Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn

John Keats · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 5 pages

John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, reproduced complete in its five stanzas across three pages, with a closing page of suggested reading. The running head reads “Suggested reading for students” rather than naming the poem, which places it in the section as a companion to the study material rather than as a document in its own right.

The ode addresses the urn as an unravished bride of quietness and foster-child of silence and slow time, a sylvan historian able to express a flowery tale more sweetly than the poet's own rhyme, and asks what legend haunts its shape — what men or gods, what maidens, what mad pursuit, what pipes and timbrels. The second stanza states the paradox the whole poem turns on, that heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter, and addresses the figures who can never complete what they are shown beginning: the piper who cannot leave his song, the lover who can never kiss though winning near the goal, and who is told not to grieve, since she cannot fade and he will love for ever. The third presses the same thought through the happy boughs that cannot shed their leaves, setting a love for ever warm and still to be enjoyed against human passion that leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed. The fourth turns to the procession coming to the sacrifice and to the little town emptied of its folk, whose streets will be silent for evermore with no soul returning to say why it is desolate. The fifth addresses the urn as an Attic shape and a Cold Pastoral that teases us out of thought as eternity does, and gives it the closing words on beauty and truth that the poem is best known for.

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