JOHN KEATS
Ode on a Grecian Urn
[Thomson, Maglioni,
New Literary Links, CIDEB, vol. 2,
p.413,]
This poem, written in May
The Greek urn, that lies at the
centre of the poem and that the poet addresses as though it were a person decorated with different scenes and
represents a perfect
work of art. However, as we shall discover, Keats' ideas regarding beauty and art are
very complex and
contain many contradictions.
The price of eternity
The
figures on the urn are eternal, but there is a price to pay for eternity, namely immobility and lack of vitality. Indeed the figures on the urn have been `frozen' in a state of pure beauty - the
girl will always be young and beautiful, the leaves
will never fall from the tree etc. - but at the same time they are `cold', people are made
of `marble'. The urn depicts a world that seems at the same time more full of possibility than the real world yet which is
ultimately a trap, since
none of its possibilities can ever be realised. The
piper's music,
for example
is silent
`unheard melody' that contains all the potential of
music but none of its sensuousness. It is music which one can imagine but not hear.
Art therefore may be eternal but it also means death and silence, and though life inevitably decays it can at the same time be enjoyed while it lasts. Looking at
a scene depicting a village whose inhabitants have gone to a sacrifice, the poet
reflects that since the sacrifice will never be completed, the inhabitants
will never return and the village will remain empty for eternity:
the cycle
of life there cannot be renewed. This central ambiguity of the artwork, its being at the same time `superior' and
`inferior' to life, is an example of Keats' notion of 'negative capability', that is to say, to be able to live in a state of permanent uncertainty and doubt.
This uncertainty is most fully conveyed in the poein's closing lines 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' spoken by
the urn. The meaning of these lines is highly
ambiguous and has provoked a great deal of commentary. They are commonly taken to represent the
poet's own cult of art as a kind of autonomous, self-justifying truth. But the phrase 'Beauty is
truth, truth beauty' is tautological - that is to say, it repeats twice the same
concept - and thus tyrannical. It tells us nothing about what might constitute either
of the two terms and offers us no space to define them outside of this eternal
loop. However, there is nothing to guarantee that the statement itself is true, or that it is “all
ye need
to know”.