Ode on a Grecian Urn

John Keats in Ode on a Grecian Urn seems to both celebrate and to lament the human minds capacity to envision beauty in an existence that is inevitable temporary.  The beauty represented by the urn is permanent whereas the beauty the observers mind is able to comprehend is more temporary and will fade as the human mind turns its attention to other duties, ages, and dies with the body.  In this way, the urn and its art symbolize a type of transcendental beauty which the human mind is capable of grasping intermittently but a beauty which can only be immortalized in art.   Human beings therefore can be immortalized in the form of artistic productions in ways that transcend human existence.  Art is an ideal expression of human aspirations and human longings.

In the first stanza, for example, the urns admirer seems marvelously transfixed on the etchings or pictures.  More than anything, this stanza is very much akin to a quest in which the observer longs to know and to understand who these pictures are about and what they might mean.  More than any other stanza, this one is tightly organized around questions rather than mere observations or extrapolations.  The observer queries about place, for instance, when states In Tempe or the dales of Arcady (Keats 7), about character when he states What men or gods are these What maidens loth (Keats 8), and about motive and plot when he states What mad pursuit What struggle to escape (Keats 9).  There is a beauty, indicated by word choice such as flowery and sweetly, that the observer is trying to understand and this beauty is fixed in time as is implied both by the existence of the pictures on an inanimate urn and by the poets reference to slow time (Keats 2).  The poet thus frames this poem in terms of a wondrous quest, of beautiful people and places, and of a beauty that is not constrained so much by the passage of time.

In the second and third stanzas the poet celebrates art as a type of permanent beauty and seems to place the ability to grasp this beauty firmly in the powers of the human mind rather than in the physical world.  This separation of mind and body is made explicitly when the poet writes that Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard (Keats 11) and Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeard (Keats 13).  The beauty, in effect, cannot be discerned through the sense of sound and must be perceived and processed by the mind alone.  This is a profound thought as it implies some connection between the human mind and the beauty represented by the pictures on the urn.  The observer therefore hears the sounds of the pipe with his mind rather than with his ears.  History is as a result made permanent and the people and the activities on the urn are thereby immortalized.  This notion of immortality is reinforced when the poet subsequently writes that For ever piping songs for ever new (Keats 24).  This ever new language expresses that the sounds of the pipes heard in the human mind persist despite the passage of time and they are forever fixed in time.  The first three stanzas, in sum, accomplish a merging of art and the human mind that transcend time, the physical body, and the inevitability of death.

The final two stanzas, attempting to tie this merging of art and mind together, are used to express the observers desire for the art to be more accessible and for the art to be recognized as a human manifestation of the greatest beauties and the highest truths.  In terms of accessibility, for example, the poet writes Why thou art desolate, can eer return (Keats 40).  The notion of a desolate art unable to return seems a plea for human beings to embrace art, to understand art through the mind, and to avoid treating it as an irrelevant relic of ancient times.  The poet then attempts to equate the beauty of art with the highest truths by stating that Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought (Keats 44) and Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all (Keats 49).  The purpose of art is to illustrate human ideals and these ideals are known by the mind rather than mundane forms of transient thought constrained by the pressures of quickly passing time.  In conclusion, Keats seems to be celebrating the power of the human mind to transcend the physical world and to be proposing artistic endeavors as one means for accomplishing this type of transcendental intellectual state.