANCASTER
r I ""HE need for an unashamedly pragmatic approach to Keats's
-L poem would be difficult to overstress in view of the misconceptions which prevail in respect of the source of his inspiration.
More than one writer assumes in spite of the explicit statement
of the fourth stanza that a pottery urn is meant.1 And
perhaps more dangerous, because less conspicuously wrong, are
the sentimentalists who would see in the Elgin Marbles, and particularly in the Parthenon frieze, the immediate source of the
poet's inspiration. Essential to the full understanding of the
Ode on a Grecian Urn is some acquaintance with the creative
processes of Keats's mind and, in particular, his habit of synthesizing an image out of a blurred agglomeration of impressions
received from disparate sources : for the sensuous basis of his
art depended largely on visual experiences of an uncommon,
indeed almost pathological intensity. Perhaps the two most conspicuous examples of this mental process are the " Titian"
description from the Epistle to Reynolds (19-25) and the Bacchus
interlude from Endymion (IV. 193-272). It will be seen that the
" Titian " description falls clearly into two portions, four lines
being given to the sacrifice and three to the boat:
Some Titian colours touch'd into real life,
The Sacrifice goes on ; the pontiff knife
Gleams in the Sun, the milk-white heifer lows ;
The pipes go shrilly, the libation flows ;
A white sail shows above the green-head cliff,
Moves round the point, and throws her anchor stiff;
The mariners join hymn with those on land.
Colvin2 identifies correctly the first scene : " There exists no such
picture of a sacrifice by Titian, and what Keats was thinking of,
I feel sure, was the noble ' Sacrifice to Apollo ' by Claude from
the Leigh Court collection, which he had seen at the British
^.g., Hough, The Romantic Poets (London, 1963), p. 176.
2 John Keats : His Life and Poetry : His Friends, Critics and After-Fame
(London, 1917), p. 264.
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Institution in 1816."1 We shall have cause to examine this painting in greater detail afterward, but here must limit ourselves to
indicating the verbal parallel with the Grecian Urn : " the milkwhite heifer lows ". The second part of the description, which
criticism has so far failed to recognize, could not, however, be
more unmistakably Titian and justifies Keats's own attribution.
It is none other than the famous " Bacchanal " from the Prado,
an engraving of which Keats must have seen in Haydon's studio.
In this picture a white-sailed boat appears round a bluff in the
background while in the foreground two of the participants can
be seen singing.2
Much more complex is the passage from Endymion describing
Bacchus's triumphal return from India :
Within his car, aloft, young Bacchus stood
Trifling his ivy-dart, in dancing mood,
With sidelong laughing ;
And little rills of crimson wine imbrued
His plump white arms, and shoulders, enough white
For Venus' pearly bite :
And near him rode Silenus on his ass,
Pelted with flowers as he on did pass
Tipsily quaffing.
Over wide streams and mountains great we went,
And, save when Bacchus kept his ivy tent,
Onward the tiger and the leopard pants,
With Asian elephants :
Onward these myriads with song and dance,
With zebras striped, and sleek Arabians' prance,
Web-footed alligators, crocodiles,
Bearing upon their scaly backs, in files,
Plump infant laughers mimicking the coil
Of seamen, and stout galley-rowers' toil.
Superficial criticism, beginning with Houghton, has been at work
1 Now at Anglesey Abbey, Cambs. The title as given on the frame is " Priests
sacrificing to Apollo ". Colvin illustrates the painting from Woollett's unsatisfactory engraving, where the image appears in reverse with the altar at the left
instead of at the right of the composition. One of the so-called Altieri Claudes,
this work belonged first to Beckford and then to R. A. Davis before entering the
collection of P. J. Miles at Leigh Court near Bristol.
2 The painting depicts the arrival of Bacchus, who is on board the boat, at the
island of Andros where he finds the inhabitants happily inebriated. The artist
was inspired by Philostratus's description of the incident in his Imagines, 1. 24.
Hence Titian's picture is also known as The Andrii.
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here almost as much as on the Grecian Urn. Titian's " Bacchus
and Ariadne MI in the National Gallery, which was seen by Keats
in 1816 when he and Severn visited the exhibition already referred to, is frequently spoken of as if it were the sole inspiration
of the passage. This painting had already emerged with considerable precision in Sleep and Poetry (334-6) :
and the swift bound
Of Bacchus from his chariot, when his eye
Made Ariadne's cheek look blushingly.
But in the Titian there are no elephants, nor do the leopards pant
onward, rather they stand still, nor is Bacchus either " Within
his car " or " Trifling his ivy-dart ", whereas all these figure in
the Woburn Abbey sarcophagus2 with which the baroque confusion of Keats's description well accords. It is not known where
this relief was housed between its purchase in Italy in 1815 and
its installation in the sculpture gallery at Woburn five years later.
Colvin argues that Keats must have had access to it in the company of Haydon sometime between 1816 and 1817. Many of
the details tigers, zebras and Arab steeds cannot be accounted
for on the basis of the sarcophagus, and one is tempted to believe that Keats supplied them from the resources of his own
exuberant imagination ; but the rowing infants mounted on
crocodiles form too precise an image not to have come from
somewhere, and Colvin is probably right in thinking they
" may have been drawn from the plinth of the famous ancient recumbent statue of the Nile,3 and the pigmy rowers, in all likelihood,
from certain reliefs which Keats will have noticed in the Townley
[sic] collection at the British Museum . . .".4 Probably various
sources were laid under contribution : the tigers could well have
1 Companion painting to the " Baccanal ", both (together with " The Offering
to Venus ") having been commissioned of Titian by Alfonso d'Este to decorate his
2 See Colvin, op. cit. pi. 5.
study in the castle of Ferrara.
3 Now in the Vatican Museum. Colvin here is somewhat less than accurate:
the infants do not figure on the plinth unless by this he means standing on it
but form part of the sculptural composition proper. Neither here nor on the
companion statue of the Tiber still in the Louvre (both works were found on the
site of the Temple of Isis in Rome) can the infants properly be described as
engaged in nautical tasks (coil, which Keats got from Shakespeare, is not perhaps
the best word in the context). No relief in the Towneley Collection answers to
this description; but both statues are represented in the Musee Napol&n (v. infra,
4 0P. cit. PP. 231-2.
p 104), iv, pis. 59,60.
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come from Lempriere's article on Bacchus, while the Silenus
image certainly came from Sandys's Ovid (Met., IV, 30-31):
Whilst old Sylenus, reeling still, doth hollow :
Who weakly hangs, upon his tardie Asse.
We have gone into this passage from Endymion in what may
seem more than necessary detail, but it, perhaps better than any
other, illustrates Keats's method. Everything is grist to the
Muse's mill; and these passages not only afford an insight into
the nature of the poet's creative processes but serve to illustrate
the almost obsessional grip which sacrificial and bacchanalian
scenes had on his imagination. It would be fascinating, if irrelevant, to pursue this further. Thus for instance, the image of
magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn
may combine recollections of Claude's picture " The Enchanted Castle "J with Keats's own view of Windermere from
Wordsworth's parlour-window at Rydal Mount, referred to in
his letter to Tom from Keswick on 29 June 1818 (" his parlor
window looks directly down Winandermere ") and again in the
journal-letter to the George Keatses on 24 October (" the window
opening on Winander mere "). Indeed the same work of art or
event in Keats's experience can emerge several times in the course
of his career before its inspirational potential is exhausted.
The Grecian Urn of the ode is not the only one of its kind in
the Keats corpus and other allusions to such works of art could
profitably be considered for the light they may throw on the ode.
The most significant is the reference in the Ode on Indolence :
One morn before me were three figures seen,
With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced ;
And one behind the other stepp'd serene,
In placid sandals, and in white robes graced ;
They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side ;
They came again ; as when the urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen shades return.
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.
1 This painting had been meticulously described under its own title in the
Epistle to Reynolds, 11. 26-54; that is, immediately following the " Titian "
description devoted to the other Claude, Keats having seen both works at the
exhibition already referred to above.
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This passage is crucial in several respects. Firstly, the urn
is unambiguously marble ; next, the colloquially direct " When
shifted round to see the other side " anticipates the way in
which the urn is examined in the greater ode; lastly, Keats,
it appears, is intrigued by urns precisely because their sculptural
qualities differ from those of the Elgin Marbles (" Phidian lore ").1
The female figures in this weird phantasmagoria are identified in
the third stanza as Love, Ambition and Poetry. In the last
stanza the poet exhorts them to
be once more
In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn.
The identification of the " dreamy urn " presents little difficulty.
In a journal-letter to George Keats dated 19 March 1819 the
poet wrote : " Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any
alertness of countenance as they pass by me ; they seem rather
like figures on a Greek vase a Man and two women who no one
but myself could distinguish in their disguisement." No one
but himself could, indeed ! Not only have the " Man and two
women " become three females in the ode, but even in the letter
he has taken poetic licence by conferring on them quite arbitrary
identities. The present writer remembers the shock he received
when, during a visit to the National Museum in Naples, whilst
looking for nothing in particular, he was suddenly confronted
with the urn from the Ode on Indolence. Keats, however, never
saw it in the flesh. He knew it from Piranesi's Vasi, candelabri,
cippi2 where the engraving (I, pi. 33) shows two draped female
figures with hands joined and faces in profile following a similarly
dressed Dionysus : precisely the scene described in the opening
lines of the ode a stately, albeit Bacchic, composition as far removed from the dynamism of the thiasus portrayed on the Grecian
Urn as the temper of the Ode on Indolence is from its greater
counterpart. Having essayed the vase theme already, Keats was
now prepared to embark on a more ambitious treatment of the
subject, using for this purpose not a single urn, as had sufficed to
1 Professor Corbett of University College, London, makes the interesting suggestion that Keats was here " unconsciously thinking of a clay vase, which you can
turn easily by hand, unlike marble " (personal communication).
2 Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcofagi, tripodi, lucerne, ed ornamenti antichi disegnati
ed indsi dal cav. Gio. Batt. Piranesi publicati I'anno MDCCLXXHX, Rome, 1778.
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portray indolence, but a composite image conflated from several
sources such as was required to render the complexity of thought
and emotion in the poem he intended.
Keats's other allusions to urns need not detain us long. With
the reference in The Fall ofHyperion (I. 55-56) we shall be dealing
presently, whilst the tremendous image in Endymion (I. 32)
" as silent as a consecrated urn ", can only refer to a cinerarium
consecrated to a religious purpose inasmuch as it holds the remains of the dead, and has therefore no connection with the kind
of urn which concerns us here. A Concordance to the Poems of
John Keats1 lists six other references to urns which, though of
value in that they confirm Keats's preoccupation with the subject, cannot help us in the present search.
Indeed some account of the kind of urn which was present in
Keats's mind may not be out of place at this point. Any
modern reader approaching the ode for the first time might
reasonably assume from the title that it concerns one of the Attic
red- or black-figured vases which abound in museums : nothing
of the kind, as " brede/Of marble men and maidens " makes
abundantly plain. The poem has to do with a sculptured urn of
marble,2 in no sense functional like the praters and lefyythoi of
Attica, but of a purely decorative character intended to ornament
the gardens and atria of Roman patrician houses. A good idea
of the original setting of these urns can be had from plate 19 of
Stevens's Restorations of Classical Buildings. 3 The decorative
value was concentrated on the frieze, which interprets a
single theme, frequently a mythological incident but more
1 The Carnegie Institute of Washington (Publication no. 208), Washington, 1917.
2 This is why, of course, the pastoral is cold, marble being exceedingly cool to
the touch. Exclusively metaphorical interpretation of this adjective has been
responsible for more than one false evaluation of the final stanza. The affected
" brede ", meaning embroidery (Keats had it from Collins's Ode to Evening),
hence decoration, may form a pun (Keats shared the Regency predilection for
paronomasia most of it bad) with " breed ". See Kenneth Burke, " Symbolic
Action in a Poem by Keats," Accent, Autumn 1943, pp. 30-42. But such a pun
seems too bad even for Keats, and as " overwrought " which Burke suggests
might mean excited taken in its normal connotation produces a mixed metaphor,
I feel obliged to reject Burke's thesis.
3 Princeton, 1955. Reproduced in F. E. Brown, Roman Architecture (New
York and London, 1961), pi. 90.
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often a thiasus as in the case of sarcophagi belonging to the
same period.1 The figures can be sculpted in either high or low
relief, whilst the vases themselves enjoy a variety of forms. The
shallow, extremely wide-necked type (a kind of gigantic cylix) is
best exemplified by the famous vase in the conservatory at
Warwick Castle, which, like the urn of the Indolence ode, was
found in the course of excavations in Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli.
A contrasting type of ovoid shape (based on the amphora) is represented by the urn in the Towneley Collection at the British
Museum ; whilst the medium and most-popular kind, familiar
to us from innumerable gardens urns, is a marble version of the
crater, the enormous vessel of pottery used for mixing wine with
water. A typical example is the famous Medici Vase at the
Uffizi Gallery. Many of these urns date from the reign of
Augustus ; indeed this reign and that of the great connoisseur
Hadrian furnish two approximate termini ad quern for the manufacture of these neo-Attic shapes. Much has been written to the
effect that Keats's title is a misnomer, but it was not misleading
to his contemporaries who always referred to the pottery vessels
as " Etruscan " urns. It is evident from the Ode on Indolence.
that Keats, notwithstanding the imperfect archaeological knowledge of the time, was sensible of the difference between the
decadent Hellenistic art of the urns and the sculpture of Periclean
Athens ; nor was he immune against the seductive beauty of the decadence. Whether these vases were as virginally white as they are
today is a matter for conjecture. Much of Graeco-Roman sculpture was coloured, and one such vase as we have been discussing,
now in the Signet Library at Edinburgh, has recently been stained
in the Etruscan shades of black and terra-cotta, producing a
peculiarly vivid and beautiful effect wholly at variance with the
coldness of surviving classical sculpture. Theocritus describes a
typical vase in his First Idyll, although pretending, as a rustic
1 Lessing's thesis in Wie die Alien den Tod gebildet, that death was thought of
as sleep, although argued on the basis of works of ancient art, is flatly contradicted
by numerous sarcophagi showing Dionysus awakening the sleeping Ariadne to
(eternal) life as well as by those depicting bacchanals. Rather than sleep, death
would seem to have been conceived of in dynamic, even orgiastic terms. Cf.
Turcan (Robert), Les Sarcopahges Remains a Representations Dionysiaques. Essai de
chronologic et d'histoire religieuse (Paris, 1966), passim.
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affectation, that it is carved from wood; he delineates a
complex mythological frieze and lays emphasis on two floral
motifs, vine and acanthus :
And I will give thee a deep cup, washed over with sweet wax, two handled,
and newly fashioned, still fragrant from the knife. Along the lips trails ivy, ivy
dotted with its golden clusters, and along it winds the tendril glorying in its
golden fruit.... And every way about the cup is spread the pliant acanthus.1
The urn of the great ode features two scenes of diametrically
opposed character : one Dionysiac in the most literal sense of
the term and the other Apollonian.2 We are to assume that the
poet turns the urn round between stanzas 3 and 4, and the scene
he finds on the other side resolves the strains and tensions generated by the first, revealing a work in which classical art perfects
its wholeness of vision. An analysis of the first side shows ten
descriptive phrases grouped into three or four concrete pictures :
" struggle to escape ", " pipes and timbrels ", " wild ecstasy ",
" Fair youth ", " Bold lover ", " happy, happy boughs ", and
" happy melodist ". The composition on the second side is
much less complex : " these coming to the sacrifice ", green
altar ", " mysterious priest ", and " heifer lowing at the skies ".
The juxtaposition of two such disparate groups on an urn is
almost unprecedented and cannot be allowed to pass without
explanation.
1 Gow's trans. Theocritus. Edited with a translation and commentary (Cambridge,
1955), i. 7-9.
2 The Dionysus cult was Greek in origin and to this degree the Urn is definitely Grecian. The cult was considered a danger to society and its liturgical
expression the bacchanal was banned by decree (De Bacchanalibus) of the
Roman Senate as early as 186 B.C., but as Jose Pijoan (Summa Artis, Madrid,
1945, v. 207) neatly observes : " The bacchantes persecuted by the Senate took
refuge in the ateliers of the artists." Artistic treatments of the theme abound, the
earliest examples dating from the fourth century B.C. At the moment of ecstasy
the participants felt themselves identified with Zagreus-Dionysus and the resulting transport and delirium are precisely the impression which the poem succeeds so well in conveying. Through the consecutive transformations of urn and
poem the thiasus recovers in Keats the fluid dynamism that was its essence when
spontaneously enacted. For, despite the plastic qualities that dance and sculpture share, the urn is really more remote from its subject than the ode is. Can the
explanation be that the thiasus was, rather than dance, music the Dionysian art
par excellence or, does it lie in the mystery to which Pater alludes when he says,
" All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music " ?
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That Keats was an urn-addict is sufficiently apparent from
the quotations already cited, but were additional proof required,
it lies to hand in a drawing by the poet's own hand of the Sosibios
Vase1 in the Louvre. This drawing, now in the Keats-Shelley
Memorial House at Rome, though not of the urn which figures
in the ode, is nevertheless of transcendental importance in the
identification of the real urn. Until recently it was assumed that
Keats had copied it from the Musee Napoleon2 (II, pi. 22), but no
one had ever been able to explain how Keats came to omit the tympanum in the maenad's left hand. Mr. Noel Machin's discovery of
an engraving of the urn in Henry Moses's Collection3 (pi. 38) with
precisely this feature was announced4 as the solution to the entire
problem, for five plates further on in this book is an urn which,
prima facie, appears to have much in common with the ode. His
conclusions, however, rest on very insecure premises, as a close
scrutiny reveals several discrepancies between Moses's version of
the Sosibios Vase and Keats's. First, Moses shows a double
moulding encircling the shoulders of the urn, but in both Keats's
drawing and the Musee Napoleon the band is triple and the representation of the moulding crude, a mere criss-cross pattern.
A glance at the frieze makes evident that Moses's maenad (on
whom Mr. Machin's argument depends) differs altogether in the
folds of her dress, particularly the sleeves, from Keats's rendering,
which does, however, correspond in this respect to the Musee
Napoleon. In fact, one is obliged to conclude that Keats's
1 This piece of sculpture, of indifferent merit, is called after Sosibios of
Athens whose signature it bears.
2 Les Monumen[t]s antiques du Musee Napolson, dessines et graves par Thomas
Piroli, avec une explication par Mr. Louis Petit Radel, Publics par F. et P. Piranesi,
4 vok, Paris, 1804-6.
3 A Collection of Antique Vases, Altars, Tripods, Candelabra, Sarcophagi, etc.,
from various museums and collections engraved in 150 plates, London, 1814.
4 The Observer colour supplement, 28 February 1965. Edmund Blunden had
already envisaged this possibility in 1928 when he wrote, a propos of the Grecian
Um : " An investigation might repay the trouble, if to gaze on Mr. Moses
softly-shaded prints should turn out to be trouble " (Leigh Hunt's " Examiner
examined, reprinted Archon Books [New York], 1967, pp. 102-3.) A pleasure
rather, but in this case a dangerous one, and it is distressing to have to record
Robert Gittings's acquiescence in Mr. Machin's " discovery " (see John Keats
(London, 1968), p. 319).
PLATE I: THE SOSIBOS VASE
After the Musee Napoleon
Keats's Tracing
PLATE II.
(a)
(b)
(c)
MOSES'S VERSIONS OF (a) THE SOSIBOS, (b) THE 'NAPLES', (c) THE BORGHESE VASES.
PLATE III.
THE BORGHESE VASE (after Piranesi).
rrrrtrm'tnTtrt ;T rt i
PLATE IV.
(Ancient Marbles in the British Museum, i, pi. 7).
THE TOWNELEY VASE
PLATE V.
THE HOLLAND HOUSE VASE
(After Piranesi).
PLATE VI.
(Courtesy of the late Lord Fairhaven).
PRIESTS SACRIFICING TO APOLLO
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drawing differs from Moses's engraving in more respects that it
agrees with it. Three hypotheses are possible :
A. Keats copied from the Musee Napoleon but by an extraordinary coincidence left out the tympanum.
B. Keats copied from the Musee but consciously followed
Moses in leaving out the tympanum.
C. Keats copied from some third source as yet undiscovered.
We can safely dismiss A, but until the last hypothesis is eliminated
all that follows in this paper is of a purely provisional nature, for
the discovery of a third source could reveal along with the
original of Keats's drawing an urn unmistakably incorporating
on a single frieze all the elements contained in the first three
stanzas. Search, however, in the British Museum has failed to
uncover any other illustration of the Sosibios Vase of a date prior
to the composition of the ode in the spring of 1819.1 The decisive factor would appear to be whether Keats's drawing is a
tracing or merely a sketch. According to the curator of the
Keats-Shelley Memorial House the height of the vase on the
drawing measures 10 cm. 9 mm. from the plinth to the rim and
11 cm. 7 mm. including the handles, while the Musee Napoleon
engraving gives respectively 11 cm. and 12 cm. for these dimensions. This is close enough to prove that Keats traced it from
the Musee. Moses in any case acknowledges the latter work as
his source for this urn. All the evidence is therefore in favour
of hypothesis B.
From the second plate devoted to the Sosibios Vase in the
Musee Napoleon Keats must have seen how the artist combined
bacchanal and sacrifice on the same frieze, justifying his own use
of the same procedure when he came to compose the ode. On
the other hand, this need not have been necessary ; Keats may
have arbitrarily decided to complete the urn on the other side
1 Amongst the books which figured in Keats's own library Baldwin's Pantheon
and Potter's Antiquities of Greece afford no clue, but a mysterious Description des
Antiques (no author given) which was on the poet's bookshelves, although unidentifiable from any bibliography, presents a tantalizing mystery. For a time
it seemed as though the Galerie du Musee Napoleon (Paris, 1804-28) might contain
the missing link, but, on inspection, no one of its 11 volumes showed engravings
of the Sosibios or Borghese Vases.
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with a sacrifice. For the identification of the scenes displayed
on the Grecian Urn the " leaf-fring'd legend " provides the first
clue, directing us toward the famous Borghese Vase1 in the Louvre
with which Keats was familiar from the engraving in Piranesi's
Vasi, candelabri, dppi (pis. 108-9) where he had already seen the
urn of the Ode on Indolence? This urn, more conspicuously than
most, is girded by a continuous vine-bough pattern just below
the rim. If we turn our attention to the frieze, we recognize an
impressive number of the features distinguished on the first side :
*' pipes and timbrels " clearly refer to the flautist (who is also the
" happy melodist ") and to the maenad with the tympanum (the
use of the plural may also cover the other maenad with the
crotala) ; the " happy, happy boughs " are the interwined vine
branches identical with the leaves fringing the legend ; and the
" Fair youth beneath the trees " is none other than Bacchus, who
is listening to Ariadne singing to her own accompaniment on the
lyre. The song is his in the sense that it is being performed for
him. Finney,3 usually so accurate, went astray at this point,
thinking that the man on their right was singing; he is in fact
dancing, with his head thrown back and his body twisted in a
spiral so as to induce ecstasy. The rhetorical questions, " What
men or gods are these ? " and " What. . . legend of deities or
mortals, or of both .. . ? " probably refer to the presence of
Bacchus amidst his mortal worshippers. One further group in
the frieze remains to be noticed ; a satyr supporting Silenus who
stoops to retrieve a kantharos he has dropped. Later in this
year of 1819 this identical figure makes his appearance in The Fall
of Hyperion :
The cloudy swoon came on, and down I sank
Like a Silenus on an antique vase.
This subsequent and unmistakable allusion to a vase that can be
1 So called from its having formed part of the private collections of Prince
Borghese which Napoleon acquired for the Louvre. The urn was discovered in
the Gardens of Sallust in the sixteenth century. As it is carved from Pentelic
marble the possibility of an Athenian origin cannot be excluded.
2 Moses (op. cit. pi. 45) engraves the Borghese Vase not from the original
but from a cast which, though differing from that urn in the body, is identical
in the frieze.
3 The, Evolution of Keat's Poetry (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1936), ii. 639.
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none other than the Borghese, linked to the previous and equally
unmistakable allusion to another Piranesi illustration in the Ode
on Indolence, convinces me that the crucial role in the imagery of
stanzas I-III was played by Piranesi's plates 108-9 and that to
see in the Sosibios Vase tracing a clue leading to the final identification of the urn in Moses's Collection, the Musee or other
similar compilation is to invite fruitless labour.
The remaining features on the first side can be accounted for
from the Towneley Vase in the British Museum, found by Gavin
Hamilton during the excavations of Antoninus Pius's villa at
Monte Cagnuolo close to the ancient city of Lanuvium. This
vase,1 which Keats must have seen on numerous occasions, like
the Borghese Vase depicts a thiasus, but is altogether different in
treatment, the sculpture being less vigorous, while the draperies
are more diaphanous and even suggestively obscene. The " Bold
lover " and his none too reluctant partner can be easily be recognized ; and to the left of this pair takes place the " mad pursuit."
The sensual handsomeness of the man brandishing a thyrsus and
the coy flight of the bacchante are particularly striking. Whether
" maidens loath " refers to her plight, as also the " struggle to
escape ", cannot easily be determined inasmuch as these phrases
seem equally or more applicable to the maenad on the immediate
right of the flautist in the Borghese frieze.2
The second side of the vase presents as complete a contrast to
the first as can be imagined save in one respect only, the complexity of its sources. There is really no more than one concrete
picture on this side, but the evidence for its sources is far from
being of a conclusive nature. Here again either Piranesi or
Moses may have been laid under contribution, for both engravers
(Vast, candelabri, cippi, pi. 4 ; Collection, pi. 48) illustrate a vase
in which the genesis of the fourth stanza can be recognized. This,
a heavy and ornate urn, rich in the inconography of ancient sacrifice, but of the same (crater) type as the Borghese Vase, stood
1 Also illustrated by Moses (op. cit. pi. 47).
2 The urn in Moses's Collection (pi. 43), claimed by Mr. Machin to be Keats's
source, certainly features pipes and timbrels as well as the leaf-fringe and even
sports a tree, but only a very partial imagination could recognize the fair youth
in the naked boy neither singing nor listening, or see a bold lover in the nonchalant Bacchus.
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till recently in Holland House. 1 In contrast with the turbid
sensuality of the two vases we have just seen, this one exudes a
sense of hieratic gravity. According to Piranesi, it features a
suovetaurilia or combined sacrifice (offered to Mars) of a pig, an
ox and a sheep, although in the present case the latter protagonist
is missing. Amidst a crowded composition may be discerned
" these coming to the sacrifice ", the " mysterious priest ", an ox
and an altar. Keats is more literal here than could be realized from
reading the poem without reference to his source : the priest is
mysterious not simply because he is enigmatic but because he is
veiled. The " green altar " is frankly a puzzle. The tripodal
altar of this urn would certainly be green in colour, being made
of bronze ; or " green " may simply signify " pastoral ", located
on an open sward rather than on the steps of an urban temple.
More probable than either hypothesis is that the altar was bedecked. The trees on the vase contribute the required note of
rusticity. Even though Keats's dependence on his classical sources
was greater than is sometimes realized certain details, notably
" all her silken flanks with garlands dressed ",are evidently drawn
from his own imagination stimulated in this instance probably by
some literary source. Proof lies in the image's being a poetic
licence : only the horns were hung with garlands (serta) ; the
flanks bore a caparison (dorsuale) as a sign that the victim was
consecrated to a divinity.2 The literary source is more than
1 The present location of this urn is a mystery. Enquiries pursued at Holland
House, the British Museum and Lord Ilchester's Dorset estates have drawn a
blank in every case. The latest reference I have been able to find is in the Earl
of Ilchester's Chronicles of Holland House (London, 1937) where the urn is described as being in the " Inner Hall... by the windows ". I venture to quote
here from a letter from Mr. H. Bennett, Architect to the Greater London Council:
". .. it would appear that the vase in question was in the inner hall or staircase
just prior to the War ... As there was no trace of an urn, either whole or fragmentary, when the property came under the care of the Council, it must either
have been removed by Lord Ilchester or stolen after the building was damaged in
the War. Although the main staircase was damaged, the position occupied by the
vase as described above was not badly damaged and remained capable of use until
the demolition of the building."
It appears almost certain that the urn was sold or disposed of by the Earl of
Ilchester who died in 1959. His estate manager affirms that " the contents of
Holland House were distributed in a most haphazard way ". It is to be hoped
that the publication of this article may be instrumental in tracing the urn.
2 This is observable m the Claude (pi. V).
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109
likely to have been an article by Haydon describing one of
Raphael's cartoons at Hampton Court, published in The Examiner
in May, the month which witnessed the composition of the ode :
" The subject is the Lycaonians bringing a heifer to sacrifice to
Paul and Barnabas, believing them to be Mercury and Jupiter. . . .
In the centre is the white bull [sic], with gilt horns and a garland,
and without spot or blemish, stooping his head with the vacant
stare of an unconscious animal. . . ." This is remote indeed
from the " heifer lowing at the skies", apart even from the confusion in gender, but the very laxity of Haydon's language may
account for the imprecision of Keats's imagery, for in a footnote
Haydon enlarges on his theme: " They [the victims] were
adorned with fillets and ribbons (infulis et vittis) Liv. II, 54. and
crowns ; and their horns were gilt.... For example, an heifer
a year old, which had never been put to the yoke was most
grateful to the Gods. . . . The ornaments used in the time of
sacrifice were such as follows : . . .. The victims had the infula
and ribbons tied to their horns, the crowns and garlands upon
their necks."1 The repetition of the word heifer, the proper
meaning of which Haydon does not seem to have been aware of,
cannot account for the poet's choice of this term, which he had
already used in the poem previously referred to ; but the appearance of the article only a few days before the poem's composition
implies that this was the immediate stimulus for the image of
the garlanded flanks. But to return to the Holland House Vase :
the other side, which is not given by Piranesi and which it is
unlikely that Keats ever saw in Holland Park, has no bearing on
the ode.2 Nothing less Grecian could be imagined than this
urn : both the veiling of the celebrant and the musician (tibicen)
playing upon the tibia to drown any ill-omened sounds were
Roman innovations. The credit for having realized the
1 " On the Cartoon of the Sacrifice at Lystra", The Examiner, 2 April, 1819,
pp. 285-6. A letter in The Times Literary Supplement (9 July, 1938, pp. 465-6)
by J. R. Macgillivray draws attention to Haydon's article and its sequel on April 9,
whose possible bearing on Keats's stress on the permanence of the emotions
exhibited by the figures on the urn is brought out by Gittings (op. cit. pp. 318-21).
2 It can be seen in Downer, The Odes of Keats (Oxford, 1897), opposite p. 38.
This illustration and that opposite p. 50 show the urn in a more weather-beaten
condition than is apparent from Piranesi's engraving.
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importance of the Holland House Vase goes not to a literary
critic but to an archaeologist, A. S. Murray of the British Museum,
who already in 1888 had suggested that this was Keats's source.1
Fused with this vase in the poet's imagination were certain
details from a painting he had seen and whose impact on him
must have been considerable, namely, " Priests Sacrificing to
Apollo " by Claude Lorrain, an artist dear to his generation. As
already observed, this painting had been hung at the British
Institution three years previously, in 1816. Certain details of
stanza four fit the painting better than the urn. A sacrificial procession headed by a priest leading a victim can be seen entering
the composition from the right; this impression of undisclosed
depth combined with the typical Claude horizon has exactly the
same sense of perspective as the stanza communicates. Even
the " little town " can be made out on the " sea shore " in the far
distance.2 The source of this image admits, however, of no
doubt; it is, of course, Lempriere's article Hyacinthia which in
1 Cf. William T. Arnold, The Poetical Works of John Keats (London, 1884),
p. xxii. Colvin's role throughout is much less important than is frequently
supposed. It was also Murray who first " discovered " the Borghese Vase, and
Colvin merely copied and amplified his conclusions, as can be seen from his
following Murray in erroneously referring to Piranesi's work as Vasi e Candelabri.
There is, in fact, a tradition of correct interpretation of the Urn which, beginning
with Murray, passes through Colvin to find its fullest expression hitherto in
Finney. In contrast with this orthodox tradition there are the numerous heresies
which appear at regular intervals based on hypotheses ranging from the Elgin
Marbles to Wedgewood vases, etc. Nor can mention be omitted in this context
of a pioneer study in German, Paul Wolters's "Keats' Grecian Urn" in Archivfur
das Studium der Neueren Sprachen, cxx (1908), 53-61, a work which, conjointly
with Arnold's, Colvin drew on heavily.
2 To Keats's classical eye the archaeological accuracy of Claude's painting
cannot have gone unnoticed. All the essential elements are present: a veiled
celebrant officiates at the altar whereon a fire has been kindled ; a popa brings in
the victim and the sacrificial instrument; one or two camilli (legitimately born
boys fit to serve as acolytes) stand by ; and, as a precaution against any inadvertent
omission in ritual which would invalidate the sacrifice, a propitiatory praecidanea is
being held in readiness. Claude painted for an aristocratic market where Vergil
was known almost by heart, and it is not difficult to account for his appeal to the
poet. Apuleius, however, provided Claude's subject in this case as Marcel Rothlisberger shows in his Claude Lorrain. The Paintings (London, 1961), ii. 369.
Psyche's father, the crowned figure, is depicted at Didyma near Miletus consulting the oracle of Apollo whose statue can be seen on the facade of his oracular
shrine.
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111
the 1806 edition 1 reads : " The city began then to be filled with
joy, and immense numbers of victims were offered on the altars
of Apollo. ... During this latter part of the festivity, all were
eager to be present at the games, and the city was almost desolate
and without inhabitants." This quotation tends to confirm,
moreover, the Apollonian character of the second side of the urn,
for it shows that Keats had Apollo in mind as the recipient of the
sacrifice, a theme which already manifested itself in Sleep and
Poetry (55-61).
In neither urn nor painting is there a heifer " lowing at the
skies " ; but it will be recalled that this phrase had already
emerged in the poet's account of Claude's painting in the
" Titian " description from the Epistle to Reynolds : " the milkwhite heifer lows ". We need no further testimony to Keats's
familiarity with the Elgin Marbles than his own sonnets composed
after his first visit to the Elgin Room at the British Museum in
March, 1817. One scene from the Parthenon frieze may have
lodged in his memory to intrude itself later into the already complex patchwork of the Grecian Um, because on a slab (No. 40)
from the south side of the frieze, one of the cows in the procession
has lifted her head as though to low. It must be emphasized,
though, that not a single scene in the poem can be ascribed with
certainty to the Elgin Marbles. This has to be stated in categorical terms because of the persistence of the " Parthenon
myth ", which not even Amy Lowell's warm espousal " the
inspiration .. . came from the Elgin Marbles. . .. No urn
had anything to do with it. . ." sufficed to discredit, for,
mirabile dictu, it has cropped up even in W. J. Bate's monumental biography : " In all probability he was thinking principally of the Elgin Marbles."2 A patchwork the Urn certainly is,
for like so much great art it is a unity produced from diversity.
It is unlikely that Keats consciously chose features from this
or that objet d'art and combined them: rather must the
1 The edition believed to have been used by Keats. The actual volume, preserved in Keats House, Hampstead, although without autograph, bears an inscription on the end-paper by Sir Charles Dilke (grandson of the poet's friend) to the
effect that " Family tradition states that this was Keats's."
z john Keats (London 1925), ii. 241. John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1964),
p. 511, n. 8.
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half-obliterated memories of various vases he had known have
so worked upon his imagination as to energize an ideal urn. The
end product of this process of crystallization is a conflate urn
capable of inspiring the poem that we have. Nevertheless, if
any one work of art may claim to have played the key-role in the
conception of the poem, that honour must go to the Borghese
Vase, which is not inappropriate as it enjoys the status of a major
work of art in its own right.1
Broadly, there are two views on poetic appreciation. Brooks
and Penn Warren would have the reader evaluate the poem as
such, independent of context. The antithesis of this is the
approach we have chosen here, a humanist criticism which does
not scorn to avail itself of whatever historico-biographical information is needed to put the poem in focus. In other words, we
have been presumptuous enough to answer, or seek to answer,
1 This is perhaps the place to notice the conclusions of Mr. D. E. Robinson
(" Ode on a ' New Etrurian ' Urn " in Keats-Shelley journal, xii, Winter 1963)
who claims to have discovered the inspirational source of the ode in a Wedgewood
imitation of the Borghese Vase. Apart from the extreme unlikelihood of Keats's
being inspired to write a hymn to the beauty of Greek art by one of the trite productions of Etruria, this paper contains certain factual inaccuracies which cannot
be allowed to pass without comment. Admittedly one of these Wedgewood
imitations sports a tree which does not figure in the original, but the figure standing underneath is not the " Fair youth " but the flautist. Furthermore, to find the
" leaf-fringe " the critic has had recourse to an altogether different vase in black
jasper. He goes on to aver that " only Wedgewood's ' bride of quietness ' has ...
the herbaceous border to make the legend ' leaf-fringed', or a floral base to
perfect the ' flowery tale' ". Unfortunately the base of the vase he uses to
support his argument is not strictly floral, but exhibits the anthemion motif,
and the continuous leaf-pattern is frequent in this kind of urn. But to be expected to recognize in the " ground or footing " of Wedgewood's vase the " trodden
weed " of the poem is straining our credulity too far. Keats's reference to the
marble substance of the urn is ignored. Lastly, Mr. Robinson's claim to have
discovered a unique source for the Grecian Um, superior, he contends, to Colvin's
plurality of sources, cannot be sustained in view of the fact that the Wedgewood
imitation of the Borghese Vase accounts only for those features already present in
this vase and not for those derived from other sources. In any case, it was Keats's
practice and an artist's prerogative to amalgamate elements drawn not only
from different works of art within a single genre but even from different arts:
poetry, sculpture and painting promiscuously commingled in a fresh creation.
(Other " Etrurian " echoes in Keats are discussed by Mr. Robinson in " A Question of the Imprint of Wedgewood in the longer Poems of Keats " in KeatsShelley Journal, xvi (1967), 23-28.)
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Browning's rhetorical question, '* What porridge had John Keats?"
by handing the Victorian poet nothing less than a diet chart. In
the case of Keats the methods of literary detection which Livingston Lowes perfected for the study of Coleridge appear to have borne
fruit, as the success of many of Gittings's analyses shows. We
can never know enough about the sources of a poet's inspiration.
Thus an archaeological as distinct from a sentimental approach
to the Grecian Urn discloses facets not wholly apparent before.
The two sides of the urn stand for poetry, indeed art in general,
in its Dionysian and Apollonian aspects. To the extent that
there exists an almost bizarre contradiction between the frenzy
and dynamism of the bacchanal and the Apollonian stillness and
repose of the sacrifice, the poem is a study in contrasts, exploring
a dichotomy in art which began with the Ancients and has never
been resolved. To this situation Kenneth Burke1 and E. R.
Wasserman2 would apply the term " mystic oxymoron ", denominating thereby certain antitheses which Keats's poems develop,
antitheses wherein the contraries are not merely juxtaposed but
rather through the vehicle of the poetry attain a degree of mystic
interfusion otherwise impossible. But art in any case effects
reconciliation, and the contradictions polarized in the two sides
paradoxically constitute the emotional symmetry of the ode. By
amalgamating several vases in his imagination the poet made his
ideal vase representative of the type, of an entire artistic genre.
Seen thus, the urn parallels the nightingale's song which is representative of its type, and for the same purpose, to point the
contrast between the permanence of art auditory in the one
case, visual in the other and the transience of the individual
who apprehends its beauty.
One further point remains to be made : the method used in
this brief essay could help locate Keats's proper place within
the English literary tradition. That he was first and foremost a
sensuous poet none would dispute ; but precisely because he was
of so sensuous a disposition, finding in the world of visual and
tactile experience the most congenial sources of his imagery,
Keats drew upon the plastic arts for inspiration. He therefore
1 Grammar of Motives, New York, 1945.
2 The Finer Tone, Keats' Major Poems, Baltimore, 1953.
8
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belongs to that line of English poets which began with Spencer
(much of whose imagery was drawn from medieval tapestries
now lost) and whose most recent representative is Yeats.1
1 After the above was completed lan Jack's Keats and the Mirror of Art
(Oxford, 1967), where an entire chapter is devoted to the question of the Urn,
came off the press. On first hearing of this book I thought that my entire article
might have to be scrapped, either because of some such discovery as I had hinted
at on p. 105 or because the thoroughness of Dr. Jack's research might have rendered my work unnecessary. It was at once a relief and a pleasure to find that his
study was along traditional " Colvinesque " lines, and that he eschewed the
thesis of D. E. Robinson. The soundness of Dr. Jack's scholarship makes his
book a veritable joy to read, although I feel he errs occasionally, not in facts or
even in conclusions, but in emphasis. In common with most critics he attributes considerable importance to the Parthenon frieze, although he recognizes
that the heifer cannot properly be described as lowing. In my opinion this, like
the garlanded flanks, is a detail supplied by Keats. Nor does it seem likely to me
that the popa on slab 40 can be the mysterious priest simply because his features have
suffered erosion. Either the Holland House Vase or Claude's painting, particularly
the latter, accounts better for the fourth stanza than can any part of the Parthenon
frieze. Particularly noteworthy, though, is Dr. Jack's inclusion of an engraving
of Claude's drawing " View of Delphi with a Procession " which the " little
town " passage fits to perfection.