John Keats, arguably the most talented and delightful writer of his time. His harrowingly beautiful writing often encompassed aspects of humanity and nature and what it means to be human. It is often argued that if he did not meet his untimely demise from a young age, he would have rivaled that of Shakespeare with graceful ease.
His work helped to conceptualize romanticism to its base parts, helping to shape its course through history. Furthermore, many of his poems took on a melancholy atmosphere and often nodded to a passing of time, continuing to shape what we know about this brilliant poet.
By looking at his life, we can see the resemblance of how his personal life is interconnected with his poetry and how he turned into a legendary poet.
In 5 stanzas of Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats focuses on an ancient Greek urn. He describes the images that are depicted there. The two scenes that the author describes in detail are the one with a couple of lovers and the one with a group of people that are gathering to perform a sacrifice.
The poem was mercilessly criticized during Keats’s lifetime. Its significance was recognized only by the middle of the 19th century.
Wordsworth’s, “Ode to a Great Urn” is a means to understand life; a means of the quest for truth and beauty; the most reliable mode of experience.” Wordsworth begins talking about an Urn and brings life to it comparing it to a “virgin bride of quietness”, stating the urn is “unchanged, perfect, yet silent.”
Wordsworth discusses a “fantasy world where two lovers are frozen in time” and is described in a state of mind where he thinks to himself about the beautiful story the urn has to tell. When the irony that encircles this, is the actual thought where everyone knows that an urn can’t talk; therefore, this Urns now imagined love story will not ever be heard.
In the third stanza of John Keats’s poem “Ode on Grecian Urn,” the poet addresses a tree that will never shed leaves. The description creates a paradox of lifelessness, and life is also expressed beyond the fair lady and the love and acquires a more temporal form.
The symbols of eternity encapsulated in the poem repetitions of the word “forever” are also present in describing the unheard song and pipes playing endlessly.
In addition, John Keats’s odes present his own existential vision through a living death of immortal lovers who surpass this paradox through the scene of sacrifice.
In whole, Keats’s poem is a deep philosophical reflection on the complex conflict between life and art, symbolizing eternity, living death, and the existence of art beyond the real world, which transfers the readers to another conceptual dimension.
In the poem, Keats adheres to a philosophical representation of the connection between art and life through the concept of eternity.
What is the meaning of grecian urn? Why is it the central object in the poem?
Time does not affect the urn because it is composed of stone, that never ages and that can resist any changes: “…happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu” (Keats 1, line 21-22).
Keats envisions the theme of immortality in Ode on a Grecian Urn to capture the conflict between art and life because “once [the poet] has imaginatively grasped the eternal beauty of the model and the material through which the sculptor of the urn worked, the problem of their actual existence completely vanishes” (Sato 3).
This relation becomes one of the central “Ode on a Grecian Urn” themes.
In summary, it should be stressed that all Keats’s poems are directed at creating an alternative world. Specifically, John Keats’s “Ode on Grecian Urn” is a philosophical deliberation on sophisticated relations between the art and life that is expressed through eternity, living death and sacrifice, and existential motifs created in the imaginary world.
The themes of eternity are also amplified in other poems by John Keats. Art and poetry can contribute to creating another conceptual dimension where everyone can live forever. That’s what the author attempted to show.
