Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ans. Ode on a Grecian Urn Analysis by John Keats “Ode On a Grecian Urn’ is one of the most celebrated Odes of John Keats. He has achieved perfection in both art and form. He speaks with the help of “a particular urn” about the general Greek sculpture which has not seen any parallel.
This unparalleled beauty of the Urn has been well expressed by the interrogation- marks put at the end of the last few lines of the first stanza. This beauty has well been made worth understanding and feeling when the poet speaks-
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Arc sweeter.. sense of beauty has further been strengthened with the help of flute- players, the youth singing under the trees, and the lovers about to kiss.
Ode on a Grecian Urn Analysis
The carven life the silent music of the marble pipes, the unuttered song, the love that never reaches fruition- all this life of imagery and imagination is more real and more enviable than the human life of audible melody and tangible embraces.
The fruition of human love never brings real happiness hitherto one poet has confined himself to the actual figures of the Urn. But in the fourth and fifth stanzas, he becomes more vigorous and imaginative.
With the help of his unbridled imagination, he not only animates the marble but goes beyond it to create a whole landscape of river and seashore, and a city in which the carven figures can live and move.
Finally, he draws the moral of the Urn, which is also the moral of his whole life’s work the generations of men pass and die, but amid the changes and chances of this mortal life Beauty and Truth- not two things, not even twin things, but the same thing seen from different aspects are unperishable.
Ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats
Thus, Beauty is truth-Truth beauty’ is the fundamental and concrete concept of Keats’ art. Generation of artists have based and are the basis of both faith and practice on Keats’ creed.
As soon as the notion of the unity of Truth and Beauty is lost from sight, the art becomes weak, false, and fragile.
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