Ode on a Grecian Urn

After not having read it for years, I revisited Ode on a Grecian Urn last night. My take on it below:

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?

"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence..." This time the strangeness of the first two lines struck me. No conjunction links the addresses (e.g. Thou bride or thou foster-child) and it seems the urn is all three at the same time: bride, child, and historian. A child bride? And how immediately the first line conjures up violence: "still unravish'd," i.e. still un-raped. 

Starting at line 5, the speaker steps closer to engage with the artwork on the urn. The problem is that he can't quite, because, though he comprehends what is happening, he nevertheless cannot comprehend it. Strikingly, lines 5 - 10 (end of stanza) are all questions. "What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape ... What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?" Impossible to miss is how these questions, increasingly breathless, culminate in a kind of crescendo that echoes the "ecstasy" of the scene, as if the adrenaline of the scene contaminates the speaker. The speaker knows what is being depicted, and yet he questions it; on some level, it's not comprehensible to him.

A note about the scene - what is this scene? It sounds awful - men or gods pursuing "loth" maidens who "struggle to escape". Notwithstanding idyllic pastoral scenes of Greek shepherds, the "deities or mortals" of ancient Greece were a bloodthirsty lot: the women raped and/or chased by Zeus and Apollo; Iphigenia and Polyxena, sacrificed. Also, the all-female mob in The Bacchus ripping men apart in "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!

The second stanza is a reboot. The speaker steps back from the precipice of being caught up in the "wild ecstasy." Indeed the stepping back is verbally enacted: "A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme" from early in stanza 1 tells us we've stitched back to that point as we begin stanza 2: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter..." And it is a reverie of this "unheard" melody that takes up the rest of this stanza. Here, the speaker, whose questioning towards an objective truth ("What... What...") in the earlier stanza is met with silence, turns to his imagination ("the spirit ditties") to supply an answer. He fixates on a "Fair youth" who is also a "Bold Lover," forever chasing (but unable to reach, due to urn's unchangingness) his "goal," "she" who is "fair" and "cannot fade."

One wonders the relation between the "Bold Lover" and the scene from stanza 1. Is the lover one of the "men" chasing "maidens loth," or is this another scene? If the former, we are faced with the stark fact that Keats felt that an attempted rape fit into Bold Lover's narrative (who, in stanza three, we find is "happy" with "happy love"). Regardless, the fact that the speaker meditates so extensively (for much of stanza three and four) on the "Fair youth" is noteworthy. Keats's negative capability is famous, but here I feel it is almost "positive" capability at work. Why doesn't he inhabit the mind of the fleeing maiden? Or the "gods" or even the "happy boughs" of the vegetal? One inevitably thinks of Keats's biography, his gender, his engagement to Fanny Brawne, and his sheer youth - at twenty-four, shadowed by mortality, how could he not identify with the "Fair youth" and "Bold Lover"? 

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.

The speaker's imaginative engagement with the art on the urn through the "Fair youth", prompted by his ignorance of its meaning, continues throughout stanza 3. We see shades of the same speaker of Ode to a Nightingale and To Autumn. He envies the eternity guaranteed to the "happy melodist," culminating in line 5 of stanza 3: "More happy love! more happy, happy love!" The reach towards happiness exhausts itself here, with its stultified repetition of just three words ("more", "happy", "love"), and we are not surprised by the subsequent descent: "All breathing human passion far above, / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue."

The end of stanza 3 thus marks the end of the speaker's imaginative engagement with the urn's artwork via the route of the "Fair youth." This route ran through the speaker's subjectivity, taking him through desire and its futility. Notably, the route leads him to depart the urn. The last three lines of stanza 3, describing as they do the exhaustion of human passion, have nothing to do with the urn. Like the silence at the end of stanza 1, and like the eternally "unravish'd" and un-caught "[maiden]," the urn has elided the speaker's grasp.

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.

As the beginning of stanza 2, stanza 4 begins with a re-engagement with the urn from a different perspective. "Who are these coming to the sacrifice?" One can imagine the speaker has merely turned to another scene on the urn, but the word "sacrifice" embeds the progression of violence in the poem. The "mad pursuit" and "struggle to escape," the effort of the fair youth to come "near the goal," are both sublimated in the formalized parallel action of a "sacrifice," whereby the (female) "heifer lowing at the skies" will be subjected to the violence eluded (still) by the other female characters in the poem. The heifer's "silken flanks" are "with garlands drest" - a connection to the "leaf-fring'd legend" dressing the urn, and the "fair" maiden-goal of the "Fair youth".

The speaker's engagement with the social scene ends much in the same way as his engagement with the "Fair youth" - by slipping off the urn. In stanza 4, the speaker asks "What little town ... or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, / Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?" The town where the urn's "folk" live is not depicted on the urn, or only hinted at, as otherwise the speaker would at least be able to determine if the town is by a "sea" or in a "mountain." He imaginatively visits this imaginary town, and finds it determined to "silent be," refusing to answer his question of the nature of the humans engaging in the sacrifice.

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."

Here, the speaker has concluded his imaginative engagement with the urn's artwork. In stanza 5, he returns to the same attitude with which he began the poem, addressing the whole urn via apostrophe: "O Attic shape! Fair attitude!" A "silent form," it has ignored his questions. Opaque and un-obtained, the urn seems on par with "eternity." The speaker has engaged - the urn has let him - but ultimately remains a "Cold Pastoral!" Finally, the speaker imagines what this "cold" urn might say as "a friend to man:" "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'"

These famous last lines are the urn's dismissal of the speaker. As if acknowledging the speaker's insistent questioning (a striking 60% and 70% of the lines in stanzas 1 and 4 are questions) to know the "truth", the urn replies that it is "beauty." But we realize that the speaker's questioning for the "truth" springs from confrontations with the un-beautiful. The questions in stanza 1 crescendo upon realizing an attempted rape; the questions in stanza 4 derive from noticing a planned sacrifice. The urn has noted the speaker's lengthy meditative engagement with the "Bold Lover" and his pursuit of his "fair" object, noted also how this pursuit ends with "A burning forehead, and a parching tongue." The tautological "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'" is the speaker's own recognition (via the urn's long-delayed answer) of his obsession with the beautiful and how, indeed, he shirks from and/or finds almost unbearable the "truth," embedded as it is in the "[eternal]" knot of human violence and the futility of life. The horror of reality (says the urn) is not for those "on earth" to know, especially not one (as you) to whom beauty is an opiate. Finally, there is, I think, also an implicit rebuke to the speaker's stance towards the female, that their "beauty" is the "truth," a principle that gives license to pursuit and that ignores their humanity.