Name:- Nirali J rathod
Roll no:- 24
Paper no:- 5, Romantic literature
Topic:- Critical commentary on ode on Grecian urn
Enrolment no:- 20691084201900039
E-mail ID:- niralijrathod@gmail.com
SUBMITTED TO :- S B GARDI DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
John Keats born on 31 October 1795. He was poet of romantic genre. His name was counted as second generation poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25 on 23 February 1821
Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his lifetime, his reputation grew after his death, and by the end of the 19th century, he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats' work was the most significant literary experience of his life.
The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. This is typical of romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through an emphasis on natural imagery. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature. Some of the most acclaimed works of Keats are "Ode to a Nightingale", "Sleep and Poetry”, and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".
Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his lifetime, his reputation grew after his death, and by the end of the 19th century, he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats' work was the most significant literary experience of his life.
The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. This is typical of romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through an emphasis on natural imagery. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature. Some of the most acclaimed works of Keats are "Ode to a Nightingale", "Sleep and Poetry”, and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".
Ode to Grecian Urn' is, probably, an admiration to the adoration of beauty; especially the beauty of art in general and Hellenistic in particular. The poet noticed the painting of a village ceremony on a Grecian Urn. Keats, a die heart romantic, attempt on to capture not only what the sculpture might have intended but also what the flight of poet's fancy could produce from yonder lands. We are amazed at the artistic trickery and astonishing power of vigor with which the purely romantic poet gives vent to his inner emotions. Keats seems to have journeyed, through the powerful effect of fancy, to the foreign lands of the past to discover the true attributes of the civilization he saw on the urn. For Keats the Grecian Urn's silence is "unravished bride of quietness"; the poet takes the opportunity to express story of this bride, the Grecian Urn. He reminds us that the Grecian Urn and the story sculptured onto it is the one such that cannot be narrated by any historian with the charm that poetry has in store for us. Therefore, he wants us to expect "flowery tale" from old times. The romantic poet has a powerful fancy to bring out mesmerizing stories out of the inscription of the Grecian Urn.
He can visualize the legendary figure. He imagines it to be of a human. Then he thinks it might be of some god. Then counting on the Hellenistic remarks, he terms it a demigod; a legendary figure both human and godly. From the imagery in the stone, the poet crafts a romantic scene where the lovers are chasing their beloveds. Then he adds minute details of how they must be "panting" with the "burning foreheads" and "dried tongues" in their "mad" and playful "pursuit" of love making. However, the poet feels that their happy lot of chasing would ever remain unchanged. Their love can never be complete for the chase is on forever. With the music added to the pleasures of the youth, Keats considers it a "wild ecstasy" because the height of this joy could neither be limited nor could have an edge to it. It's the permanency of this very joyful , which forces the poet consider an "ecstasy". It is the same "ecstasy" the poet wishes to join by plunging into the time and age of the people in this urn; he wishes to celebrate and rejoice with them. He wishes to enjoy the music of the Grecian Urn.
Keats declares: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard "Are sweeter"... The trees of the urn can never be bare and the season of joys, spring, may continue. The song played by the musicians would ever remain new for it is never finished; neither the song will become old nor would it end tire them. It is "more happy love" because it is to be youthful and enjoyable for times to come. He styles the urn "fair attitude" and a civilization of marble men. The poet can see that the trees' branches and weeds have quite surrounded the urn. The urn is "cold pastoral" because it has rural scenery and a silent race that cannot speak. The poet "may cease to be" but the urn shall remain in the world, in the midst of human woes and agony. The urn and its culture is a happy lot and it convinces the poet that art, in the form of beauty, is capable of enduring the damages of time and age. The poet is happy to have seen the beauty of the Grecian Urn. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
He can visualize the legendary figure. He imagines it to be of a human. Then he thinks it might be of some god. Then counting on the Hellenistic remarks, he terms it a demigod; a legendary figure both human and godly. From the imagery in the stone, the poet crafts a romantic scene where the lovers are chasing their beloveds. Then he adds minute details of how they must be "panting" with the "burning foreheads" and "dried tongues" in their "mad" and playful "pursuit" of love making. However, the poet feels that their happy lot of chasing would ever remain unchanged. Their love can never be complete for the chase is on forever. With the music added to the pleasures of the youth, Keats considers it a "wild ecstasy" because the height of this joy could neither be limited nor could have an edge to it. It's the permanency of this very joyful , which forces the poet consider an "ecstasy". It is the same "ecstasy" the poet wishes to join by plunging into the time and age of the people in this urn; he wishes to celebrate and rejoice with them. He wishes to enjoy the music of the Grecian Urn.
Keats declares: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard "Are sweeter"... The trees of the urn can never be bare and the season of joys, spring, may continue. The song played by the musicians would ever remain new for it is never finished; neither the song will become old nor would it end tire them. It is "more happy love" because it is to be youthful and enjoyable for times to come. He styles the urn "fair attitude" and a civilization of marble men. The poet can see that the trees' branches and weeds have quite surrounded the urn. The urn is "cold pastoral" because it has rural scenery and a silent race that cannot speak. The poet "may cease to be" but the urn shall remain in the world, in the midst of human woes and agony. The urn and its culture is a happy lot and it convinces the poet that art, in the form of beauty, is capable of enduring the damages of time and age. The poet is happy to have seen the beauty of the Grecian Urn. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
No one knows if, when he wrote this in May 1819 (his great year of productivity), Keats had in mind one particular urn, although it is known that he drew or traced a vase contained in a volume of engravings called Musée Napoléon that he saw in the house of his beloved friend Benjamin Haydon. No doubt Keats’ constant visits to the British Museum will have provided plenty of other examples. The heifer being led to sacrifice in the poem’s fourth stanza is probably based on an image found on the South Frieze of the Elgin Marbles.
Keats realized that the function of a Grecian urn was to preserve the ashes of the dead. As he wrote in Endymion, ‘Why, I have shed / An urn of tears, as though thou wert cold-dead’. The stasis and peace of the urn is absolutely juxtaposed with current human frailty. Having witnessed the death of his brother Tom from tuberculosis a few months previously, Keats was now surrendering to the same illness, so would be familiar with the effect – and consequence – of ‘A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.’ (l.30)
It is important to apprehend the dramatic situation in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” both to understand the poem on a literal level and to glean any larger meaning from it. A narrator looks at the pictures that decorate the outside of an urn; between the “leaf-fringed legend s ” (line 5)—literally, the decorated borders on top and beneath the painted figures on the vase—the narrator sees two distinct scenes, consisting primarily of figures engaged in two activities common to Greek life: raucous intimate play and religious celebration.
The speaker in the poem addresses the urn directly, as if it were a living object like birds and animals or human. Viewing the first scene of poem , which consists of a collection of young people engaging in some form of carnival, the narrator asks about the identity of the people and about their motives: Are the women escaping from the men, or is this a courting match? Why is there music (represented by a figure on the urn who is playing an instrument)? The scene makes the narrator realize that he can only imagine his own answers—but in a sense, the “unheard” melodies that he imagines are “sweeter” than those he might actually hear (lines 11-12). Gazing at what he believes to be two lovers about to hold tightly lover’s hand, he observes that, though they can never gift their relationship, they will never change, either; instead, they will be forever in that heightened state of anticipation that precedes the climax of a love affair. Their love will be pure t the beginning of the fourth stanza, the narrator shifts his gaze to the second scene on the urn; in it, some townspeople are leading a calf to an altar for sacrifice. Once more the narrator asks questions: Who are these people? Where do they come from? Again he realizes that he cannot get the answers from viewing the urn; the questions will be forever unanswered, because the urn is not capable of providing such information. Rather, it sits silently, provoking his curiosity.
In the final stanza, the narrator recognizes the futility of his questioning and acknowledges that the urn is simply capable of teasing him “out of thought” (line 44)—leaving him unable to come to some logical conclusion about the stories depicted on the urn, and hence about the value of the urn itself. The narrator concludes by calling it a “Cold Pastoral” (line 45) whose ultimate worth lies in its beauty, not in its message.
The first response to the poem came in an anonymous review in the July 1820 Monthly Review, which claimed, "Mr Keats displays no great nicety in his selection of images. According to the tenets of that school of poetry to which he belongs, he thinks that any thing or object in nature is a fit material on which the poet may work ... Can there be a more pointed concetto than this address to the Piping Shepherds on a Grecian Urn?" Another anonymous review followed in the 29 July 1820 Literary Chronicle and Weekly Reviewthat quoted the poem with a note that said that "Among the minor poems, many of which possess considerable merit, the following appears to be the best". Josiah Conder, in a September 1820 Eclectic Review, argues that:
Mr Keats, seemingly, can think or write of scarcely any thing else than the 'happy pieties' of Paganism. A Grecian Urn throws him into an ecstasy: its 'silent form,' he says, 'doth tease us out of thought as doth Eternity,'—a very happy description of the bewildering effect which such subjects have at least had upon his own mind; and his fancy having thus got the better of his reason, we are the less surprised at the oracle which the Urn is made to utter:
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
That is, all that Mr Keats knows or cares to know.—But till he knows much more than this, he will never write verses fit to live.
George Gilfillan, in an 1845 essay on Keats, placed the poem among "The finest of Keats' smaller pieces" and suggested that "In originality, Keats has seldom been surpassed. His works 'rise like an exhalation.' His language has been formed on a false system; but, ere he died, was clarifying itself from its more glaring faults, and becoming copious clear, and select. He seems to have been averse to all speculative thought, and his only creed, we fear, was expressed in the words— Beauty is truth,—truth beauty". The 1857 Encyclopædia Britannica contained an article on Keats by Alexander Smith, which stated: "Perhaps the most exquisite specimen of Keats' poetry is the 'Ode to the Grecian Urn'; it breathes the very spirit of antiquity,—eternal beauty and eternal repose." During the mid-19th century, Matthew Arnold claimed that the passage describing the little town "is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added."
The speaker in the poem addresses the urn directly, as if it were a living object like birds and animals or human. Viewing the first scene of poem , which consists of a collection of young people engaging in some form of carnival, the narrator asks about the identity of the people and about their motives: Are the women escaping from the men, or is this a courting match? Why is there music (represented by a figure on the urn who is playing an instrument)? The scene makes the narrator realize that he can only imagine his own answers—but in a sense, the “unheard” melodies that he imagines are “sweeter” than those he might actually hear (lines 11-12). Gazing at what he believes to be two lovers about to hold tightly lover’s hand, he observes that, though they can never gift their relationship, they will never change, either; instead, they will be forever in that heightened state of anticipation that precedes the climax of a love affair. Their love will be pure t the beginning of the fourth stanza, the narrator shifts his gaze to the second scene on the urn; in it, some townspeople are leading a calf to an altar for sacrifice. Once more the narrator asks questions: Who are these people? Where do they come from? Again he realizes that he cannot get the answers from viewing the urn; the questions will be forever unanswered, because the urn is not capable of providing such information. Rather, it sits silently, provoking his curiosity.
In the final stanza, the narrator recognizes the futility of his questioning and acknowledges that the urn is simply capable of teasing him “out of thought” (line 44)—leaving him unable to come to some logical conclusion about the stories depicted on the urn, and hence about the value of the urn itself. The narrator concludes by calling it a “Cold Pastoral” (line 45) whose ultimate worth lies in its beauty, not in its message.
The first response to the poem came in an anonymous review in the July 1820 Monthly Review, which claimed, "Mr Keats displays no great nicety in his selection of images. According to the tenets of that school of poetry to which he belongs, he thinks that any thing or object in nature is a fit material on which the poet may work ... Can there be a more pointed concetto than this address to the Piping Shepherds on a Grecian Urn?" Another anonymous review followed in the 29 July 1820 Literary Chronicle and Weekly Reviewthat quoted the poem with a note that said that "Among the minor poems, many of which possess considerable merit, the following appears to be the best". Josiah Conder, in a September 1820 Eclectic Review, argues that:
Mr Keats, seemingly, can think or write of scarcely any thing else than the 'happy pieties' of Paganism. A Grecian Urn throws him into an ecstasy: its 'silent form,' he says, 'doth tease us out of thought as doth Eternity,'—a very happy description of the bewildering effect which such subjects have at least had upon his own mind; and his fancy having thus got the better of his reason, we are the less surprised at the oracle which the Urn is made to utter:
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
That is, all that Mr Keats knows or cares to know.—But till he knows much more than this, he will never write verses fit to live.
George Gilfillan, in an 1845 essay on Keats, placed the poem among "The finest of Keats' smaller pieces" and suggested that "In originality, Keats has seldom been surpassed. His works 'rise like an exhalation.' His language has been formed on a false system; but, ere he died, was clarifying itself from its more glaring faults, and becoming copious clear, and select. He seems to have been averse to all speculative thought, and his only creed, we fear, was expressed in the words— Beauty is truth,—truth beauty". The 1857 Encyclopædia Britannica contained an article on Keats by Alexander Smith, which stated: "Perhaps the most exquisite specimen of Keats' poetry is the 'Ode to the Grecian Urn'; it breathes the very spirit of antiquity,—eternal beauty and eternal repose." During the mid-19th century, Matthew Arnold claimed that the passage describing the little town "is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added."
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