Keats, John - Analysis of an Ode on a Grecian Urn

Keats and the Grecian urn

Keats has seen this object in the British Museum (is a container where Greeks put the ashes, decorated with religious and pastoral scenes).

Classical poem, written with a high language.

‘Poetry I something you feel, something like a fire or a bore. The Grecian Urn is something ‘unverably beautiful’ or something you just don’t understand.’

Ode on a Grecian Urn is divided into five stanzas.

First stanza invocation

1) In the first stanza, the speaker addresses an ancient Grecian urn. (invocation). The urn is eternal (quietness, silence, slow time). He thinks to which legend the man and woman represented came from. It is an orgy scene.
2) In the second stanza, the poet looks at another picture of a young man playing a pipe with his lover.

He could not ever kiss his lover, time is stopped but his melodies will last forever and their love too. Unlike mortal love, that is a cycle of desire, fulfillment, satiety, decay.

What is happiness in eternity?

3) Happiness is only possible in the world of forever.
4) In the fourth stanza, the poet looks another picture on the urn, a religious scene ( sense of desolation, this time). There is a procession with an heifer to be sacrificed. He thinks where they came from – a little town- and where they are going to do their sacrifices.

Static scene, juxtapose to the other scene.
5) In the fifth stanza, the speaker addresses the urn saying that the urn will remain forever.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”: beauty is truer than life, even if is frozen.