John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

It’s hard to be human. It’s quite hard to be 23, an orphan, and a struggling poet with little formal education whose father died when he was eight and whose mother died when he was 14, whose brother died of tuberculosis after he nursed him, and whose inheritance was withheld by a guardian so that he could not marry the woman he loved. It’s hard for anyone to make art, especially lasting art, and it wasn’t easy to be one of the younger Romantic poets, derided by critics and patronized by colleagues, yet still determined to make a mark on poetry. And it’s impossible to be forever young. John Keats, nevertheless, wrote a series of odes in quick succession in 1819 and died soon after at the age of 25, leaving us with these remarkable poems of eternity.

This young and ambitious man, who went to meet his friend at the British Museum, found himself astonished and preoccupied by the grand and alien classical Greek works of art he encountered. Haunted by the loss of his mother and brother and entering a period of meditation on aesthetics, he found himself ready to write poems about, as his Poetry Foundation biography states, “the irresolvable contrarieties of experience” and the transformative powers of the imagination. Keats rendered the urn of his poem, one of six odes, out of many influences, including his friend Benjamin Haydon’s articles on art of antiquity, and from several artworks: the Elgin Marbles, the Townley Vase, Claude Lorrain’s paintings, and the Neo-Attic Sosibios vase (that Keats traced an engraving of), among others. His urn, an imagined composite, reflects upon Keats’s philosophical and emotional concerns and contains his ambivalence about art and life within its rich, ambiguous tropes and vocabularies. Indeed, the poem’s ambivalences haunt its readers still.

As with any three-dimensional work of art, a vase, even a textual one, must be viewed from multiple angles. Keats tries various poetic and rhetorical approaches to the urn in each stanza in his desire to communicate with it. The overall strategy is apostrophe—the address of an absent figure, an abstraction, or an object.

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? 

Keats first addresses the urn as “thou” and in a rush of enthusiasm personifies it—a “bride of quietness,” a “foster-child of silence,” and a “historian.” How can it be three things simultaneously, and how are a virginal bride, a lonely child, and a forest-dwelling historian connected? Both the bride and child dwell in silence, and perhaps the historian needs quiet to write this tale of the past. However, a bride is usually not a child, and though in Keats’s time, brides were usually not historians, they did have children, and silence and slow time are not human parents. Coherence of metaphor is not essential in the traditional ode form, but excitement is, and this incoherence reflects the tension the silent urn presents. Keats would like to engage with this ancient object, but he can’t, so he must address it from many animated angles. Unravish’d, a fascinatingly ambiguous word, helps us understand this multiplicity—to ravish means passion and violence. Is the urn’s slenderness and round opening attractive? Is it intact throughout its history? Usually poets represent contraries in binaries, yet Keats’s eagerness demands a third option, an aesthetic tactic that enacts his idea of negative capability—to embrace contradictions and uncertainties “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

The poet excitedly asks what is depicted on the urn: a legend? Who, where, and why? Playful paradoxes dominate. He asks the urn to tell its “flowery tale” that is sweeter than “our rhyme,” at first giving the urn painter’s art precedence over his verbal art. He wonders about the figures on the urn: are they deities or mortals, in Tempe or Arcady, pipes and timbrels, and are they men or gods in mad pursuit of maidens in a struggle to escape or in wild ecstasy? “Or of both,” the poet says tellingly. Choosing becomes no choice at all—we can have both and all. Beloved for his sensual, musical lines and despite his fervent interrogations, the poet crafts elegant alliterations such as “leaf-fring’d legend” and lovely assonance in the quiet i’s throughout this stanza. He delights in this pastoral imagery of antiquity, yet his ambivalence never leaves this Dionysian procession of either celebration or struggle or both.

Keats also tests the difference between words and images, an ekphrastic tradition that figures the verbal as male and the pictorial as female. The “unravish’d bride” signals an ekphrastic precedent in which male poets configure visual art as silent, female, and sexually frustrating and in need of dominating narration. Is she “still” because she is a static object or because she is yet-to-be ravished? Whose wild ecstasy is this, we might ask? Is the bride also chased in mad pursuit and struggling to escape? Keats’s whole-hearted tone and persistent questions charm, yet a fraught word is haunts. The poet longs to know the legend haunting the urn’s shape—to Keats, shape means form, and his careful form and precisely paced ode shadows the captivating, crafted urn.

After this cascade of enthused questions, the poet switches tactics to tell readers and the urn and its characters what to think and do. Apostrophe turns imperative with an explosion of evers, nevers, and nots.

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! 

Keats begins this stanza with confident wisdom: the urn’s tale is sweeter than poetry, the urn’s sweet silent music is preferable to “heard melodies” played to the “sensual ear”—“therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,” he directs. In a charming pun, Keats rhymes ear with endear’d; the spirit’s ear hears more endearing ditties, and even the word ditties is endearing even though ditties have “no tone” in a poem of deeply felt tones. The enchanted sounds, calm caesuras, and finely paced iambs (“soft pipes”) create intimacy to deflect his anxiety, although he undercuts his own medium.

Addressing the fair youth, the poet corrals him in a series of canst nots and nor evers. The youth cannot leave his song, like the trees that are never bare, and he’s a Bold Lover who can “never, never” kiss the maiden, although near “the goal.” But the poet comforts and orders the lover not to grieve, because “she cannot fade.” Fantasies of impossible ideals appear: a never-ending song in a never-ending spring with a never-ending love between beautiful, immortal figures. Yet all this negation creates unease; we may long for those things, but they would be terribly uncomfortable and awfully inhuman.

In a few lines, Keats sketches these classical characters—the piper, the bold lover, and the young woman trapped in art’s dilemma: to be forever young, in love, and never alive. Unlike human reality, on the urn nobody ages, falls ill, breaks your heart, or dies. Silent, the urn cannot answer the poet’s questions so that he can narrate its story and even counsel its characters. Yet, why would someone, especially a young poet, long for love with no kissing, a bliss never to be had? Is sexual anticipation and idealized youth and beauty so much sweeter than love experienced? Keats’s meter is light, charmingly landing on the page like the ditties, contradicting his argument that silent music is sweeter than poetry, which is another ekphrastic move: to rival the seductive superpowers of the visual and assert poetic dominance. There’s also a pleasant array of v’s: leaves, grieve, ever, never, companions to the earlier unravish’d and Sylvan, a pattern that returns significantly. Leaving the overwrought images of the first stanza, Keats soars ahead.

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. 

“Happy, happy”! Today’s readers may guffaw at the exclamatory tone of the third stanza; its idealism and breathlessness have bothered critics. Keats’s engagement with the urn surges in the center of the ode with an initiating Ah and an overabundance of happiness. Now the innocuous trees are doubly happy because they cannot shed their “leaves” (leaves again) nor ever bid “adieu” to “Spring,” an idealized state of potential and renewal. The happy melodist can also play “unwearied,” and his songs are “for ever new,” unlike any human artist or poet, who certainly cannot play without a break and who struggles to compose new work. Note the two for evers in two lines: there are five whole for evers in this one stanza! Insistent repetition and exclamation are the stratagems here as a knowing signal to readers that this scene is one of artifice—only in art can such happiness exist.

Then the tone swerves again as the idealistic vision dissolves, and we return to reality. The repetition of still halts us because it refers to the urn itself; its characters are still and silent, and its maker is dead, not at all warm. Thinking within his poem, “For ever panting and, for ever young,” reminds the poet of how hard human love is: it makes one parched and feels “cloy’d”—too much sweetness. The final three lines abandon happiness and portray real love as akin to an illness: human passion “leaves a heart high-sorrowful,” sick with sweetness, feverish, and thirsty—it’s hard not to notice these love symptoms are like those of tuberculosis. Even the repeating, halting h’s sound breathless. While Keats revels in the still figures’ representational loving, he laments actual “all breathing” experience. To be human is to live, to love, to leave.

In the fourth stanza, Keats moves away from the painful disappointment of having a body to more questions, an artful return to his first strategy. Remember that the urn is not fully observable from one physical perspective or fully describable through one metaphor or image, so we fall under the poet’s spell in this action-filled, cinematic 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. 

His questions (who, to where, from where, and why) envision a slow, pastoral procession in which a mysterious priest leads a pretty cow to a green altar on a pious morning in a little seaside town or a mountain citadel at peace: a quiet, religious ritual except for the lowing of the heifer. The sweetness of this picture contains a magisterial aesthetic touch, revealed in the figure of the cow “and all her silken flanks with garlands drest”: a perfect iambic line stocked with alliteration and assonance of k’s, s’s, and e’s. “[D]o not grieve,” comforted Keats earlier. This fictional character can’t die! She’s not real, of course. The urn is a thing and “for evermore / will silent be.” It cannot tell a soul “why thou art desolate, can e’er return.” Desolate creates another moment of isolation and despair: not a soul can express the tale of this little town, the artist of the urn can never return from the past, and don’t forget that urns hold the ashes of the dead. Like the bride or the foster-child tropes, the heifer (on its way to its death without any power to understand) is another innocent figure. This controlled stanza achieves negative capability within its vivid and unknowable mysteries, as Keats again humbly undermines his poetry while he affirms the grandeur of the urn he imagines. It cannot answer his questions. Yet it can! The lowing heifer prepares us for the next and final speaker, also not human yet communicative.

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."

Keats emphatically apostrophizes the urn again: “O Attic shape! Fair attitude!” and “Cold Pastoral!” In these final addresses, we learn more of what’s on his urn: marble men and maidens “overwrought” beneath “forest branches and the trodden weed.” The word overwrought significantly implies both the act of making and too much intensity: an artful poetics of overwrought emotion balanced with philosophical control. Keats switches from emotive engagement and painterly visions to a more objective diction, not without contradiction. In the last stanza, the urn teases onlookers and readers over time, “out of thought / as doth eternity.”

What does this daring statement mean? Exasperated readers have wondered forever. It could mean that exquisite art—and beautiful people or landscapes or creatures or objects—tease out our thoughts so that we can contemplate the abstract, the transcendent, eternity itself. Or does silent art take us out and away from our daily, quotidian thoughts, the burden of being human? Is this why the pastoral scene is cold and remote, not warm and present? Keats alerts us with heavy end rhymes and aphorisms that the poem will soon conclude, informing us that when “old age” wastes this generation, the urn will remain to witness other daily woes. It will be a “friend to man” and say to us, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Now what do these lines mean?

In a series of letters in 1817 to his brothers and friends, Keats connected beauty with truth: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” Entering a debate dating back to Plato, Keats stakes a Romantic claim: the human imagination and its passions intertwine beauty and ethics. And in this ode, the urn now sits in for poetry itself, which Keats had earlier described in “Sleep and Poetry” as “a friend / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” In a telling conflation of the visual and verbal, the urn and poetry, Keats believes, allow us to think beyond ourselves and our earthly limits. What we find beautiful in the actual world leads us to a transcendent truth, and whatever we experience as truth has sensual beauty. The dramatic caesuras here force us to slow down and have these thoughts teased out. This dramatic instance of prosopopeia, a common ekphrastic technique of envoicing a silent object, concludes the poem with a tangled intimacy. Who is really speaking? The urn, of course, speaks to the poet through time, and Keats speaks to us through his poem.

A contentious history of critical arguments trails the meaning of the urn’s utterance. Critics have found its statement to be frustratingly or delightfully enigmatic, dramatic, meaningless, or silly. My favorite readers of this poem, Helen Vendler, W.J.T. Mitchell, and James A.W. Heffernan, have written dazzling readings of this ode and influenced my own attempt. Vendler points out that the urn speaks to us with a maternal tone at the end (again, we hear the lost mother appearing to comfort the child through ages of silence). The urn’s words do not trouble Vendler; to her, Keats generously gifts the silent urn with philosophical language, the supreme aesthetic of this ode of many poetic strategies. Mitchell, drawing on the gendered nature of ekphrasis, quips that Keats feminizes the urn and “could at a least give her something interesting to say.” The urn’s language isn’t only figurative but also existential, Heffernan adds to this debate; he finds the urn’s utterance to be the point in which Keats “represents not what has been or will be but what is”—language approaching being.

What happens when we gaze at a work of art? Does it speak to us through time, or are its silence and distance incomprehensible? Can poetry ever capture the power of the visual arts? What use is it to make beautiful objects? In the great odes, Keats contemplates indolence, melancholy, a nightingale, the mythical Psyche, autumn, and the urn—an object envisioned with such careful fervor that it embodies both the poet’s wish for immortal, affirming art and his apprehension that art and poetry cannot relieve human suffering.

Keats surrounds the urn with all these pressing questions and tries to assure us at the end with its ventriloquent wisdom. Yet our doubts remain even in all this exquisite sound and shape—paradoxes to contemplate about art and life and beauty and truth—and that is why we are continually drawn to this poem. What is true is not always beautiful, and what is beautiful is not forever true. Negative capability may be a fantasy of identification with the Other; the Greek world was not at all ideal—the poet cannot escape his pain, yet his pain can make a marvelous poem. The poem and the urn do not have one meaning; the point is to be “overwrought”—to dwell in the difficult paradoxes, questions, and exclamations—and not reach for the simple or factual. To be human and mortal and not want to be—and to want to make art.