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Ode on a Grecian Urn
The urn speaks these lines to mankind. They address an age old philosophical question: what is truth? The lines mean that rather than seeking the answer to this question in pure reason, we should...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
One poetic technique that is used in this poem from the outset is metaphor. The speaker compares the urn he is talking about to a series of different images that each point towards the centrality...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats muses on the power of the urn to defy contemplation. He compares the urn to eternity. In trying to understand eternity, we can gain no answers to our many questions by contemplation and...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Keats highlighted the use of imagery in his poetry to speak to the follow characteristics typical to the Romantic period. He valued feeling over reasoning...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
It is always important to look at the context of the lines you need to focus on to see what they mean and to try and understand what clues the rest of the poem before and after can give in order to...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the speaker addresses the urn itself and the images on it. First, the speaker addresses the bride on the urn. She is frozen in time. She has yet to be ravished, so she is...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
The central message of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is the way in which the Grecian Urn represents an eternal beauty that contrasts to the ephemeral nature of man's existence. This is something of a...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
"Sylvan" pertains to woods, the forest, or a pastoral landscape. Keats' urn depicts various people and circumstances: a religious ceremony, two lovers, a pastoral piper, townspeople, and the forest...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
For the Romantics, poetry was the highest form of literature because it most easily expressed the concept of the "sublime" (a thrilling emotional experience that combines awe, magnificence, and...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Critics through the ages have been troubled by these last two lines of this wonderful Ode, as they seem on the surface at least to have very little to do with the rest of the poem and the depiction...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
I believe Keats uses this phrase to emphasize that he does not really know what the scenes on the urn were meant to represent. In the next few lines, he twice asks whether the figures on the urn...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats calls the Grecian Urn itself a "Sylvan historian." On the urn is a painted record of some ancient ceremony. Because it holds this record, it is a historian of sorts. For a more...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats is actually a poem about the Parthenon frieze, which had been brought to England by Lord Elgin and was on display in the British Museum. The central theme of...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats begins the fifth stanza by addressing the urn as an "attic shape." The word "attic" refers to Attica, a region of ancient Greece of which Athens was the chief (primate) city. "Shape" simply...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ah, one of my favorite controversial subjects to discuss about one of my very favorite poems EVER! The contrast Keats creates between art and life in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is precisely this: that...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
The image that absorbs Keats (or, more precisely, the poem's narrator) on the Grecian urn is a "Cold Pastoral" because it is a picture frozen in time of a pastoral or outdoors scene. It is not...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
As always with any question that asks you to examine the meaning of a particular text, it is important to look at the line in context so that you are aware of how it relates to the poem as a whole....
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Surfacely, the tone seems very light...a poet describing a sublime piece of visual art. The speaker calls the beauty of the object, “A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme." However,...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
The two words that are repeated frequently in the third stanza are "happy" and "forever." Remember that the speaker of the poem is commenting on a scene that he is seeing painted on a Grecian urn,...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
One major theme of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is that a beautiful work of art brings comfort and joy to the viewer. In this poem, the narrator gazes at the picture on an ancient Greek urn. It shows a...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
In my opinion, the speaker of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" admires the immortality of the urn's subjects (and of the urn itself) even more than its beauty. With the same idea that a poem can make its...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Our poet/narrator is contemplating a Grecian urn, of course, and he sees and makes observations about life. He sees two scenes" First, he sees a young man wooing a beautiful young woman under a...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
An interesting question. The scenes on the urn appear in isolation; life always gets tangled with other things. The scenes on the urn are perfect; life is not. The scenes on the urn sum up...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
It would certainly be unfair to label Keats an escapist based solely on a single poem. Looking at Ode on a Grecian Urn, however, we can see that he certainly plays with some escapist ideals. As...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats's use of apostrophe in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is an effective method of conveying the speaker's deeply felt emotions. In apostrophe, a writer speaks to a person who is not there or to an...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
In the first stanza, the speaker comments on the figures on the urn. Since the figures are frozen images, the bride on the urn is "still" (unmoving) and since she has yet to be ravished, she has...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
The images on the urn are frozen in time. Presumably, if the urn survives the effects of erosion and decay, those images will remain there forever. Likewise, a poem (such as "Ode on a Grecian Urn")...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
In the first stanza of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats, the speaker refers to the urn as an "unravish'd bride of quietness," a "foster-child of silence and of slow time," and a "Sylvan...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
This refeerence to the poem is featured at the beginning of the second stanza, where the speaker comments on the difference between the kind of music that is a product of his own world and the kind...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
John Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is a formal lyric poem whose metaphoric tension depends upon the dual nature of the urn: While the beautiful urn itself is a symbol of the static quality of art,...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
The interpretation of the last two lines of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is controversial, primarily because it is unclear whether the urn speaks some or all of the words. Quotation marks would...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
This poem starts with personification. Personificiation is the literary device in which an author acts as if an inanimate object is actually alive. To put it more formally, personification is a...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Critics find it hard to agree on exactly what Keats is describing in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Some suggest that stanza 4 is a digression away from the urn he is either imagining or recalling. The...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
The speaker in the poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is fascinated and teased by the figures on the urn. All the figures are frozen in time and therefore they exist in an eternal state. But, in being...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
The urn itself is a symbol of art and beauty.The lovers in an "almost kiss" are symbolic of love.The stories on the urn...the lovers, the tree, the musician, the priest and the heifer,...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
In his "Ode on a Grecian Urn," John Keats writes of the spirit that runs through all things. Certinly, in the urn, which represents all art, there is a timelessness that does not exist in the real...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Oh, this is a tough one, because there are so many used. Let's start with the basics. Keats uses personification in the first line. He uses metaphors throughout. He uses allusions. He rhymes. He...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
This is one of the most widely quoted lines in all of English poetry and is usually used divorced from its context. Within the context of the poem, Keats is thinking very specifically about a...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the urn was likely a product of Keats' mind, based on images of vases, sculptures and paintings. The scenes depicted are a Dionysian celebration, lovers about to...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Do you mean the meter of this verse instead? You need more lines of the poem before you can determine the rhyme scheme, which involves listening to the sound of the last syllable in each line. For...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
When the speaker speaks of the happiness of the lovers who never will grow old, and who are always just at the point of highest expectation of that first sweet kiss, and of spring which will always...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
One of the themes you might like to consider in respect to the poem is the autonomy of art. Even though the Grecian urn—and the poem it inspired—is, like all forms of art, a product of the time and...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
It's been a long time since I've read this poem, but the relationship between truth and beauty is in each of the scenes on the urn. For instance, the youth who chases his lovely young woman and...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
These lines near the end of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" have long perplexed critics. Since Keats doesn't offer us a definition of either beauty or truth, their meaning is elusive, but we can draw out a...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Aspects of life are frozen on the urn in different images which chronicle a ritual of another culture in another time. It represents, for that people, an aspect of life that had meaning. It...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Interesting questions. I have always assumed that the speaker looking at the urn was addressing the urn...that the truth is in the stories depicted on the side of the urn and that the beauty of...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Your analysis is absolutely correct and very well explained. Iambic pentameter, the most common of all rhythmic patterns in Western English poetry, is a pattern of five pairs of syllables with the...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
First, there is no way that we can know precisely why Keats wrote the words he did. Given that time travel is not possible and he did not write an essay explaining his intentions, all we can do is...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats' concluding line to "Ode on a Grecian Urn" represents much of his thinking and the ideas behind Romanticism. As he is staring at this urn, the speaker (presumably Keats) is engaged in a...
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Ode on a Grecian Urn
Scansion is the formal term for marking the meter of a poem, which is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line. A stressed syllable may sound “longer” than an unstressed...
