Many of the ideas and themes evident
in Keats’s great odes are quintessentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of
nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the
passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of human life in time. The
odes are written in a sensory language, their idealistic concern for beauty and
truth, and their agony in the face of death are Romantic preoccupations—though expressed
in an original way.
The Grecian urn, passed down through
countless centuries exists outside of time in the human sense - it does not
age, it does not die, alien to all such concepts. In the speaker’s meditation,
this creates a paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn:
free from time, and 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).
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, but the urn can never tell
him the facts of the stories it depicts. In the second and third stanzas, he
examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees, and
tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like and
he tries to identify with them and with their escape from temporality, with the
eternal newness of the piper’s unheard song and the unchanging beauty of his
lover. He thinks that their love is “far above” all transient human passions,
which lose intensity à when passion is satisfied, a
wearied physicality remains (a sorrowful
heart, a “burning forehead,” and a “parching tongue”). The speaker perceives
that he is subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the
figures on the urn.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker
thinks 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 he is aware that the town will
forever be deserted: the people have left it and they will never return to it. This is
the limit of static art: is impossible to learn from the urn the “real story”
in the first stanza, it is impossible to know the origin and the destination of
the figures on the urn in the fourth.
In the final stanza, the speaker
presents the conclusions, overwhelmed by the existence of the urn outside of
temporal change, a separate and self-contained world, which can be a “friend to
man,” but cannot be mortal; the
aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is insufficient to
human life.
The final two lines, the urn’s
message to mankind (”Beauty is truth, truth beauty”), could be the speaker addressing the urn, and
it could be the urn addressing mankind.
If it is
·
the
speaker addressing the urn, àawareness of its limitations: The
urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth;
·
the
urn addressing mankind, à an important lesson, beyond
all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is
that beauty and truth are one and the same.
