Keats focuses on how happy the people seem to be on the urn. They are a group of young people headed out to the countryside for a Greek religious festival. He asks who they are and why they are in such a wild tumult of happiness.

Keats focuses, first, on a young man painted on the urn playing a pipe. Keats is so involved in this scene that he speaks to this figure, implying that the youth is very lucky that he will always be playing his pipe in beautiful, leafy spring weather during a joyous festival.

Keats then moves on to a pair of lovers depicted at the moment they are about to kiss. He is transfixed that their lives are frozen at this particular moment and wonders what bliss it must be to be eternally young, healthy, and on the brink of kissing your beloved. He says to the lover:

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!

Keats sees human relations on the urn as supremely happy because all the figures shown are frozen at a moment of youth and happiness.

Keats contrasts this scene, which captures for eternity humans in joyous celebration together, to the unhappiness experienced by human beings who must suffer disappointments in life and love, grow old, grow sick, and die.