On Reading Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
The value of this poem is not in the final two lines, the so often repeated “Truth is Beauty” phrase. This is commonplace. Nor does it lie married with the specific piece of Grecian pottery that Keats first doted on, then recollected warmly in rhapsody. For the former, in reading Keats’ letters and his admiration for a figure like Socrates, he was more inclined to that philosopher’s skeptical mindset. He could never settle for any axiom unless it was “proven upon the pulses”. Even then, he could think up all sorts of objections tomorrow to contradict whatever result was discovered today. For him the best of Poets never stayed a single course: they delighted in the high and low, dark and light, and the greatest poems travel from either pole on the silver linings in this Life to end at Reconciliation.
This predilection towards ambiguity, in a perpetual confession of “not knowing”, even shook the foundation of his self-proclaimed purpose in Life:
“I am sometimes so very skeptical as to think poetry is a mere Jack-o-Lantern to whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance.”
Keats, in a letter to friend Benjamin Bailey, March 13, 1818
As if the genuine lovers of poetry were trapped in Plato’s Cave, intoxicated by the very aroma of the floral wreaths that bind their wrists to antique marble, forever distracted by the shadows of sweet objects that mime and make mockery on the cold wall.
For the latter, if we were to place the specific piece of pottery before the reader, very likely the spring of Sentiment will not flow along your tongue if you do not hold a sincere love for Antiquity, for Ancient Greek culture, and more importantly Art in general. I do not mean merely a shallow prejudice for the old, nor the scholar’s curiosity for history and dead cultures. I mean the Eye of appreciation of the Poet, who feels the figure’s countenance of passion in a painting, or notices the gentle movement frozen in Time in a sculpture, and seeks out the living examples. Then once found — when our beloved looks longingly in our own eyes, or when she tucks a lock of hair behind her ear with an unspoken grace, unaware of our presence — how much more deeper and more fresh do these impressions resonate within us when we discover that She is a reincarnation, animated with sacred breath, of the ideals of Human Experience that past artists strove to capture in their work. Her glance is what inspired Shakespeare to write his loveliest sonnets, and her form is what persuaded Dante to perceive Beatrice as an Angel walking on Earth.
The particular value of this ode is that sincere love that would inspire one to say, with full confidence, “Truth is Beauty”.
The first three lines contain phrases of praise backed by a truth, defeating any chance of subservient flattery to undermine his purpose: to debut this object on a pedestal and reveal how it truly lives in the Poet’s mind. In an ode the Poet becomes like that court herald who, to prepare the audience for the grand entrance of the King, announces the real victories in battle and noble bloodlines that are signified by his list of Titles.
The Grecian urn holds a supernatural power to be, after all this time, still an
unravish’d bride of quietness,
Incorruptible by the worldly vices that surround it. Though she was crafted by mortal hands, she holds no direct relation to humanity, as her essence which her form approximates is closer in lineage to Immortality, making her a
foster-child of silence and slow time.
The urn is clothed in ancient myth, and gives her the purpose of a mute storyteller who can, despite the lack of the organ which is the storyteller’s greatest strength, still
Express a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.
How can this be? Keats will return to this idea at the beginning of the second stanza.
A pastoral scene breathes on the side of the urn, and with a closer gaze we try to decipher the specifics, leading us to ask a string of relevant questions. It would be the scholar’s “irritable reaching after fact and reason” to pin down the figures with the labels of the theorist’s traditions, turning a somewhat mysterious scene into a flat “paint by numbers” rendition of particular facts. This false academic attempt of appreciation, this cold hindsight, is always given voice when you hear a piece of work championed as the “greatest representation of the core tenets of — ism”, even though we all know the artist had no conception of this supposed creed when creating his work.
Instead, feel the fresh delight in the changing mystery, and frolic through the new scenes in the imagination when figures, first seen as mortals who then lived by the Vale of Tempe, now at a different angle are deities that dwell on high in “the dales of Arcady”!
At the start of the second stanza, Keats reveals the particular powers of the silent tale. There a sweet quiet music exists not to play to
The sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
It seems at first a paradox, this silent music which is sweeter than heard melodies. But what is the first effect of music’s impression on us? I can play a couple notes to a song and in an instant a new atmosphere, containing innumerable associations bundled up in a mood, crashes down on my head. The silver color of my room was calming and becoming my solitude. Now, after listening to a somber tone, it is gray and speaks of the despair in loneliness, fueling my imagination to produce corresponding images. This hold over the imagination of music, whether instrumental or lyrical, is of the same kind which this scene on the urn works, only its of a different degree.
In poetry and music we give the reins to the artist, and our Imagination must follow where they lead. I have often been disappointed when I begin to read a fine line of poetry and discover at the end that a conceit is abandoned before it was fully developed, or disparate objects through a metaphor are placed in comparison solely because of a surface similarity. My mind wanders off the artist’s established trail to seek the remedy for the flaw. Likewise in music, sometimes I hear a string of notes and expect the song to go a certain direction; instead the string of notes is repeated, then dissolves to make way for the renewed appearance of the chorus. Again, my mind leaves the measures and thinks of the potential notes that could have prolonged my pleasure.
This simple scene on the Grecian urn serves for the Poet’s imagination more as a signpost for his Fancy towards an undiscovered personal Paradise. It grants the viewer greater freedom, a liberty which Keats takes in the second half of the fourth stanza.
The urn is a palpable symbol to the Eye, and our Soul looks through its watery window to transform the scene as it desires at that particular moment.
Keats tells of the specific bittersweet pleasure that lives in the scene of idealized love. See how he plays with the light and the dark:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
This perpetual pleasure thrives on the proximity of pain.
I read criticism of this poem saying that the lines of the third stanza, when Keats sings of the “happy, happy boughs” which adorn the scene of “happy, happy love!” are rather trite and unaffected. If your heart caught the tune of bittersweet yearning, then these lines are easily sincere. Hearing myself read these lines aloud on video put a smile on my face. And if you are a Poet who daily seeks the pleasure of the shade under a bower, and well-respected the cool seat’s ability to stir sentiments which give us the sweetest, heart-felt music on the English tongue, then you too would be boundless in your joy to find a bough that never lost its leaves
Nor ever bid the Spring adieu.
Imagine the prime moment of your Life, when passion was at its height. Here this scene speaks of something very real, in one sense, but gains the wings of the Ideal as it is love never-ending,
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d.
And though our cool reason may swoop down to pop the Romantic bubble, as our past experience of Love in retreat proves the conclusion to this scene to be false — when Love did exist we walked on Earth as though we were in a dream — the scene captures for all time that temporary bliss, when Love gifted sensations to the heart, and when Fancy-inspired images were phenomenon that worked as real objects on our mind.
We now move to a scene of natural piety in the fourth stanza. This could be another scene on the other side of the same urn, or a different urn entirely. Whatever it is, it does not matter.
Keats views the scene as a part of a whole, logical world. He envisions in this scene of movement the destination and the starting point. It was his imagination, not the artist of the urn, who painted the little town scene in his mind.
This last stanza serves as a refrain, and we return to sing the praises of the urn again. The effect of the scene to bring the Poet to their unreflecting Paradise is summed concisely in the following lines:
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
The instance when Keats with his Imagination is inspired by an antique object to create new images paired with living sensations, that is the instance when the artificial barriers of Time and Space are abolished, and the Soul can take flight. When we recognize that the hand that shaped the urn had a pulse, and the scene is drawn in part from their past life, then do we find sympathy and sincere Love is cultivated. This destruction of those artificial barriers leaves our mind sensitive to the feeling of Eternity; that same feeling that comes over us when we stare out into the sea’s horizon, and feel the boundless sea ever coming towards us, wave after wave after wave; and we stand the shore, powerless to stop its motion, unable to fathom its own force, stepping on stones which witnessed the Sea’s birth.
