Ode on a Grecian Urn Group

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mariam-faisal
mariam-faisal
Student
High School - 9th Grade

Can I have a detailed explanation of the first three stanzas in the poem 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' by John Keats?

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Posted by mariam-faisal on Thursday September 10, 2009 at 5:29 PM and tagged with explanation, literature, ode on a grecian urn, summary.

Answers:

  1. lit24
    lit24 Teacher
    Doctorate

    eNotes Editor

    John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" written in May 1819, and published in January 1820 is made up of five stanzas, each with ten lines. The poet-narrator reflects upon the images of the figures  depicted on a Grecian urn to whom he addresses his discourse.

    In the first stanza the poet-narrator addresses the urn from the 'outside' and thus he is able to speak to the urn and the readers directly:

    "Thou still unravished bride of quietness!

    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time."

    The creator of this urn or vase is dead and gone, but it has been preserved by "silence and slow time."  On the sides of this beautiful and eternal artifact is painted or engraved a beautiful scene of an ancient Greek religious celebration. The poet-narrator is captivated by the beauty of the scene even as he tries to puzzle out its significance in a series of rhetorical questions for which there can be no final answer. Since there can be no definitive answers to these questions and since everything is left to the readers' imagination the urn is a better "historian" than the poet whose skill and versatility  can never hope to match its superlative aesthetic power.

    The same theme that aesthetic pleasure is keener when everything is left to the imagination of the reader is repeated in the next two stanzas by the images of music, and eternal unfulfilled love.  In real life once we have listened to a piece of music we are satiated or once we have made love our sexual desires are fulfilled. In our daily existence in this mundane world all our pleasures - visual, aural or sexual - are finite and limited especially by time.

    On the contrary, in the realm of art, we can derive infinite pleasure with the help of our imagination and thus "unheard melodies are sweeter," and "those trees can never be bare" and love "can never fade," because  "forever wilt thou love and she be fair."

    Sources:
    http://www.enotes.com/ode-grecian/summary
    http://www.enotes.com/ode-grecian/themes

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    Posted by lit24 on Friday September 11, 2009 at 8:08 PM