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The Urn

The speaker’s meditation on the urn transforms this ancient piece of pottery into an object of symbolic significance. Initially, the urn symbolizes the immortality of art. The speaker indicates as much when they open the poem with an emphasis on the urn’s unchanging form (lines 1–2):

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
       Thou foster-child of silence and slow time

Note the ambiguity of the word “still” in the first line. It isn’t perfectly clear whether this is used as an adjective (i.e., “unmoving”) or an adverb (i.e., “as yet”). Either way, the speaker expresses awe for the urn’s survival across many centuries, which makes the artifact into a symbol for art’s immortality. By the poem’s end, however, the urn’s symbolic status shifts in an ambiguous way. As the speaker reflects on the urn’s meaning in the final stanza, they speculate about the message this artifact might say to the world if it could speak (lines 47–50):

                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.

For the speaker, the urn communicates a straightforward relationship between “truth” and “beauty.” This is a simplistic conclusion, and it isn’t entirely clear what the speaker thinks about it. Does the simplicity of the statement make the urn into a symbol of naïveté? Or does it make the urn that much more valuable, because it stands for a simple truth that has otherwise been forgotten or ignored? The answer depends on how we read these final lines.

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