Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

July 18, 2024

Episode 71
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats.

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Poet

John Keats

Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness

Ode on a Grecian Urn

By John Keats

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?

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!

III

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.

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.

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.’

Podcast transcript

Last month Matthew Buckley Smith read us his poem ‘Drinking Ode’, inspired by Ode 2.14 by the Roman poet Horace. And just as we did with Terrance Hayes and the sestina, I thought it would be good to stay with the same poetic form and look at a classic example from the past.

And when it comes to the ode, John Keats is probably the preeminent name in English poetry. Other poets have written one or two famous odes, but Keats’ substantial reputation rests in very large part on a series of six great odes he wrote in the same year, 1819. So this feels like a good time to feature Keats on the podcast.

So what exactly is an ode? Well as Matthew said last month, the word has meant a lot of different things at a lot of different times. It’s a bit of a slippery form. For one thing, it’s not associated with a specific metrical form, the way the sonnet is, or the ballad, the sestina, the villanelle and so on. And for another thing, its character has changed quite a lot in the two and a half thousand years or so since it first appeared.

The word ‘ode’ comes from the ancient Greek word for ‘song’, and the original Greek odes were set to music and performed by a choir in a theatre, who went through a set pattern of movements as they sang: from east to west, then west to east, and then stopping in the middle. And the metre would change with the dance steps, and it must have been pretty dazzling, a bit like a modern gospel choir.

Pindar was the ancient Greek poet credited with writing the greatest of these odes for public performance. The Romans continued the tradition, most notably in the work of Horace, but the Horation ode was typically more private in theme and tone, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t lead a choir booming his works out in the public square.

The ode was a popular form for English poets in the 17th and 18th centuries, doing their best to emulate the classical poets they revered, with some leaning towards Pindar and some towards Horace. And at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Romantics really took on the ode in a big way, echoing Pindar in their sublime visions, and Horace in their focus on their own personal and subjective states. Wordsworth wrote an ode on ‘Immortality’, Coleridge did one on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43973/dejection-an-ode, and Shelley did the west wind. And Keats of course did a whole series of odes.

So the ode in English is no longer a song and dance routine, but it does retain something of the grandeur of its roots. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics describes it as ‘the most formal, ceremonious and complexly organized form of lyric poetry’, lending itself to public or state occasions. Even when it’s on a personal subject, an ode is very much poetry with a capital P.

Supposing we compare the forms of lyric poetry to the violin family of musical instruments, and say the sonnet is about the shape and size of a violin, and the sestina is a cello, then the ode would be the double bass, producing the deepest and most sonorous notes, and usually only wheeled out when the occasion calls for a full orchestra.

So the ode is a form of lyric poetry, but of the weightiest and loftiest kind. Poets don’t typically write an ode about their trip to the supermarket or their dirty weekend in Paris. They write odes on immortality, beauty, death, or classical gods. Or in Keats’ case, all of them at once.

This lofty seriousness is one reason why odes aren’t particularly popular these days. They’re seen as a bit pretentious. But Keats was writing at the height of the Romantic era, so he wasn’t remotely scared of being pretentious, and thank goodness for that.

And Keats is a great example of a poet coming into his own when he found the form that fitted his talent. He started off wanting to be an epic poet in the tradition of Homer and Virgil and Spenser and Milton, and he wrote reams and reams of epic poetry that had a lot of great things in it, but didn’t really go anywhere.

He also wrote some great sonnets, and these are definitely worth reading, I may do one of them on the show at some point. But it’s the odes where he really stands out, where he stakes out his own unique territory, and does things no one has done in English before or since.

His most famous ode is the one ‘to a Nightingale’, and I was very tempted to do that one today, but it’s a little bit long for the podcast, this one is a bit more manageable and just as interesting in its way.

OK. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. It’s ostensibly a description of a Grecian urn, a fancy kind of vase (or ‘vayse’, depending where you’re from). And the speaker is looking at the urn and talking to it as if it were a person:

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:

So all of these epithets, the ‘unravished bride’, the ‘foster-child’, and the ‘Sylvan historian’ are the speaker’s pet names for the urn, capturing different aspects of what it means to him: a messenger or a historian, who is able to speak from the depths of silence and slow time, to bridge the gap between the ancient world and the present, and communicate something important from the past.

And he then goes on to introduce the images on the urn in quite an elegant way, by asking a series of questions:

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?

And we know that Keats did spend time contemplating ancient Greek urns and other artworks, as part of the Elgin Marbles collection, and also by studying illustrations. We even have a drawing by Keats of one Grecian urn, the Sosibios Vase, which he traced from a book.

But no one has identified a single urn that depicts the exact set of scenes described by Keats in the poem. So it looks like his Grecian urn is a composite, an imagined object that exemplifies the themes he wanted to write about.

And given that the speaker of the poem is talking to the urn as if it were another person, and by the end of the poem, the urn starts talking back, we should probably be careful about taking the poem at face value.

So the poem’s structure is fairly straightforward – he starts by addressing the urn and then describes the scenes sculpted on the panels of the urn, with a different stanza for each scene, and then concludes with some final thoughts that are among the most quoted and debated lines in English poetry.

The stanza form is original to Keats, it’s basically a sawn-off Petrarchan sonnet, starting with only four lines, making a single quatrain, instead of the usual eight lines; and then followed by a typical sestet, the final six lines. And we know from Keats’ letters that this experimental form was born of a dissatisfaction with the way the sonnet worked in English, and he tries variations of it in several of his odes.

And for me, the effect is to undermine the usual four-square, solid appearance of the sonnet, and to foreground the fluid, intricate, open qualities of the sestet. Way back in Episode 3 of this podcast, you may recall Mimi Khalvati describing the Petrarchan sonnet. She said the octave, the first eight lines, is like ‘ a tall stand of still trees, somewhat gloomy, possibly and all standing close together’. And the sestet, the final six lines, is ‘like some little babbling brook at the feet of these trees’.

So Keats has basically cut Mimi’s grove of trees down to size, so that we’re focused much more on the sound and movement of the babbling brook, which accounts for the beautifully flowing or dappled or mottled effect that to me is very characteristic of Keats’ odes. Just have a listen to the second stanza:

Isn’t that beautiful? There are so many interlocking sound patterns we could spend the whole podcast on this one stanza. We could look at the way the hypnotically regular metre combines with the rhyme scheme, and the use of assonance and alliteration, repeated vowel and consonant sounds; not to mention the use of enjambment, the syntax running over the line endings, and caesuras, breaks in the middle of lines, so that the lines seem to dissolve and form themselves again. A bit like reflections in a moving stream.

If we turn to what the speaker is saying, he’s basically arguing that the imagination, as expressed in the art on the urn, is better than reality:

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:

So sweet as it is to listen to music, it’s even sweeter to imagine the ‘unheard’ melodies played by the pipes depicted on the urn. Because these are heard not by ‘the sensual ear’, but by the ’spirit’. And then we get this extraordinary passage, where he shifts from talking to the urn to addressing a ‘fair youth’ and a ‘bold lover’ who are depicted on it:

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

So he’s talking about the fact that the scene on the urn is frozen in time, which means the ‘fair youth’ can never stop singing the same song, the leaves can never fall from the trees, and the bold lover who is reaching out to the woman in front of him will never be able to actually kiss her, even though they are almost touching. All of which sounds like a decidedly mixed blessing. But he offers some consolation to the tantalised lover:

yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

So although he will never be able to touch her, he will love her forever, and her beauty will never fade.

And it’s tempting to agree with this, isn’t it? I mean, Keats is hardly the first poet to confront the problem of the passing of time, and the fading of love and beauty and all the other fleeting joys of life. And he’s offering art as a consolation, a way of preserving love and beauty, not just for a few thousand years, but ‘for ever’.

This reminds me of when I was small, looking at the pictures on my bedroom wall. I remember thinking that I wanted to go into the pictures, into the landscapes of the artists’ imagination. There was something weirdly magnetic about the worlds I could see but not enter. So I know how Keats feels about art as a portal to another dimension. Or as he put it in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’.

And in the third stanza of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, he paints a very rosy picture of the picture on the urn:

So this is all very ‘happy happy joy joy’, as Ren and Stimpy would put it. In this eternal spring the leaves never fall, the music never stops, and the lovers are ‘For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, / For ever panting, and for ever young;’. Unlike ‘breathing human passion’, that leads to broken hearts and burning foreheads and parching tongues.

But – and you knew there was a but coming, didn’t you? – there’s obviously a problem with this line of argument. Because it’s all very well to say the solution to the suffering created by the passing of time is to freeze time, by enshrining youth and beauty in an artwork. But of course, as soon as we start to think about the implications, it starts to feel a bit weird and unnerving.

Would you really want to be frozen for all eternity, about to kiss your beloved but never actually touching their lips? Isn’t that a version of the punishment of Tantalus, in the ancient Greek underworld?

So what Keats has done is to confront us with an existential paradox: on the one hand, when we think of everything and everyone we love, including ourselves, vanishing with the passage of time, it feels unbearable. But if we imagine taking even the most perfect moment in time, full of music and love and laughter, and freezing that in time to preserve it forever, that too feels unbearable. As a sermon on suffering, the Buddha would have been proud of this one!

And Keats himself seems to have second thoughts about all this in the final stanza, where he turns from talking to the figures carved on the urn, to addressing the urn itself once more:

So ‘brede’ is a variation of ‘braid’, meaning the scenes of ‘marble men and maidens’ are wrapped around the urn. And it’s telling that he says the urn is ‘overwrought’ with the carvings. I think, on a literal level Keats is saying these scenes were carved over the surface of the urn; but that word also has more negative connotations, suggesting firstly that the artwork is a bit ornate, a bit overdone, and also maybe suggesting the feeling of being ‘overwrought’, overcome with anguish.

And then he says:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

A cold pastoral doesn’t sound very idyllic, does it? And it’s at odds with his description of it as a warm springtime. But he’s explicit here that the chill comes from the association with eternity – the urn is teasing us out of thought, waking us from our reverie, to contemplate eternity. And what comfort is there in doing that? Human beings are creatures of time, and we are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of eternity, even when we try to imagine it as an endless paradise. As somebody once said, most of us would rather go to a lecture on heaven than heaven itself.

But in spite of this chill, Keats persists, presenting the urn not just as a symbol but as an oracle:

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.’

So this is the point where the urn starts talking back, when the speaker imagines it speaking to future generations, and saying ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’.

It’s a pretty bold claim isn’t it? And there has been a lot of argument over the past two centuries about what exactly Keats meant by this, and whether there is any validity to the claim. It’s fair to say most critics agree that the words are beautiful, but not so many are convinced they are true.

These days of course, even the beauty part is suspect. To Keats and his contemporaries, it would have been self-evident that beauty was an important element of art and poetry. And in the late 19th century, this attitude reached its apex in the aesthetic movement, which espoused ‘art for art’s sake’.

But nowadays, beauty is regarded with suspicion in the poetry world. It’s seen as old-fashioned, self-indulgent, a luxury, and a distraction from the harsh realities of life. The pendulum as swung so far that in 2010, while I was on the board of Magma Poetry magazine, I remember Laurie Smith editing issue 48 on the theme of beauty in poetry, because as he wrote, ‘we wondered if it was still possible to write poems about experiences, people, objects or places that the writer finds beautiful’.

And the truth side of the equation is even more controversial. Because Keats’ urn is not just saying that beauty is important or desirable or a consolation for suffering. It’s proposing truth as epistemology, a foundation of knowledge – if something is beautiful, it’s likely to be true, and vice versa. And of course we can imagine all the trained philosophers throwing up their arms in horror at this.

Plus in the political sphere, the obvious danger with this kind of attitude is that it risks airbrushing uncomfortable realities out of the picture. Especially in a poem that was partly inspired by the Elgin Marbles! If the ode were in a museum, it would be a candidate for a plaque explaining the colonial provenance of its subject. It’s practically begging for a satirical poet to write a scathing takedown.

But you don’t have to be particularly woke to object to the proposition that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’. No one would accuse Philip Larkin of political correctness, but he took issue with the ‘Ode’, saying that a poem could be either beautiful or true, but not both. And he categorised his own poems as either one or the other.

He wrote a poem called ‘Essential Beauty’, which sounds pretty Romantic, and the title is actually from one of Keats’s letters, but it’s actually about the fake beauty of advertising billboards. One of the most beautiful and famous lines in Larkin’s verse is ‘what will survive of us is love’, at the end of ‘An Arundel Tomb’, another poem about a sculpture of a pair of lovers. Which again, sounds marvellously Romantic, but if you look closely at the syntax, then strictly speaking, Larkin’s poem is saying that this beautiful idea is ‘almost true’, but maybe not quite.

We’ve said several times on this podcast that we should be wary of taking poems at face value, as statements of the poet’s opinions. But in the case of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, we do have strong evidence that the urn is speaking on Keats’ behalf: in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey, 18 months before the composition of the ‘Ode’, he wrote: ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.’

But in the poem, even Keats doesn’t quite put his cards on the table. He puts the words ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ in quotation marks and attributes them to the imaginary voice of the urn. So they take on the character of dramatic speech, rather than the author’s unfiltered opinion. So maybe Keats and Larkin aren’t quite as far apart as they seem.

Anyway. If you have a negative reaction to the ending of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, I can probably understand why. As we’ve just seen, there are all kinds of reasons for dismissing it or criticising it.

And yet… it is a beautiful line, and a beautiful poem. And call me a Romantic, but I think once we decide that there’s no place for beauty in art, we’ve kind of given up. I can’t help responding to the beauty of the poetry and feeling its beauty is a key to some kind of truth, even if I would struggle to articulate it in rational terms. Fortunately for us, Keats has articulated it in poetic terms, so let’s have another listen and see what we make of it this time…

Ode on a Grecian Urn

By John Keats

III

John Keats

John Keats pencil portrait

John Keats was an English Romantic poet who was born in 1795 and died in 1821. He trained as a surgeon, but abandoned medicine to devote himself to poetry. Despite a brief literary career cut short by tuberculosis, Keats produced a remarkable body of work, including epic verse, sonnets, and a series of great odes, including ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, and ‘To Autumn’. His poetry explores themes of beauty, love, and mortality with profound emotional depth, and his letters are also widely read and quoted for his observations on life and art.

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