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
quietness,” 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 urn and asks what legend they
depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems
to depict a group of men pursuing 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?”
In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture
on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with
his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s
“unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they
are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never
kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve,
because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks
at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will
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 the
girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing
human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning
forehead, and a parching tongue.”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture
on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to
be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (“To what green altar,
O mysterious priest...”) and from where they have come. He imagines
their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that
its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left
it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the
speaker again addresses the urn itself, 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 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.
Form
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” follows the same ode-stanza structure
as the “Ode on Melancholy,” though it varies more the rhyme scheme
of the last three lines of each stanza. Each of the five stanzas
in “Grecian Urn” is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise
iambic pentameter, and divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last
three lines of which are variable. The first seven lines of each
stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second occurrences
of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one, lines
seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED; in stanzas
three and four, CDE; and 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 sense of a two-part thematic structure
as well. The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the
subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop
it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule, true of some
stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect
rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)
Themes
If the “Ode to a Nightingale” portrays Keats’s speaker’s
engagement with the fluid expressiveness of music, the “Ode on a
Grecian Urn” portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility
of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries
to 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 all such concepts. In the speaker’s meditation, this
creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into
the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously
frozen in 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).
The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes
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.
