What can one say about one of the most famous poems in the English language? Every schoolchild can (or could, who knows nowadays…young people!) recite its famous closing lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
A young man—Keats died at 26—is transfixed by an ancient Greek urn with pictures of gods chasing mortals, lovers caught in mid-kiss, spring trees in new leaf, pipers making song, villagers leading a heifer to sacrifice. The characters have been unchanged for 2000 years, and Keats imagines they will remain so “When old age shall this generation waste”. The young poet feels intensely the contrast between the fixed, unchanging pictures and what they are showing, people in the midst of frantic actions—actions that will never be fulfilled.
There is nothing special about this urn, as far as we can tell. It is a normal, generic piece of Greek pottery. Keats doesn’t know who is being depicted or what stories they might be caught up in. He fills the poem with questions: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?…Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, leadst thou that heifer lowing at the skies?” There are no answers. The poet is held by something that stands outside of change and time and knowledge itself. It is an experience that “dost tease us out of thought As does eternity.”
It seems important for Keats that this is a Grecian urn, even specifically an “Attic shape”. It is not Roman, or Chinese, or pre-Columbian. Keats like many Englishmen of his time and class was brought up to venerate the Greeks. His education at the Enfield Academy immersed him in Greek poetry, history, and philosophy. Another of his most famous poems, “On Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” celebrates reading Homer (via Chapman’s translation; Keats apparently never learned Greek). Keats was so enamored of the Greeks that his contemporary Shelly said of him “Keats is Greek.”
What was it in the Greeks or “Greekness” that appealed to Keats? It is contained somehow in his conclusion about the sameness of Beauty and Truth. For the Greeks, according to Keats, there is no division between the two. One might see his claim as a distillation of Plato, who seems to teach that the love of the beautiful leads to or is the same as philosophy. But even if Keats is not thinking of Plato, the combining of the two in a civilization that simultaneously produced sublime beauty in its art, and profound knowledge in its science and philosophy, is immensely appealing.
One doesn’t have to choose between the poet and the scientist. The artist seeking and creating beauty is not at odds with the philosopher. Beauty and Truth are two aspects of the Eternal.
There seems to be a tension, however, between experiencing the urn and its unity of Beauty and Truth, and capturing this experience in poetry. To genuinely see the urn is hard. It has to be experienced without thought, without interpreting what it shows, trying to see past it or through it. Can poetry convey the stillness and changelessness of the urn? This seems contradictory, since any linguistic description involves movement as the reader begins to read and goes through the writing, one word, sentence, and image succeeding another. .
Keats points to the dilemma at the start, addressing the urn as “Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme”. And in the second stanza “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter; therefore ye soft pipes play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone”.
The goal is to directly reach the spirit and this seems to require a melody, or a rhyme, that is paradoxically unheard. It may be impossible to achieve this in speech, which cannot duplicate seeing the urn directly. The urn maker has pictured people, animals, trees but also shown action and movement and emotion and sound, paradoxically fixed forever in silence and immobility. The poet has a double challenge, one art conveying the results of a different art. Rhymes and melodies unfold in time, requiring a movement of our attention.
The third and central stanza is key to the poet’s vision. Keats repeats the world ‘happy’ over and over to describe the unchanging trees, the piper, and especially the love “forever warm and still to be enjoyed.” Only here does Keats bring himself into the poem, contrasting the changelessness of the urn with the reality of love that he has observed, or experienced himself “That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” The work of art captures what is most precious in our changing and imperfect world, the moment when love is all possibility and hope, before the inevitable sorrow and regret.
Can the poet redeem the moment of true love? Or the other similar moments the urn points to: the green leaves of spring that will, inevitably, turn brown and fall to earth; the piper’s song that will fade away; the sacrifices that will fall short of fulfillment. What if these outcomes are suspended, if we can hold fast to those moments before change and decay and disappointment take their toll?The urn holds out that promise. And perhaps even more with the poem that describes the urn, which like what it depicts will one day come to an end. The words can be preserved forever.
The Greeks for Keats are the ones who discovered and tried to capture the permanent, the timeless. They are the ones who claimed there must be Truth that lies outside any particular truth, Beauty outside any particular instance of beauty. They are the ones who claimed that the unchanging is both better and more ‘real’ than what comes into being and passes away.
The poem doesn’t tell us what Keats thinks of his own time. He says the urn will ‘in the midst of other woe’ remain a ‘friend to man’; the human condition, he implies, is never free from sorrow and pain, but can be helped if not healed by the silent communion he describes. Since the urn was made, has Christianity with its deep suspicion of earthly things permanently separated truth and beauty? Has modern science relegated beauty to the realm of the subjective, while making truth ugly, nothing but Descartes’ mathematically describable extension? Can this lost unity be recovered? Keats, perhaps out of youthful enthusiasm, says emphatically ‘yes’— access to “Greekness” remains possible.
It is interesting to consider the very different perspective of Keats’ older German contemporary, Goethe. His Faust says something quite different to Mephistopheles. Faust tells Mephistopheles he can have his soul
If ever I stretch on an idler’s bed.
Then let my doom descend!
If ever through lying flattery
You lure me into self-complacency.
If ever through pleasure you succeed
In tricking me into feeling satisfied
Let that day be my last!
This is my wager!
If ever to the moment I should say ‘Oh, stay! Thou art so fair!’
Clap me into fetters then and there
Then to destruction I will gladly go. (Faust Part I, Act 4).
Faust does not seem to believe Keatsian moments of timeless rapture are desirable. They are signs of human weakness. Man is at his best not when silent and full of the moment, but when active and striving and dissatisfied. We could say this is not a Greek but a modern view of man. What Faust wants from the devil is a stream of experiences.
Faust’s appetites and ceaseless striving bring terrible results, including the death of his beloved Gretchen. Yet despite this Faust eventually has his ‘moment’ and is saved, shown in the baffling end of Faust, Part II where Faust imagines a bright future made possible—for others—by strenuous labor. The most admirable human work is not something beautiful but something useful. [1]
Ode on a Grecian Urn
BY JOHN KEATS
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?
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!
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.
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.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of 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.”
[1] Yet it seems Goethe too is thinking about our relation to the Greeks. In a letter about Part II of Faust, he wrote “It is time that the impassioned dispute between classicists and romantics should finally be reconciled. The principal thing is that we should properly cultivate ourselves; the source from which we do so would not matter, if we did not have to fear the possibility of miscultivation by appealing to false models. For it is certainly a broader and purer insight into and around Greek and Roman literature to which we owe our liberation from the monkish barbarism of the period between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Is it not from this high level that we can learn to appreciate everything in its true physical and aesthetic value, both what is oldest and what is newest?” (Goethe’s letter to K. J. L. Iken September 27, 1827)
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