Ode on a Grecin Urn

March 8 2001

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Throughout his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Keats uses innocent, unfulfilled images painted on the urn, to demonstrate the theme of innocence and eternal beauty.

In the first stanza the speaker standing before an ancient Grecian urn, addresses the urn, preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. This is where Keats first introduces the theme of eternal innocence and beauty with the reference to the “unvarnished bride of quietness”(Keats). Because she has not yet engaged in sexual actions, the urn portrays the bride in this state, and she will remain like so forever. Also in the first stanza he examines the picture of the “mad pursuit,” and wonders what the actual story is behind the picture. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of woman and wonders what they could be doing. “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and trimbels? What wild ecstasy”(Keats). Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, and whens of the story it depicts. As the stanza, slowly leads the reader to the series of questions that are asked. The tone of the poem becomes exciting and breathless until it reaches the ultimatum, “wild ecstasy”(Keats). “The ecstasy brings together the pursuit and the music, the human and the superhuman, and, by conveying an impression of exquisite sense-spirit intensity, leads us to the fine edge between mortal and immortal. Where passion is so intense that it refines itself into the essence of ecstasy, which is without passion”(Bate117). Ecstasy is therefore the end of the feelings the poem has lead to reader to feel. Since the urn does not depict anything past the chase itself, the situation is purely innocent with beauty again complying with the theme of eternal innocence and beauty.

In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melody’s are sweeter then the mortal melodies. Because music is unaffected by time. He will always play the flute and never kiss the girl. “she cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”(Keats) These lines simply mean that the youth, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. The urn freezes her innocence in the picture. Therefore since the maiden and the man never actually have a sexual contact relationship, their love is pure, innocent, and eternal complying with the theme of eternal innocence and beauty. He perceives art as something that is better than real life. Keats goes on to discuss some trees whose branches, he remarks, can never be bare. They will always exist in the spring, always be green. Keats enjoys the fact that nature remains the same and this particular painting it must be spring. The two lovers will always be in love and will always have passionate symptoms for each other. He gives very real, very human qualities to these two painted beings.

In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers, and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue”(Keats). “It appears that the poet has not created the confusion, but that the unstable situation his vision created has bewildered him in the midst of his ecstasy and forced him into a direction that he did not intend or expect”(Bate 132). His recollection of this mortal world seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with these figures on the urn.

Continuing to the fourth stanza, the theme of eternal innocence and beauty is profound with the subject of a peaceful, uncorrupted town. The urn presents a priest leading a heifer dressed in garland up to an altar. The town symbolizes the potential of man. Then, as the story continues, a bit of irony becomes present. The people are portrayed to have taken over a spiritual nature of innocence and purity.