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John keats

The artistOde on a Grecian UrnText Analysis

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John Keats (1795-1821)

• Life and works• Productive Years

(1817-1821)• Illness and Death

(1820-1821)• The contradictions of

art• Ode on a Grecian Urn

Analysis

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Life and works

• John Keats was born near London on October 31st, 1795. The firstson of a stable-keeper, he had a sister and three brothers, one of whom died in infancy. When John was eight years old, his father was killed in an accident. In the same year his mother married again, but a little later separated from her husband and took her family to live with her mother. John attended a good school where he became well acquainted with ancient and contemporary literature.

• In 1810 his mother died of consumption, leaving the children to their grandmother. The old lady put them under the care of two guardians, to whom she made over a respectable amount of money for the benefit of the orphans. Under the authority of the guardians, he was taken from school to be an apprentice to a surgeon. In 1814, before completion of his apprenticeship, John left his master after a quarrel, becoming a hospital student in London.

• Under the guidance of his friend Cowden Clarke he devoted himself increasingly to literature. In 1814 Keats finally sacrificed his medical ambitions to a literary life.He soon got acquainted with celebrated artists of his time, like Leigh Hunt, Percy B. Shelley and Benjamin Robert Haydon.

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Productive Years (1817-1821)

• Keats travelled to the Isle of Wight on his own in spring of 1817. In the late summer he went to Oxford together with a newly-made friend, Benjamin Bailey. In the following winter, George Keats married and emigrated to America, leaving the consumptuous brother Tom in John's care.

• Apart from helping Tom against consumption, Keats worked on hispoem "Endymion". Just before its publication, he went on a hiking tour to Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown. First signs of his own fatal disease forced him to return prematurely, where he found his brother seriously ill and his poem harshly criticized. In December 1818 Tom Keats died. John moved to Hampstead Heath, were he lived in the house of Charles Brown.

• While in Scotland with Keats, Brown had lent his house to a Mrs Brawne and her sixteen-year-old daughter Fanny. Since the ladies were still living in London, Keats soon made their acquaintance and fell in love with the beautiful, fashionable girl. Absorbed in love and poetry, he exhausted himself mentally, and in autumn of 1819, he tried to gain some distance from literature through an ordinary occupation.

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Illness and Death

• An unmistakeable sign of consumption in February 1820 however broke all his plans for the future, marking the beginning of what he called his "posthumous life". He could not enjoy the positive resonance on the publication of the volume "Lamia, Isabella &c.", including his most celebrated odes.

• In the late summer of 1820, Keats was ordered by his doctors to avoid the English winter and move to Italy. His friend Joseph Severn accompanied him south - first to Naples, and then to Rome. His health improved momentarily, only to collapse finally. Keats died in Rome on the 23rd of February, 1821.

• He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. On his desire, the following lines were engraved on his tombstone: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

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The contradictions of art• Keats’s ideal of beauty and art is very complex and contains

many contradictions. • The figures on the urn are eternal, but there is a price to pay

for eternity: • 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 “, the people are made of marble.

• Art therefore may be eternal but it also means death, and life does decay but at the same time can be enjoyed.

• This central ambiguity of the artwork is an example of Keats’s notion of “negative capability” – the quality he thoughtessential to the poet.

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Ode on a Grecian Urnby John Keats

• I stanza

THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

The face of silence

II stanza

III stanza

IV stanza

V stanza

Analysis

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AnalysisI stanza

• Summary• In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient

Grecian urn and addresses it.• He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in

time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of qiuetness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow time.”

• He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urnand asks what legend they depict and from where theycome.

• He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of menpursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

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Ode on a Grecian Urn

• II stanza

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; 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!

Analysis

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AnalysisII stanza

• Here the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lyingwith his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodiesare sweeter than mortal melodies because theyare unaffected by time and they are the inspirationof our personal imagination – the romantic concept of the role of the artist – He tells the youth that, eventhough he can never kiss his lover because he isfrozen in time, he should not grieve, because herbeauty will never fade – eternal youth associated witheternal beauty .

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Ode on a Grecian Urn

III stanza

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Analysis

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AnalysisIII stanza

• In this stanza, the poet looks at the treessurrounding the lovers and feels happy that theywill never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new”, and happy that the love of the boy and girl will lastforever, unlike mortal love – the immortality of art– which lapses into “breathing human passion”and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”

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IV stanza

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

Analysis

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AnalysisIV stanza

• Here, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer (young cow) to be sacrified.

• He wonders where they are going “To what green altar, O mysterious priest…” and from where theyhave come.

• He imagines their little town, empty of all itscitizens, and tells it that its street will “ forevermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return.

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Ode on a Grecian Urn

V stanza

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with bredeOf marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, «Beauty is truth, truth beauty,»- that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Poems (published 1820)

Analysis

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AnalysisV stanza

• In this final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urnitself, saying that it, like Eternity, “doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations (thus, historian) its enigmatic lesson: Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.It also expresses the superiority of art over human passions.If human life is a succession of “hungry generations, “ as the speaker suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a separate and self-contained world.” It can be “a friend to man,” as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind of aestheticconnection the speaker experiences with the urn isultimately insufficient to human life.

END

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Form

• Each of the five stanzas in "Grecian Urn" is ten lineslong, metered in a relatively precise iambicpentameter, and divided into a two part rhymescheme, the last three lines of which are variable.

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Form

• In stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE;

• in stanza two, CED; • in stanzas three and four, CDE; • in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one.

As in other odes (especially "Autumn" and "Melancholy"), the two-part rhyme scheme(the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) creates the senseof a two-part thematic structure as well.

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Form

• As in other odes (especially "Autumn" and "Melancholy"), the two-part rhyme scheme(the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) creates the senseof a two-part thematic structure as well.

• The first four lines of each stanza roughlydefine the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop it.

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Themes

• The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuriesto the time of the speaker's viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense-

• it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to allsuch concepts.

• In the speaker's meditation, this creates an intriguingparadox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn:

• They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozenin time.

• They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is"for ever young"), but neither can they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their homes).

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• The speaker attempts three times to engage withscenes carved into the urn;

• each time he asks different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the "mad pursuit" and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture:

• "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?" • Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos,

whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.

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• In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees.

• Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them.

• He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attractedto the eternal newness of the piper's unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover.

• He thinks that their love is "far above" all transient humanpassion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to anabatement of intensity--when passion is satisfied, all thatremains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a "burningforehead," and a "parching tongue.“

• His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and heabandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.

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• In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to thinkabout the figures on the urn as though they wereexperiencing human time, imagining that theirprocession has an origin (the "little town") and a destination (the "green altar").

• But all he can think is that the town will forever bedeserted:

• If these people have left their origin, they will neverreturn to it.

• In this sense he confronts head-on the limits of staticart; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whosand wheres of the "real story" in the first stanza, it isimpossible ever to know the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

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• In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawnfrom his attempts to engage with the urn.

• His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeplyfelt identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processionalpurely on its own terms, thinking of the "little town" with a realand generous feeling

• He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporalchange, with its ability to "tease" him "out of thought / As dotheternity.“

• If human life is a succession of "hungry generations," as the speaker suggests in "Nightingale," the urn is a separate and self-contained world.

• It can be a "friend to man," as the speaker says, but it cannotbe mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life.

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Themes

• The final two lines, in which the speaker imaginesthe urn speaking its message to mankind-

• "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," have provedamong the most difficult to interpret in the Keatscanon.

• After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," no one can say for surewho "speaks" the conclusion, "that is all / Ye knowon earth, and all ye need to know.“

• It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and itcould be the urn addressing mankind

John keatsJohn Keats (1795-1821)Life and worksProductive Years (1817-1821)�Illness and Death The contradictions of artOde on a Grecian Urn �by John Keats�Analysis �I stanzaOde on a Grecian UrnAnalysis �II stanzaOde on a Grecian UrnAnalysis�III stanzaAnalysis�IV stanzaOde on a Grecian UrnAnalysis�V stanzaFormFormFormThemesThemes