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?
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!
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.
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.
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."
JOHN KEATS
SUMMARY
A man is whispering sweet nothings to a Grecian urn, an ancient Greek pot that is covered in illustrations. He thinks the pot is married to a guy named "Quietness," but they haven’t had sex yet, so the marriage isn’t official. He also thinks that the urn is the adopted child of "Silence" and "Slow Time."
Then the speaker gives us the urn’s profession: it’s a "historian," and it does a much better job of telling stories than the speaker possibly could. The speaker looks closer at the urn and tries to figure out what’s going on in the pictures that are painted on it. Illustrated on the urn is some kind of story that might involve gods, men, or both. It looks like a bunch of guys are chasing beautiful women through the forest. People are playing pipes and beating on drums. Everyone looks happy. The scene is chaotic and the speaker doesn’t know quite what’s happening.
Not only is the urn a better storyteller than the poet, but the musicians in the illustration have sweeter melodies than the poet. The poet then tries to listen to the music played by the people in the image. That’s right: even though he can’t hear the music with his ears, he’s trying to listen to it with his "spirit." He looks at the illustration of a young guy who is playing a song under a tree. Because pictures don’t change, the man will be playing his song as long as the urn survives, and the tree will always be full and green.
Then the speaker addresses one of the guys who is chasing a maiden, and he offers some advice: "You’re never going to make out with that girl, because you’re in a picture, and pictures don’t change, but don’t worry – at least you’ll always be in love with her, because you’re in a picture, and pictures don’t change."
The speaker thinks about how happy the trees must be to keep all their leaves forever. It’s always springtime in the world of the urn, and every song sounds fresh and new. Then he starts talking about love and repeats the word "happy" a bunch of times. He is jealous of the lovers on the urn, because they will always be lusting after each other. Seriously. He thinks the best part of being in love is trying to get your lover to hook up with you, and not the part that follows. We’re starting to think that the speaker needs a cold shower. The word "panting" threatens to send the poem careening into X-rated territory.
Things were getting a bit steamy, but now the speaker has moved to a different section of the urn. He’s looking at an illustration of an animal sacrifice. This is pretty much the cold shower he needed. A priest is leading a cow to be sacrificed. People have come from a nearby town to watch. The speaker imagines that it’s a holy day, so the town has been emptied out for the sacrifice. The town will always be empty, because it’s a picture, and pictures don’t change.
The speaker starts freaking out a bit. He’s basically yelling at the urn now. Whereas before he was really excited about the idea of living in the eternal world of the illustrations, now he’s not so sure. Something about it seems "cold" to him. He thinks about how, when everyone he knows is dead, the urn will still be around, telling its story to future generations. The urn is a teacher and friend to mankind. It repeats the same lesson to every generation: that truth and beauty are the same thing, and this knowledge is all we need to make it through life.
STANZA I
Line 1
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Imagine walking into a room of a museum and seeing a young man talking to an ancient pot. That’s what entering this poem is like. We’re all, "Did we interrupt something? Maybe we should leave you alone with this urn . . ."
(If you haven’t already, find a picture of a Grecian urn online. The poem won’t make much sense if you don’t have some idea of the urn itself.)
He talks to the urn as if it were a beautiful woman, like many people do nowadays with their cars. (My, my, Doris: your chrome rims are looking mighty shiny today!) He calls her the "unravish’d bride of quietness," which, if taken literally, would mean that the urn is married to a guy named Quietness. But wait – urns can’t get married, so he probably just means a really old pot and quietness go hand in hand. Imagine the speaker standing in some big, empty room of a museum, and it’s easy to see where the quietness thing comes from.
What about "still unravish’d"? It might not seem like it on the surface, but this is a sexy poem. The word "ravish" means to take or carry away something by force, and, more directly, it means to have violent, passionate sex with someone. The writers of bodice-ripper romance novels love the word "ravish."
But this urn hasn’t been ravished – yet. Even though "she" is married to quietness, they haven’t consummated the marriage by having sex. It looks youthful and pure, even though it’s really old.
Don’t worry, if you think the whole sex-and-marriage metaphor for a pot doesn’t make much sense, you’re not alone. But you have to admit that it sounds cool.
If you want to boil the first line down to something very simple, he’s saying that the urn has lived its life in "quietness," in a museum or buried in some Greek ruins, but it’s still in great condition and hasn’t suffered any major damage.
Line 2
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
The urn is called the "foster-child" of Silence and slow Time. A "foster-child" is a kid who is adopted and raised by people other than his or her own parents.
In this case, the urn has been adopted by "Silence" and "slow Time," which, if anything, sounds like an even more boring couple than Mrs. Urn and Mr. Quietness.
The point is that the pot is thousands of years old, and it has spent most of its time buried in ruble or tucked away in the corner of some museum or some private collector’s house. But these were not its "original" circumstances.
The true "parent" of the urn would have been the Greek artist who created it. Furthermore, the pot might have had a ceremonial use rather than just being a pretty thing to look at.
But after the decline of Greek civilization, the pot lived on to age in silence, outside of the vibrant culture in which he was created.
Lines 3-4
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
So far, the speaker has addressed the urn by a bunch of different names and titles. It’s like saying, "You, John Doe, husband of Jane Doe, son of Susie and Richard Doe, lawyer at the firm of . . ." Now this line gives us the urn’s job or profession, which is "Sylvan historian."
Bet you’ve never seen that one on a business card, huh? "Sylvan" is a just a word derived from Latin that refers to woods or forests. This makes the urn a historian of people who live in forests. It’s a storyteller (the word "history" is derived from a Latin word for "story" or "tale"), and a darn good one.
In fact, the urn is a better storyteller than the poet.
The urn tells stories using pictures, while the poet uses "rhymes." (You’ll notice that Keats uses a lot of nature imagery to talk about art and poetry.) The tale told by the urn is "flowery" and "sweet," as if you could bury your nose in it like a bee inside a daffodil.
This is appropriate, because this particular urn depicts scenes that are set in nature.
Moreover, "flowery" works as a pun. A tale is "flowery" if it’s complicated and has a lot of ins and outs.
But the story told on an urn is also "flowery" in a more literal sense: the illustrations on urns were often framed by a pattern of leaves or flowers.
Line 5-7
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
Having established that the urn is a storyteller, now it’s time to get to the story.
This is the point when our speaker leans in to take a closer look at the urn. He’s trying to figure what’s going on in the carved pictures that encircle it.
(We know this because every sentence for the rest of the stanza is a question that begins with "What," as in "What’s that?" Imagine him squinting at the urn and stroking his chin thoughtfully.)
Remember how we told you that the illustrations on Greek urns were bordered with a pattern of leaves and/or flowers?
Well, we got the flowers in line 4, and now we get the leaves. The story or "legend" on the pot is "leaf-fringed," which builds on the idea of the "Sylvan" or forest historian.
But this "legend" suddenly sounds a lot like a ghost story: it "haunts." This is another pun, because "haunt" can just mean to exist in a certain place, but it has that obvious connection to the dead. Indeed, we would expect that all the characters of a story that was first told thousands of years ago would be dead by now.
And who are these characters, the speaker is wondering. Are they gods ("deities") or just normal human beings ("mortals")?
In Ancient Greece, all the gods were represented as looking like people, so you wouldn’t always be able to tell the difference between them and people in a picture. The gods also liked to hang out with humans.
Needless to say, it’s hard to tell if these people are mere mortals or gods.
The speaker is also wondering where the story takes place.
With his knowledge of Ancient Greece, he throws out a couple of names as guesses: Tempe and "Arcady," or Arcadia. (A "dale" is just a valley.)
(These places are stock names that refer to really beautiful, rural regions where farmers, shepherds, and other country folk live. Think of blue skies, babbling brooks, lush trees, and fluffy white sheep.)
Line 8-10
What men or gods are these? what maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Keats is playing a clever trick here. Under the guise of having the speaker try to figure out what’s on the pictures, Keats is really telling us about the story.
The speaker repeats the question about "deities or mortals" in more causal language: are they "men or gods"?
Here it helps to have a little background into a very common Ancient Greek theme: a bunch of lustful guys chasing a bunch of nice girls around and trying to get some action. Very often the males would be half-man, half-goat-type creatures called "satyrs," but Keats doesn’t mention anything about satyrs so we can’t jump to that conclusion.
If you want to have a more sinister interpretation, you can imagine that the women are being chased against their will.
(Unfortunately, the line between rape and consensual sex was often extremely blurry in Greek myths.)
We’re going to give these couples the benefit of the doubt, though, and imagine that the women are just being playful.
They are "loth," or "loath," to have sex, which means they are reluctant, but it could just be a teasing reluctance.
In the picture, the guys are chasing the women in "mad pursuit," which the women "struggle to escape."
This cat-and-mouse scenario seems to be a game. It wouldn’t make much sense to depict a serious chase scene and then include people playing instruments like "pipes and timbrels" (a timbrel is like a tambourine).
On the whole, everyone looks happy.. But not just happy as in simply content.
We’re talking rowdy, crazy, best-party-of-my-life happiness. We’re talking "wild ecstasy." Everyone is running around and dancing.
STANZA II
Lines 11-12
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
In this stanza, the speaker seems to have moved on to another of the pictures on the side of the urn.
(We think there are a total of three different scenes depicted on the urn, and this is the second.)
As in the first scene, there is music playing. The music is being played on "pipes," which is like a primitive version of a flute. Unlike the wild party music of the first stanza, these pipes are "soft."
The speaker arrives at a totally counter-intuitive conclusion. He says that the melodies you don’t hear are "sweeter" than those you do.
This claim is a paradox: it doesn’t seem to make sense. No one listens to their music player with the volume at zero so they can "imagine" the music they aren’t hearing.
This is the first example of a trick that Keats is going to play over and over again for the rest of the poem.
He treats the scenes on the urn as if they were real places and events, and not just a depiction of a place. Real people are actually "living" on the urn, but they are frozen in time.
The pipe-player actually is playing a song, but you can’t hear the song because urns don’t make sounds. The speaker is imagining what the song would song like, and he thinks this imaginary song inside his head is better than anything he has heard with his ears.
In other words, he prefers to the world of fantasy to the physical world.
He tells the "soft pipes" to keep playing, even though he’s the one who is making the pipes play, by imagining them.
In this sense, it’s almost like he’s talking to himself. He is both musician and audience.
Lines 13-14
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Talk about a weird. The speaker is still giving orders that only he can obey.
He tells the pipes not to play to his "sensual" or physical ear, but to the metaphorical ear of his "spirit," or imagination. This spiritual ear is "more endear’d," or cherished, than his flesh-and-blood ears.
As if that weren’t strange enough, he asks the pipes to play "ditties of no tone," that is, songs that don’t have any notes or sounds, at least in the real world. Imaginary songs.
Haven’t you ever composed an awesome song in your head, and you’re sure it’s as good as a Top-40 hit, but you also know that if you ever tried to sing or perform it, the result would be a total disaster? That’s kind of what’s going on here.
Lines 15-16
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Aha! The identity of our mysterious musician revealed! It was Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Lead Pipe. Oh wait, no: it was a good-looking young guy ("fair youth") sitting under the trees, and his pipe was probably made of wood.
Here comes Keats’s trick again. He treats the urn like a real place, and because this place never changes, it means that the guy under the tree will always be playing the same song, in the same pose forever!
It’s like Bill Murray’s life in Groundhog Day, but with even less variety.
But for the speaker, this is actually a good thing. Because the seasons never change, the weather will always be nice and the trees will never be "bare," without leaves.
It’s Eden. Eternal spring.
Line 17
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Now he turns back to the first scene, the guys chasing the women, and he starts talking to one of the guys.
He calls him "bold," presumably because he has taken the initiative the chase his lady around the forest. In modern-day terms, he’s like a guy who is never afraid to ask for a girl’s number.
To paraphrase, the speaker says, "I know you’re hoping to make it with that nice girl you’re chasing, but I’ve got bad news for you: It’s not going to happen. Ever. I don’t think you realize this, but you live on an urn, you’re just a picture, and you can never move or change. But there’s a definite upside to the situation: you’ll always feel just as strongly about her, and she’ll always be really beautiful. Not such a bad deal, right?"
This is an absurd thing to say, and it tells us more about the speaker than it does about the lover. The speaker wants to imagine a world in which nothing changes and good things never come to an end.
(By the way, if you want to check out a poem whose speaker takes the complete opposite view, visit Shmoop’s analysis of Wallace Stevens’s "Sunday Morning.")
The speaker isn’t the most tactful guy in the world, and he repeats the word "never" twice as if to rub in the bad news. He also describes the chase scene as if it were an athletic race, for which having sex is considered "winning." It’s like the Romantic poetry equivalent of locker-room banter.
STANZA III
Lines 21-22
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
The branches of the trees never lose their leaves because the world of the urn never changes.
The urn is to the Ancient Greek world what a Norman Rockwell painting is to 1950s America: it captures a moment in time in which everything seems to be wholesome and happy.
In this case, it’s always springtime, and the trees are always green.
After repeating the word "never" twice in line 17, the speaker seems to have decided that repeating words is his new thing, and he does it a bunch of times in this stanza. He uses the word, "happy," twice in a row in line 21. He also continues to talk to objects that can’t respond to him, like the "boughs" or branches of the trees depicted on the urn.
Finally, he continues to treat the urn as a real place, and one where things never change.
(As you can see, Keats keeps playing the same tricks over and over again, and once you figure them out, the poem isn’t so tough.)
To bid "adieu" is to say "goodbye" in French with the expectation that you won’t see someone again for a long time. If someone goes down the street to the corner store, you say "au revoir," but if someone moves to another state, you say "adieu."
Fortunately for the tree branches, they never have to say goodbye to the Spring, which will never be replaced by summer in this world.
Some readers have thought that the repeated use of the word "happy" smacks of desperation on the part of the speaker, as if he were trying to convince himself that eternal springtime would be a great thing, rather than a huge snooze-fest.
After all, how long can you sit around looking at tree leaves?
Lines 23-24
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
These lines make us think that the speaker is still talking about the second scene of the urn: the young musician playing the pipes under a tree.
Now he calls him a "melodist." Unlike, say, the piano, you can’t play both melody and harmony on the pipes. You have to pick one, and the most obvious choice is to play a melody.
The "melodist," you probably won’t be shocked to learn, is also "happy," like everyone else in this world. He is also "unwearied," which means he never gets tired.
In your version of the poem, you might notice that the word has an accent at the end, so that it reads, "un-wear-i-ed." What’s that about? It means that Keats wants you to pronounce the word with four syllables, instead of three.
He does this to preserve a perfect ten-syllable iambic pentameter, which you can read more about in the "Form and Meter" section.
But you can think of the accent as being like a notation on a piece of sheet music, which might be important in light of the fact that the speaker is talking about music at this point. Is he comparing himself with the "happy melodist"? We think so.
In line 24 the speaker says that the songs played by the musician are always fresh and new. Again, that’s because the world of the urn never changes.
It would be as if our world froze while you were listening to the radio, so whatever was on the Top-40 station would always be considered hip and catchy.
Of course, in the real world, we know that most pop songs don’t last in the Top-40 for more than a few weeks. We get sick of the old songs and crave new ones, which is why there will always be a need for young teen pop stars to replace the older teen pop stars of the year before.
Line 25
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
This is the place where a lot of readers think the speaker starts to go off in his own world.
Three "happy"s in one line? We imagine our speaker is the kind of person who puts 25 packets of sugar into their iced tea. In case you hadn’t noticed, he likes sweet things. But do these "happy" thoughts have any substance?
If you want to be less cynical, you could also read these lines as the speaker encouraging the musician to keep playing by calling for more songs.
He thinks the music and "love" go hand in hand, so more music means more love. He’s like the crowd at a concert clapping its hands and shouting, "Another! Two more songs! Ten more songs!"
Line 26-27
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
OK, it’s time we had "the talk." The birds and the bees. When it comes to sex, lots of people think that the most exciting part is definitely before the act itself. It is the time of attraction and pursuit.
By contrast, "after" is the time when people often wonder what they were so worked up about. On a longer time scale, the same holds true for love affairs. They are usually most exciting in the beginning, before things settle down into a routine.
The speaker seems to have returned to the first image on the urn, that of the "men or gods" chasing a bunch of women, and he imagines that everyone in the scene is at the peak of their erotic excitement.
The men are just about the catch the women, but they haven’t yet, so they always have the big moment ahead of them.
Line 26 refers to the bodies of the women, which are "warm and still to be enjoy’d."
Line 27 refers to both men and women, who are "panting" from their chase.
Keeping in his mode of repetition, the speaker keeps using the words "for ever" to make the point that the people on the urn are frozen in time. The world of art is eternal.
We’re now going to argue in favor of a different interpretation. Our speaker is showing definite symptoms of sexual excitement himself, like the pulsating rhythm of his speech and the repetition of his words (being sexually excited isn't the most creative human state). He might need a cold shower.
Lines 28-30
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Line 28 has somewhat awkward grammar.
Generations of readers have not known what to make of these lines. Line 27 told us about the "panting" of the lovers, but now these lines might suggest that the lovers are better than or "far above" the "breathing human passion" of the normal world.
That’s one interpretation. But here’s a different one.
In this second interpretation, "far above" refers to the perspective of the speaker, our excited guy who is "breathing" on the display case at the museum as he salivates over the urn.
The word "all" suggests that the speaker knows he belongs to a much wider and more populous world than the people on the urn. In other words, the urn is like a tiny planet that is frozen in time while all around it people are moving and breathing and carrying on with their lives.
So if the speaker represents the "human passion" that looks down on this little world from "far above," then line 29 must refer to his "heart," not just any old heart.
(It’s like when you need advice about something but don’t want to talk about yourself, so you say, "Well, I have this friend, see…" The speaker says, "Well, there’s this heart, see…")
When he looks at the happy lovers, the speaker’s heart becomes "high-sorrowful and cloy’d." In other words, he feels a dramatic, woe-is-me kind of sadness.
To be "cloy’d" is to have too much of a good thing. The speaker is overpowered by his excitement, and instead of a warm and pleasant "panting," he feels feverish, with a "burning forehead," and desperately thirsty, with "a parching of tongue."
He’s like a guy stuck in the desert. But instead of water, he craves love.
STANZA IV
Line 31
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
Just when we thought the speaker might faint from the steamy, sticky atmosphere of the lovers, he manages to turn his attention to other things.
Now the speaker is looking at the third scene on the urn, which depicts an animal sacrifice.
Just as in stanza I, the speaking is leaning in and trying to figure out what is going on in the scene. In stanza I he asked "What," and now he asks, "Who?" There seem to be people coming to watch the sacrifice.
Line 32-34
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
Now our speaker talks to the priest on the urn, asking him, "Hey, where are you headed?"
He wants to know to "what green altar" he is taking a cow ("heifer").
In classical times, an altar was a place where sacrifices were carried out, and this one is covered with leaves and vegetation that make it green. The poor cow must know what’s coming, because it moans or "lows" at the sky.
Its sides ("flanks") are dressed in a string or "garland" of flowers. This cow is a holy object, destined for the gods.
Lines 35-37
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
We can now piece together the whole third scene. There’s a priest, a cow, a green altar, and a crowd of people following behind in anticipation of the sacrifice.
The speaker infers that this crowd must have come from somewhere, from some "little town," but the town isn’t depicted, so he has to imagine what it must look like.
He imagines things in the world of the urn just like we, the readers, imagine what is going on in the poem. Hm. Very curious.
This scene doesn’t have anything besides people and cows in it, but he comes up with a few guesses as to what the town looks like. It is either a.) by a river, b.) by a sea-shore, or c.) on a mountain.
If it’s on a mountain, he imagines a small fortress called a "citadel" must protect it. But there isn’t a great need to be defended, so the citadel is "peaceful."
This truly is a perfect world. Everyone is outside, enjoying the weather and looking forward to the ritual. The town is "emptied" because it is a "pious" or holy morning.
(The Ancient Greeks were pagans who believed in a lot of different, human-like gods, representing natural events like the sun and the seasons.)
Lines 38-40
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
The speaker talks to the town to inform it that its streets will always be "silent" and "desolate" of people.
Although the speaker knows that everyone is headed to a sacrifice, he doesn’t know what the sacrifice is for, and he can never find out because there is "not a soul, to tell" the reason for the holy day.
Lines 41-43
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Compared to the steamy stanza III, stanza IV was a mellow, low-key affair. But in the last stanza the speaker suddenly gets excited again.
It’s like someone stuck a shot of adrenaline in his arm. He starts yelling about the beautiful appearance of the urn, as if noticing it for the first time.
He has raptures over its "Attic shape," which just means it has a distinctively Greek appearance, and its "fair attitude," which means a graceful posture. (A "brede" is a braid, like a braid of hair.)
The lovers are "braided" together in the chiseled marble, which is a wild image. It makes the carving sound complicated and ornate.
Indeed, the speaker calls the depiction "overwrought," or too complicated.
There’s just too much detail and craftsmanship. This might remind us of the use of the word "cloy’d" in stanza III, another occasion where the speaker thought that the urn’s artistry was just too rich.
We already mentioned that the urn has decorative images of plants all over it, and now the speaker is annoyed with the "forest branches" and the "trodden weed" that seem to be choking the poem with vegetation. They get in the way and make the urn look crowded.
He’s starting to have some serious mixed feelings about this urn. He praises it and disses it within two lines. He’s basically saying, "You have a nice body, but you’re trying way too hard to look fancy."
Lines 44-45
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
If you thought his feelings were mixed before, these lines will really throw you for a loop.
He starts out by pointing his finger at the urn: "You! That’s right. You, the quiet one." So far, it’s been a fairly one-sided conversation (that tends to happen with inanimate objects), and now he’s trying to get the urn to be more involved.
He says that the urn is so mysterious and baffling that it’s impossible to think about.
Our speaker uses the word "tease," which has at least two meanings. The first is the one we’re familiar with: mockery. The second is to separate or disentangle, like you might "tease" apart the nest of wires behind your computer.
We think this second meaning is actually the primary one here. The poet compares the experience of looking at the urn to thinking about eternity, an idea so lofty and hard to understand that trying to think about it is like not thinking at all.
Huh? Yeah, you can see why this poem is so complicated.
The speaker has been setting up this comparison between the world of the urn and eternity for the entire poem. He views the urn as a world where things never change and can never be destroyed, which is pretty much the definition of eternity. Except, of course, if the urn breaks.
Finally, he calls the scenes depicted on the urn a "Cold Pastoral." Pastoral imagery concerns nature and simple country life, so it’s an appropriate word in the context of images of peaceful towns, young lovers, and bright, green trees.
But "cold"? Are these lines supposed to be a put-down, or are they actually a form of praise. They sound more like a put-down – like the speaker changed his mind after all his talk about happiness and warm bodies. He might be accusing the urn of being distant and uncaring.
But maybe he likes how the world of the urn seems so foreign from human life that it’s hard to even think about.
You might compare the feeling to looking at remote stars and planets, which seem cold and indifferent but also provide a sense of beauty and comfort.
Overall, it seems he understands the urn even less at the end of the poem than at the beginning.
Lines 46-48
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,
Whoa, here comes "old age" like the villain with a flamethrower in an action movie to "waste" an entire generation of people – the speaker’s generation.
The speaker imagines that after everyone in his generation is dead, the urn will still be around.
(We think Keats would have been a big fan of the Flaming Lips song "Do You Realize?" with its lyric, "Do you realize, that everyone you know someday will die?" Kind of a conversation stopper – but great song).
The problems or "woe" of the present generation will have been replaced by new problems.
But the urn, like a good therapist and "a friend of man," won’t be lacking in advice to give new generations.
In fact, it has always given the same advice to everyone, throughout history, which is.
Okay, get ready, because the next two lines are some of the most immortal ever written.
Lines 49-50
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Ah! It’s all so simple! Beauty and truth are the same thing.
Wait, no. That makes no sense at all. If beauty and truth are the same thing, then why do we have two different words for them?
One of the sneakiest things about these lines is how they sound so darned confident, as if "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" were on a par with "Gravity makes things fall down."
We want to respond: "First of all, we didn’t already know that beauty and truth were that same thing. Second, if you think we already knew that, why are you telling us? Third, why do you think this is all we ‘need to know.’ How does this information help us, at all?"
To our knowledge, the urn has yet to respond to our inquiry. But we can try to say a bit about what these lines could mean.
To say that beauty and truth are the same thing has usually been taken to mean that there is no truth outside of art. We’re talking about BIG truths, like meaning-of-life truths.
We also think he’s using "beauty" to refer to more than just pretty pictures and writings. He’s referring to anything that gives us that sense of grandeur and a meaning larger than ourselves, including the art of the universe: nature.
Truth is not something that can be "thought." It’s too remote and complicated, like the idea of eternity. It can only be felt.
The speaker thinks that we don’t need truths that can be expressed in words. The experience of beauty is enough. Enough for what? Well, perhaps to lead a good, fulfilling, meaningful life. There are lots of things we’d like to know about the world, like why suffering exist. But we don’t need to know such things. Beauty is the only absolutely necessary idea.
This last point is actually super-radical, and it’s what makes Keats one of the most Romantic of the Romantics. If you take it to the extreme, you don’t need any of the truths of religious or philosophical texts, history books, celebrity magazines, or wherever else people get their ideas. You don’t need truths that are passed down through tradition.
Needless to stay, British conservatives hated Keats, whom they considered a wild-eyed liberal, which he kind of was.
You may just want to throw up your hands and decide these lines are absurd. Which is fine. You’d be in good company. T.S. Eliot, a poet, was never shy about voicing his opinions.
But for many people, they express truth in exactly the way they suggest: not with some kind of intellectual argument, but through their rhythm and melody – their beauty.
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