Ode on a Grecian Urn, Not So Unchanging!

Holly Pretsky

John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” the speaker emphasizes the power that lies in the historical treasure that is the ancient piece of pottery, adorned all around with frozen images. The aspect of the urn most highlighted is its constancy, it’s endurance through the ages, unchanging and eternal. The scene of young love will never grow less beautiful or less passionate: “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” (20). The scenes of verdant nature will not fade away: “Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu.” The urn, through its immortality, seems to gain an almost supernatural awareness of the universe. It can view humanity from outside of time, from a place perhaps other than earth. It relates the wisdom at the end of the poem: “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’” (49 – 50).

While the urn is explicitly unchanging and eternal, the imagery of the poem implies something else. The imagery shifts distinctly from the beginning to the end of the poem. At the beginning, the urn is much closer to human life. By the end, it has grown distant, cold. In other words, despite the speaker’s insistence otherwise, the urn seems to age right before us.

In the first stanza, the opening lines of the poem, the urn is personified: “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.” The urn is an unravish’d bride, meaning virginal, young, and a foster-child. Not only is it compared to living humans, but it’s compared to young ones. There is also ample fecund imagery. The urn is covered in plants: “Sylvan,” “flowery,” “leaf-ring’d.” Next, the scene of the two lovers is described. The man is a “youth.” There is frozen music, then trees that will never shed their leaves.

The second to last stanza of the poem takes a turn, and speaks of sacrifice. If the rest of the poem was intimately related to human life and green-ness, this stanza stands out in its meditation on death. It moves to a town empty of humans. Where the last stanzas focused on people, this one focuses on the absence of them, moving away from human life. The poem began with youth, then moved through sex and attraction, then death. For something that is unchanging, the urn neatly encompasses human life.

In the last stanza the speaker observes, “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!” What was living is dead, what was silently musical is cold. Rather than being eternal, the urn seems to have aged and died.

Additionally, the urn is inconstant by virtue of its very form. An urn is round, it cannot be viewed entirely at once. Stillness is impossible in order to observe it as the speaker does.

There is a fascinating tension here, between what the speaker says, and what her use of imagery implies. (Photo from schmoop.com)