A 'nice' poem about raping a virgin

Can a rape be beautiful? If not, then wherein lies the beauty of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn? The poem's depiction of the rape of a young girl is crucial to the action and energy of the poem. Furthermore, the speaker predominantly revels in the joys of the rapist, only lamenting the pain of the victim in passing. The extent to which the greatness of such a work is lauded as a seminal, even genius contribution to the literary cannon is rendered highly disturbing when a feminist reading of the poem is explored.

The centrality of the rape theme in the poem is established in the first line: “Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,” (line 1). The speaker addresses the urn, which becomes metaphorically equated to a woman's body. The much sighed-over preservation of temporal stasis embodied by the vase is directly equated with the preservation of virginal 'purity'. The woman is married to “quietness”, she is without a husband and therefore assumed to be a virgin, deemed by the speaker to be a more inciting target for the rape he is set upon committing. The woman is further characterized as a “foster-child” (line 2). This line paints the woman as socially, physically and emotionally vulnerable. As she is without a husband, so is she without a father. The speaker's desire to rape this woman is the desire to exploit her special vulnerability, to simultaneously occupy the place of the absent husband and father in a fantasy of total patriarchal dominance.

At the end of the first stanza there is an explicit reference to the rape event. “What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?” (lines 7-10). We are given a frame-by-frame depiction of the rape, a “maiden” is chased, she is caught and she struggles to free herself, she is forcibly penetrated and the rapist achieves orgasm. The word “pipes”, repeated in the next stanza as “soft pipes” (line 12) is a graphic reference to the anal or vaginal orifices of the victim.

The disturbing quality of the poem is heightened by the continuation of the rape theme in praise of the rapist and sanctification of the act. “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave” (15). The speaker returns to his fantasy, finding the unmarried and fatherless youth beneath a tree and exerting his power to prevent her from escaping him. The speaker sees the rapist in his imaginary scenario as a “Bold Lover” (line 17), not only praising his transgression through rape as courageous but capitalizing the phrase to give him an even greater position of power.

 On the first stanza the speaker, imagining the urn as a woman's body, asks “What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape” (line 5). Later in the poem, a “heifer” (line 33) is being sacrificed “And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?” (line 34). In the parallelism of these two descriptions the virgin is equated with the heifer that is to be sacrificed. The rape becomes a sacrifice, relating to the trope of sacrificing a virgin and therefore preserve her virginity forever as the vase does. The sacrifice is a rape in the penetration of the phallic dagger, but instead of eternally destroying virginity it eternally preserves it.