Keats is addressing someone, or something, here. He's saying, thou - you - you still unravished bride of quietness, you foster child of silence and slow time, you are a Sylvan historian. So who or what is he addressing here? If you want to pause the video and
think about it, go ahead. Well? Did you get it? That's right! He's addressing the urn itself. It's an ode on a Grecian urn and he's talking to the urn. So here he says what the urn is, and then he goes on to talk about what the urn can do; it can tell a story - "express a flowery tale" - better than Keats himself can. And then he brings in a whole range of images: a "leaf-fring'd legend", deities, mortals, Tempe,
the "vales of Arcady", "men or gods", "maidens loth", a "mad pursuit", a "struggle to escape", "pipes and
timbrels" and "wild ecstasy". Again, what is he talking about here? W hat do you think? Pause the video for a while if you want to; see if you can work it out! All right! Did you get it? He's talking about what's painted
on the urn, the pictures he can see. Let's slow down a bit here and look at this in some detail. Keats is describing the urn, he's telling
us what he sees in the urn; let's have a look and see exactly what he's talking about. So here's the urn and I'm going to
illustrate it according to his description. And again, if you'd like to imagine it
for yourself before I draw the pictures, pause the video here and see what you
can come up with in your mind... All right, here goes! First he talks about a "leaf-fringed legend", so the story is surrounded by some
kind of leafy border. Let's put that in. then he talks about deities and mortals, so let's add a couple of figures here
that may be human or may be divine, and he says "Tempe or the dales of Arcady", which leads me to feel that it's something going on outside, something in the open air, in nature. Then he develops deities or mortals into "men or gods". I'm going to add a few more figures. And then he talks about maidens loth. it seems that they're being pursued
and they're struggling to escape. Well, in my mind that might look something like this... Then he introduces pipes and timbrels,
musical instruments, which make me feel that perhaps what we're looking at here
is some kind of party, a festival, something like that is what I
imagine Keats is looking at, and describing to us in this first stanza of
the poem. Did you picture it to yourself something
like that in your mind's eye? Do you feel you that you have a grasp on what Keats
is describing in this opening stanza of the poem? I hope so! stay tuned for my analysis of the second stanza... "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter"; the melodies the poet can only imagine are sweeter than those that he can actually hear. This recalls the first stanza where the Sylvan historian - that is, the urn - can "express a flowery
tale more sweetly" than the poet can, and the fact that those melodies are "unheard" picks up on the quietness, the silence,
that he talks about in the first stanza, And, of course, that all makes sense because
he can only see the picture on the urn; he can't hear the music, he can only imagine it. So the melodies he can only imagine are
sweeter than melodies he can actually hear, and the tale he can create in his
imagination, from the pictures in the urn, is sweeter than any tale he can tell in his rhyme, that is, in his poetry. Just as the story we can imagine from the pictures on the urn is sweeter than
the story we can tell in words, so the music that we can imagine is "more endeared"
than the music we hear with the sensual ear. We're beginning to get a kind of
pattern here; reality is ranged against the
imagination and imagination is better. In the second part of the stanza there's
a lot of apparently negative stuff; everything in the picture is frozen,
unchanging, so the youth cannot stop singing, and the trees can never lose
their leaves, the lover can never kiss the woman that he pursues and she - less
negatively perhaps - can never fade. And at the same time he says "do not grieve". Even
though you don't have your fulfillment "Forever wilt thou love and she be fair". That last line nullifies all those negatives. Never mind, he says, through the
figures in the picture; never mind what you don't have;
think about what you've got. In this world of the urn, this world that he imagines while looking at the urn, there are limits and there are possibilities; and the possibilities outweigh the limits. This idea that there's another world, a better world,
that can be reached through the imagination, is something that Keats comes back
to time and again in his poetry. But there's more to it than that; it's not so simple, as
we shall see when we turn to the third stanza. There's one word that sets the tone for this stanza, and there are no prizes for guessing what it is! You can stop the video and think about it
if you like, but I think it's pretty obvious... Yes, the word "happy" occurs six times.
That's got to mean something! And this happiness is associated with the same
things that he talked about before; the tree, whose boughs can never lose their
leaves and which will always be living in the springtime; the piper, who will
always be piping new songs; and the lover, who will always be chasing the object of
his love, "For ever panting and for ever young. But the atmosphere, the tone of the
poem, changes in the last two lines. In what way does it change? Pause the
video if you want to think about it... Right! Somehow this happiness is all too
much; it leaves the heart "high sorrowful", suggesting a sorrow that comes from an
excess of happiness, just as the word "cloy'd" describes the discomfort that
comes from too much sweetness. And the lover can never wipe his burning
forehead or wet his parching tongue. This is very typical of Keats.
He had a miserable life, his parents died when he was still a child, his brother died, his guardian kept
his inheritance from him, he wasn't able to marry the woman he loved, and he too sickened and died at the age of twenty-five. So it's no surprise, really, that he sought some
escape from the sorrows of the world, that he tried to find relief from the miseries
of life by entering a world of the imagination. What makes him so remarkable, though -
the reason we still read his poetry today - is that, instead of just escaping to some
imaginary world of happiness, he realizes that even that world has its suffering, its pain, that in the end there can be no happiness, no joy, without sadness and grief. We'll see this even more clearly when we come to the fourth stanza. In this stanza the poet introduces quite
a few new elements. For example, we've got a "mysterious priest", we've
got a heifer - a cow - "lowing at the skies", and with garlands of flowers about her flanks. And there are people coming
to a sacrifice; there's an altar. How does this fit with the picture of
the urn that we've built up so far? Yes, pause the video if you want to think about it... It's still the same urn, but now Keats is
looking at it from a different angle, perhaps from the other side of the urn,
so he's seeing a different picture. Here's the heifer, and the priest, and
others are coming to the sacrifice. And what about the altar that he
spoke of? Where would that be? Pause if you want to... It's not actually on the urn, is it? He asks the priest
"to what altar" are you leading the heifer, which suggests that the altar is
outside the urn, outside the picture, and that gives us a hint about the next
part of the stanza, the little town. How do you think that fits in? Again, take
your time, pause the video if you want to... Again, Keats is thinking outside
the frame of the urn itself. Just as those people are going to
an altar to sacrifice the cow, so they must have come from somewhere, and he imagines the little town that they have come from. Is it by a river? Or by the sea? Or in
the mountains? He doesn't know. But what he does know is that, like everything in the world of the urn, it can never change - and it's not a source of happiness. The town is "desolate" - deserted and miserable - echoing the word "sorrowful", used at the end of the previous stanza. As Keats enters more deeply into the world
of the urn, seeing not only the various pictures painted on the urn itself, but
also, in his imagination, envisaging the altar where the figures on the urn are going, and the town from which they have come, it becomes more and more apparent
that this is not just the world of "happy happy love", inhabited by beings who are
"For ever panting and for ever young". The heifer, decked with flowers as it is,
is in fact going to be slaughtered, The town the figures have
come from is forever deserted. Keats loses himself in the world of the urn, seeking, perhaps, to escape from the misery of the real world in which he finds himself. All too soon, though, he finds that the world of the urn, the world of imagination, is also
tainted with pain and suffering... There are one or two vocabulary points
here. "Attic" means from Attica, that's the area around Athens; "brede" is an old form of braid, that is to say braiding or embroidery; in other words decoration, ornamentation; and a pastoral is an ideal representation of country life. The first part of the stanza talks,
once again, about what the urn is, and there's a fair bit of playing around with language in there; there's the alliteration of "marble", "men" and "maidens", leading up to that word "overwrought", which on the one hand suggests that the brede or braiding is highly decorated - too ornate even - and on the other suggests that the maidens
are in a state of emotional excitement. And there's also that pun on the word "brede" [breed], carrying as it does the idea of a
race of "men and maidens". And the second part of the stanza
focuses, again, on what the urn does, contrasting it with the misery of the real world, in which the present generation
will be wasted by old age, and future generations will have
their own woe, their own sorrows. The urn, by contrast, teases us "out of thought". This is an example of the "negative capability", the ability to stop rationalizing and lose oneself
in a sense of beauty and wonderment, for which Keats is famous. This is an idea he develops at the end of the poem, saying that the message of the urn is that beauty is truth, and that truth is beauty, and we don't really need to know anything else in this life. There's probably been more debate
about these last two lines than about the whole of the rest
of the poem put together. For some, these last lines successfully express the aesthetic sensibility of a poet who seeks a form of truth that
exists beyond rational thought, while for others they represent a failure on the part of the poet to capture the deeper message of the poem, which is that we cannot escape from this
world of pain and suffering into a world of beauty and imagination, because in that world too there will be suffering. There's no right or wrong way to
understand this. it's simply something for each
individual to think about, which in the end I suppose is what poetry and literature are all about - not to give us answers, but to
give us something to think about.
