JOHN KEATS

Ode on a Grecian Urn

[Thomson, Maglioni, New Literary Links, CIDEB, vol. 2, p.413,]

This poem, written in May 1819, a month after `La Belle Dame Sans Merci', extends and deepens that poem's theme of the `lure' of art, considering its capacity for deception in relation to its capacity to console. The poem reflects on the immortality and perfection of art versus the transience of life, but it does so in a way which reflects on its own creation. In this way we can say it is self-reflexive: it is a work of art which is also a reflection on works of art and their effects.

The Greek urn, that lies at the centre of the poem and that the poet addresses as though it were a person decorated with different scenes and represents a perfect work of art. However, as we shall discover, Keats' ideas regarding beauty and art are very complex and contain many contradictions.

The price of eternity

The figures on the urn are eternal, but there is a price to pay for eternity, namely immobility and lack of vitality. Indeed the figures on the urn have been `frozen' in a state of pure beauty - the girl will always be young and beautiful, the leaves will never fall from the tree etc. - but at the same time they are `cold', people are made of `marble'. The urn depicts a world that seems at the same time more full of possibility than the real world yet which is ultimately a trap, since none of its possibilities can ever be realised. The piper's music, for example is silent `unheard melody' that contains all the potential of music but none of its sensuousness. It is music which one can imagine but not hear. Art therefore may be eternal but it also means death and silence, and though life inevitably decays it can at the same time be enjoyed while it lasts. Looking at a scene depicting a village whose inhabitants have gone to a sacrifice, the poet reflects that since the sacrifice will never be completed, the inhabitants will never return and the village will remain empty for eternity: the cycle of life there cannot be renewed. This central ambiguity of the artwork, its being at the same time `superior' and `inferior' to life, is an example of Keats' notion of 'negative capability', that is to say, to be able to live in a state of permanent uncertainty and doubt. This uncertainty is most fully conveyed in the poein's closing lines 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' spoken by the urn. The meaning of these lines is highly ambiguous and has provoked a great deal of commentary. They are commonly taken to represent the poet's own cult of art as a kind of autonomous, self-justifying truth. But the phrase 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' is tautological - that is to say, it repeats twice the same concept - and thus tyrannical. It tells us nothing about what might constitute either of the two terms and offers us no space to define them outside of this eternal loop. However, there is nothing to guarantee that the statement itself is true, or that it is “all ye need to know”.