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    A Study Guide for John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
    A Study Guide for John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
    A Study Guide for John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
    Ebook34 pages52 minutes

    A Study Guide for John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535829816
    A Study Guide for John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

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      A Study Guide for John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" - Gale

      7

      Ode on a Grecian Urn

      John Keats

      1819

      Introduction

      In Ode on a Grecian Urn, the speaker observes a relic of ancient Greek civilization, an urn painted with two scenes from Greek life. The first scene depicts musicians and lovers in a setting of rustic beauty. The speaker attempts to identify with the characters because to him they represent the timeless perfection only art can capture. Unlike life, which in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is characterized by the weariness, the fever, and the fret brought on by humans’ awareness of their own passing, the urn’s characters are frozen in time. The lovers will always love, though they will never consummate their desire. The musicians will always play beneath trees that will never lose their leaves.

      The speaker admires this state of existence, but in the end it leaves his heart high-sorrowful. This is because the urn, while beautiful and seemingly eternal, is not life. The lovers, while forever young and happy in the chase, can never engage in the act of fertility that is the basis of life, and the tunes, while beautiful in the abstract, do not play to the sensual ear and are in fact of no tone. Filled with dualities—time and timelessness, silence and sound, the static and the eternal—the urn in the end is a riddle that has teased the speaker into believing that beauty is truth. In life, however, beauty is not necessarily truth, and the urn’s message is one appropriate only in the rarefied, timeless world of art.

      Author Biography

      Born in 1795, Keats, the son of a stablekeeper, was raised in Moorfields, London, and attended the Clarke School in Enfield. The death of his mother in 1810 left Keats and his three younger siblings in the care of a guardian, Richard Abbey. Although Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary, he soon realized that writing was his true talent, and he decided to become a poet. Forced to hide his ambition from Abbey, who would not have sanctioned it, Keats instead entered Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals in London, becoming an apothecary in 1816 and continuing his studies to become a

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