Ode on a Grecian Urn

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Summary

In the first stanza, the speaker, standing before an ancient Grecian

urn, addresses the urn, preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in

time. It is the "still unravish'd bride of quietness," the "foster-child of silence

and slow time." He also describes the urn as a "historian," which can tell a

story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn, and asks what

legend they depict, and where they are from. 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?"

In the second stanza, 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" melody's are

sweeter than mortal melodies, because they are unaffected by time. He tells

the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in

time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third

stanza, he 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 the girl will

last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into "breathing human

passion," and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a "burning forehead,

and a parching tongue."

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the

urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He

wonders where they are going ("To what green altar, O mysterious

priest..."), and where they have come from. He imagines their little town,

empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will "for evermore" be

silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the

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 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.

Form

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" follows the same Ode-stanza structure as

the "Ode on Melancholy," though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the

last three lines of each stanza. Each of "Grecian Urn"'s five stanzas 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. The

first seven lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the

second occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In

stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED;

in stanzas three and four, CDE; and 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.

The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza,

and the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is

only a general rule, true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as

the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)

Themes

If the "Ode to a Nightingale" portrays Keats's speaker's engagement

with the fluid expressiveness of music, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" portrays

his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian

urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker's

viewing of it, exists outside of time in the human sense--it 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