Ditties of no tone…”. A Reading of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (article) by Muhhammad Hesham on AuthorsDen

Much ink has been shed over the implications of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, which is perceived to be “the most problematic of the major odes.”[2] A great deal of critical discussion has been particularly provoked by the perplexing couplet at the end of the poem[3], in which the speaker makes a generalization about the relationship between two philosophical and aesthetic abstractions, arguing that

However, the tendency to focus on this epigrammatic statement, assuming that it represents the crux of the poem, obscures an essential theme in the ode: the supremacy of silence and the preference for the unheard and the unattainable. This is perhaps what leads John Barnard to protest against the traditional way of reading the text, and to complain that the ode is thus “taken outside its containing topic, the teasingly silent urn.”[4]

The “Ode” begins with an imaginative exploration of the world depicted upon the urn, but the human world lies in the background and remains a constant point of reference. While the urn itself belongs to the Greek past, the questions it raises are closely related to both the present and the future:

Each of the three consecutive metaphors at the beginning of the poem involves the idea of quietness or silence, as the urn relates its story in pictures rather than words. Being a “Sylvan historian,” the urn reveals to the viewer a “leaf-fring’d” bit of history through the portrayed scenes and subjects that belong to a remote past shrouded in silence. In such a way “a moment out of the flux of becoming has been frozen and perpetuated for our contemplation.”[5] As an art object, the urn is fostered by “silence and slow time.” While its creation was the result of a fertile union between an ancient artist and some experience, the same artist is now long-forgotten and the experience long-ended. Thus the urn, its “child,” has fallen into the custody of ages— “slow time.” Viewers who look at the urn can imagine but cannot actually hear the musical sounds and the story it depicts. While in its own day the urn was used by people in their everyday life, it has since become a mere artifact that viewers inspect reverentially in silence.

Moreover, the urn’s mysterious and immediate presence is unspeaking, provocative of questions but yields no answers:

The nature and identity of the figures remain unsaid. Nevertheless, these silent figures are able to generate unending questions, and even to tell silently a “flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.” Although the urn is marked by its stillness and silence, the activities it depicts are filled with motion and sound: “mad pursuit,” “struggle to escape,” “pipes and timbrels,” “wild ecstasy.” Thus the urn possesses a dual nature. On the one hand, it is a symbol of the static quality of art. Its painted figures, on the other hand, represent the dynamic process of life, which art distils in “slow time” and silence. In addition, the lines describe “the peculiar power of the urn — its instantaneity, its silent testimony, and its unanswerability to another medium, language.”[6]

In the second stanza the speaker turns wholly to the sounds and activities depicted on the urn, stressing the distinction between the ideal nature of art and the flawed, fleeting nature of life:

Here, the static perfection of the silent figures sculptured upon the urn is contrasted with the fervid imperfection of real life activities, and hence the preference for the silenced and the unattainable is highlighted more explicitly. Although the speaker may physically enjoy the “heard melodies” of the real pipes, “those unheard/ Are sweeter” because they exist in the Platonic world of abstract forms.[7] Likewise, the songs “of no tone” are more enjoyable than those striking the eardrum. They are perfect precisely because they are silent, since the “spirit” to which they appeal can grant them an imagined flawlessness that is lacking in the songs and melodies perceived by the “sensual ear.” The portrayed “Bold Lover,” on the other hand, will never actually kiss his beloved, yet she will ever remain fair, and both lovers will forever be in love. Thus, the imagined beauty is superior to the really recognized, and the unfulfilled desire is loftier than the actually consummated.

The same theme is maintained in the third stanza, and the implicit tension between the static, yet perfect, and the dynamic, yet fleeting, turns to be an open confrontation:

The repetition of the words “happy” and “for ever” emphasizes both the immortality and superiority of the silent world depicted on the urn. Unlike natural plants, which go through seasonal cycles of death and regeneration, the portrayed “boughs” are fated to remain eternally at their peak. In their timelessness, the lovers in the picture will be “For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d.” Though captured midway in the process of the chase, and thus denied the possibility of fulfilling their desire, they are happier than mortals in the actual human world, where the attainment of joy always “leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d.” The melodist, though silenced on the urn, is able to offer his viewers “songs for ever new.”

The silent marble figures of the urn are not threatened by change and mortality, as they exist “far above” in the world of abstract ideas and do not belong to the world of the living, which is not only doomed to “fade,” in spite of its vigour and clamour, but also “brings listlessness and satiety.”[8] Again, the unattainable is better than the attained, as it is likely to offer a more permanent feeling of happiness.

However, this very happiness is also paradoxical, and the apparently envious tone of the speaker does not conceal the tragic situation of the enviable characters. The figures of the urn are, after all, “motionless figures in an eternity of stone.”[9] Represented in a moment of supreme beauty, they are also perpetuated in their eternal present without a ray of hope for any future progress. The melodist cannot “leave” his song, and the boughs cannot “shed… leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu,” while the lover is doomed to be “For ever panting.”

In the fourth stanza the scene on the urn changes, presenting another aspect of human activity:

The mysteries and uncertainties generated by the silence of the urn are reinforced by the silence of the little town, which is “emptied of its folk.” Accordingly, the speaker poses a new series of unanswerable questions, searching the figures of the urn for a different kind of immortality. Beyond the fleeting passions of life and the abstract perfection of art exists religion, which attempts to synthesize nature, symbol and experience within a single overriding principle. Yet the urn’s religious significance, like its eternal lovers, does not offer much comfort. Represented by a “mysterious priest” of a spiritual practice long dead, the urn’s religion has itself become art, eternal but eternally abstract. Therefore, the silence of the town may suggest the void and absurdity of the universe when religion becomes an antique artifact rather than a means of relieving the miseries of the human situation.

The tone of the speaker now turns to be one of defeat and despair, lamenting the “pious” past that time had taken away relentlessly and irredeemably in spite of man’s “mad pursuit.” Realizing that “none of the figures that take part in the procession can move his marble lips to tell the town’s name,”[10] the speaker is left helpless in front of the mighty power of silence.

Moreover, the same melancholic silence can be seen as the counterpart of the seemingly self-contained silence represented in the third stanza by the “happy boughs,” the “happy melodist,” and the lover who “for ever” enjoys “happy love.” A different reading of this stanza suggests that

To fill the zone of the urn with these figures in their forever of about-to-be, some human habitation somewhere upon this changing earth has had to be emptied of its mortal folk. There is … a human price to be paid for the eternal present the imagination can create.[11]

This juxtaposition of melancholy and happiness, of the deserted town and the ever-green trees, of the ultimate silence and the possibility of “piping songs for ever new,” of the “mad pursuit” and the “struggle to escape,” is what keeps the “Ode” in the human arena. Seeking persistently to discover the wholeness of human destiny, the poem holds together the contradictions of the familiar human world — those “extremities,” between which “Man runs his course,” as W. B. Yeats puts it in his “Vacillation.”[12] In doing so, the poem insists that the recognition of the tragic is only possible in the presence of its opposite — happiness, and that these two aspects of human existence are to be experienced together at the same time if either of them is to be known really and fully.[13]

While the mysteries of the urn have been inspiring the speaker’s imagination throughout the previous stanzas, the tone of the speaker shifts, with the final stanza, from imagination to reality, as the urn is brought back to its own as an aesthetic object:

The urn now is reverted from a “bride,” a “foster-child,” and a “historian” — all human personifications — to its objective identity as an “Attic shape,” a “silent form,” and a “Cold Pastoral.” Its figures, thereupon, are no longer those living beings, seen earlier by the speaker as full of vitality and “For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,” but merely artistic renderings. They are now “marble men and maidens” who exist neither in the past nor in the present but in stone.

Nevertheless, the urn is still a rich source of fascination. Although it is a mere “shape,” it has the power to resist the ever-lasting flow of time, and to “remain” unchangeable “When old age shall this generation waste.” In its muteness as a “silent form,” the urn is able to “tease us out of thought,” and it is precisely the riddle of “the urn’s silence that teases us into and out of thought.”[14] Not only does the urn continue to imbue its viewers with more questions and thoughts, but it can also continue its “paradoxical powers of eloquence,”[15] conveying to all human beings valuable messages, like this one:

These “paradoxical powers of eloquence” have already been manifested throughout the poem, which is filled with a variety of moving tales that the urn, for all its silence, can tell. More important is the fact that this silence is capable of haunting the readers of the poem, and of keeping them “For ever panting,” in a continuous dialogue with the poem, the poet and the urn. By trying to introduce a verbal representation of a mute art object, and by allowing the urn to speak without speaking, the poem develops a dialogical ekphrasis[16] that turns any reading or interpretive process into “multiple dialogues occurring simultaneously.”[17] The readers of the poem unavoidably become readers of the urn, as the unanswerable questions of the speaker invite them to share his experience of viewing, to search the surface of the urn for any possible answers, and to construct their own interpretations of the mysterious figures.

But the readers also become “readers of the fictionalized urn,”[18] or the urn as represented by the poet in his attempt “to translate the arrested visual image into the fluid movement of words.”[19] The text, therefore, constantly engages the readers in a dialogue with the poet, and urges them to explore his ability to probe the silence of the urn and turn it into a piece of writing that perpetuates the existence of the urn and its creator, on the one hand, and the existence of the poet and his creation, on the other. In this process

… the urn itself and the sculptor himself, both, by nature of the urn’s existence, as well as its inscription, ‘speak’ to modern viewers, allowing them a voice in a ‘dialogue.’ The sculptor, more importantly, is allowed a ‘quasi-animate’ existence beyond his own years; he can communicate with future generations without even breathing.[20]

This ongoing dialogue, initiated and continued mainly by the silence of the urn, relates the listener to the speaker, the reader to the author, and the past to the present, achieving the Bakhtinian paradigm of existence as dialogue, in which:

… there is neither a first word nor a last word. The contexts of dialogue are without limit. They extend into the deepest past and the most distant future. Even meanings born in dialogues of the remotest past will never be finally grasped once and for all, for they will always be renewed in later dialogue. At any present moment of the dialogue there are great masses of forgotten meanings, but these will be recalled again at a given moment in the dialogue’s later course when it will be given new life. For nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its homecoming festival.[21]

[1] John Keats, The Works of John Keats (Hertfordshire: The Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994), p. 233.

[2] John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 104.

[3] Detailed discussions of the different interpretations of the concluding couplet, and of the variant versions of the text, are offered in:

- Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

- Jack Stillinger, ed., The Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats’s Odes (London: Prentice-Hall International, Inc., 1968).

- Harvey T. Lyon, ed., Keats’ Well-Read Urn (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1958).

[4] Barnard, Keats, p. 104.

[5] Cleanth Brooks, John Thibaut Purser and Robert Penn Warren, An Approach to Literature, Fourth edition (New York: Meredith Publishing Company, 1964), p. 416.

[6] Barnard, Keats, p.105.

[7] Many scholars point out that the teachings of Plato are instrumental in understanding Keats’ poem, as they provide important clues for its implications. A detailed discussion of Plato’s theory of the forms and its impact on Keats’ Ode, with particular reference to the final lines of the Ode, is offered in Kellie Martin, “The Philosophical Implications of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Honors Group, http://www.archnid.pepperdine.edu/goseweb/honorsgrp.htm (6 October 2000).

[8] Brooks, Purser and Warren, Approach to Literature, p. 416.

[9] Archibald MacLeish, Poetry and Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961), p. 190.

[10] Brooks, Purser and Warren, Approach to Literature, p. 417.

[11] MacLeish, Poetry and Experience, p. 196.

[12] W. B. Yeats, Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Pan Books Ltd., 1974), p. 155.

[13] This theme is recurrent in the poetry of Keats. In “Ode on Melancholy,” for example, Keats has this to say about the paradoxical relation between joy and sorrow:

Ay, in the very temple of delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung. (Keats, The Works, p. 247:8).

[14] Andrew Bennett, Keats, Narrative, and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 137.

[15] Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Art (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), p. 135.

[16] The term “Ekphrasis” can be broadly defined as a means of citing one work of art within another, or a way of reproducing “through the medium of words… sensuously perceptible objets d’art.” (Leo Spitzer, “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ or Content vs. Metagrammar,” in Essays on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (New York: Gordian Press, Inc., 1984), p. 72). The term is also perceived to refer to “the special quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object” (Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 18n), or to “the verbal representation of visual representation.” (W. J. Thomas Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 7). Another definition confines the term to “the poetic description of a work of art.” (Grant F. Scott, “Shelley, Medusa and the Perils of Ekphrasis,” in The Romantic Imagination: Literature in England and Germany, ed. Frederick Burwick and Jurgen Klein, Studies in Comparative Literature 6 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), p. 315).

[17] K. Denee Pescarmona, “Et[urn]al Existence: Keats and Dialogic Ekphrasis in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’,” Prometheus unplugged,

http://www.prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/5c/pescarmona.htm (3 October 2000),

[18] Douglas B. Wilson, “Keats’s Urn: Death in Arcadia,” Studies in English Literature, 25 (1985), p. 827.

[19] Scott, The Sculpted Word, p. 1.

[20] Pescarmona, “Et[urn]al Existence,” p. 3

[21] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. V. M. McGee, ed. Michael Holquist and Cary Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), p. 373.

Ode on a Grecian Urn[1]