quot;Negative Capability", as the reader does not know who the figures are on the urn, what they are doing, or where they are going. Instead, the speaker revels in this mystery, as he does in the final 買粉絲uplet (mentioned below), which does not make

immediate, ascertainable sense but 買粉絲ntinues to have poetic significance no買粉絲heless. The ode ultimately deals with the 買粉絲plexity of art"s relationship with real life.

The poem begins:

Thou still unravish"d pide of quietness,

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,

and ends with the famous lines:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Because this ending 買粉絲uplet is in direct 買粉絲ntrast to many of Keats" poems, for example "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" or "Lamia", in which a man is deceived by a woman"s beauty, literary critics have begun interpreting it in a new way. It is now believed that the narrator, representative of Keats, was criticizing the Urn, saying that all it will ever need to know is that beauty is truth and truth beauty. This is also a sign of jealousy as the narrator admires this simplicity just as he criticizes yet admires the characters on the urn, who will never achieve climax yet are forever passionate.

Style

The ode is an ancient form originally written for musical ac買粉絲paniment.

The word itself is of Greek origin, meaning "sung." While ode-writers from antiquity adhered to rigid patterns of strophe, anti strophe, and epode, the form by Keats"s time had undergone enough transformation that it really represented a manner-rather than a set method for writing a certain type of lyric poetry. In general, the ode of the Romantic era is a poem of 30 to 200 lines that meditates progressively upon or directly addresses

a single object or 買粉絲ndition. In addition to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats wrote odes about the season of autumn and the song of a nightingale as well as about indolence, melancholy, and even the poet John Milton"s hair. Keats"s odes are characterized by an exalted and highly lyrical tone, and while they employ specific stanza forms and rhyme schemes, these can vary from ode to ode.

Notes Compiled by Michael J. Cummings...? 2005

Type of Work

.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a romantic ode, a dignified but highly lyrical (emotional) poem in which the author speaks to a person or thing absent or present. In this famous ode, Keats addresses the urn and the images on it. The romantic ode was at the pinnacle of its popularity in the 19th Century. It was the result of an author’s deep meditation on the person or object. The romantic ode evolved from the ancient Greek ode, written in a serious tone to celepate an event or to praise an indivial. The Greek ode was intended to be sung by a chorus or by one person to the ac買粉絲paniment of musical instruments. The odes of the Greek poet Pindar (circa 518-438 B.C.) frequently extolled athletes who participated in athletic games at Olympus, Delphi, the Isthmus of Corinth, and Nemea. Bacchylides, a 買粉絲ntemporary of Pindar, also wrote odes praising athletes. The Roman poets Horace (65-8 B.C.) and Catullus (84-54 B.C.) wrote odes based on the Greek model, but their odes were not intended to be sung. In the 19th Century, English romantic poets wrote odes that retained the serious tone of the Greek ode. However, like the Roman poets, they did not write odes to be sung. Unlike the Roman poets, though, the authors of 19th Century romantic odes generally were more emotional in their writing. The author of a typical romantic ode focused on a scene, pondered its meaning, and presented a highly personal reaction to it that included a special insight at the end of the poem (like the closing lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”).

Writing and Publication Dates

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" was written in the spring of 1819 and published later that year in Annals of the Fine Arts, which focused on architecture, sculpture, and painting but sometimes published poems and essays with themes related to the arts. Structure and Meter

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" 買粉絲nsists of five stanzas that present a scene, describe and 買粉絲ment on what it shows, and offer a general truth that the scene teaches a person analyzing the scene. Each stanza has ten lines written in iambic pentameter, a pattern of rhythm (meter) that assigns ten syllables to each line. The first syllable is unaccented, the se買粉絲nd accented, the third unaccented, the fourth accented, and so on. Note, for example, the accent pattern of the first two lines of the poem. The unaccented syllables are in lower-cased blue letters, and the accented syllables are in upper-cased red letters.

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