John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn

© 2001 by Jay Braiman

It’s one of my favorite writing activities, something that gets me started any time I’m at a loss for ideas. It’s also one of the most effective ones that I use in my classroom, something I teach my students how to do at the beginning of the term when I’m introducing them to writer’s notebooks. It’s remarkably simple, yet it often requires detailed and painstaking explanation to these young people who have never really written before, and whose ideas about writing exist in very narrow, superficial concepts of “essays” and “reports.” Very few have ever truly had the inclination, or even the opportunity, to use their imaginations when they write; to look beyond the static, concrete facts in front of them and produce their own unique, personal, creative response, then move beyond that initial perception into the imaginative realm of infinite possibilities.

As the students finish responding to the quote on the board, I pass around a series of photographs clipped from newspapers and magazines. Each image contains up to three people, but they are not recognizable or newsworthy; I am careful not to choose photos of celebrities or scenes from recent theatrical films or television shows. The people and settings seem largely generic; often there is little remarkable at all about the image, or perhaps there is one single particularly intriguing or unusual element in the picture. Inevitably, as I hand one clipping to each student, someone speaks out with a question: “What are we supposed to do with this, Mister?”

Once each student has a picture, I address the class. “Today,” I tell them, “we’re going to try another writer’s notebook strategy besides ‘writing-about-something.’ This is also an activity that can give us ideas when it’s time to do our first writing project.” I hold up a picture for everyone to see. “Think of what you see in this picture, in the picture I just gave you, as the ‘middle of the story.’ What you need to do is write the rest of it; the beginning, up to the moment you see in the picture, and then continue afterward to the end. You need to imagine who these people are, where they are, what they’re doing, what they’re looking at, what they’re talking about, what’s going on around them, et cetera.”

“It doesn’t say who they are,” is one inevitable response. “How are we supposed to know what’s going on?”

“You’re not,” I assure them. “It’s up to you to imagine what the situation in the picture is. You need to figure out who they are, what events happened leading up to the moment in the picture, what events will happen afterward, and so on.”

“I don’t get it, Mister,” comes yet another inevitable response. I hold up one image and demonstrate.

“Here we see two people, a man sitting on the bench, and a woman looking down at him. What do you suppose is happening here? Who is the man? Why is he sitting there? How long has he been there? What about the woman? Who is she, and why is she talking to that man? Where did she come from, where is she going? What’s in that bag she’s carrying? What are they discussing? What are they thinking? What’s going to happen next?” The barrage of hypothetical questions continues, with some random responses from the students, as I glance hopefully around the room for some sign of understanding.

Further protests arise from the students, who clearly do not understand what it is I want them to do. Many ask if they’re just supposed to describe what they see in the image; I tell them they may do that, but then they need to come up with the story and context surrounding it. Others insist that they cannot do it because the pictures lack captioning and they have no way of knowing what the surrounding context is; I assure them that the objective reality of the picture itself, or the moment it depicts, doesn’t matter, as this is an exercise in imaginative thinking. There is also, of course, the frequent and standard declaration that “I don’t know what to write.”

To provide a model, I read to them one of my own better short narratives, written in response to the image of a man Nordic-skiing across a vast snow-covered plain, with mountains in the background. In my tale, the nameless man feels the sun and the cold, the mountains and the vastness bearing down on him, and suddenly feels an inexorable desire to return home to his adoring wife. We see neither the wife, nor their cozy mountain cabin, nor even the expression on the man’s face, in the photograph itself; all those, I tell the children, are products of my own imagination that I came up with after looking at the image.

Time is growing short, so I must insist that the students begin writing. Sadly, many do not seem able to look beyond the image and construct their own imaginative scenarios; some of the resulting notebook entries merely describe the physical, visual details of the image, others merely assign names and occupations to the people. Some of them manage to produce brief summaries of stories, but they’re generally short and superficial, not especially detailed, and many deteriorate into pseudo-Hollywood formula of adolescent romance or gratuitous crime/violence. The responses also generally seem more concerned with social, economic or other such factors, such as occupations, clothing labels, favorite television shows, or what make of automobile the person owns, than the actual human minds of the characters they see in the pictures; their experiences, emotions, desires, fears, and the like. Still, there is something there; any time a student is able to write beyond the image, he has accomplished something and begun to journey into imagination.

The tension between objective reality (the students’ apparent need to know the actual context of the photograph and the true identities of the people therein, and the limitation of their responses to its objective content and socio-economic details) and imagination (the requisite ability to form their own interpretation, and more importantly, creative extrapolation of the elements in the image) seems to be the core of what causes these students to have such difficulty with this particular writing strategy, and with affective writing in general. It is the essential tension between the kind of writing and thinking they are accustomed to doing in school, and that which I am attempting to teach and foster in my classroom. It is also the essential tension in Romantic poetry, between the eighteenth-century philosophy which saw reality as a result of perception and art as a social process interpretive of that perception, and the nineteenth-century Romantic idea that reality was a result of perception and imagination; that reality is what the mind half-perceives and half-creates. In a way, by teaching this particular writing exercise, I am attempting to move my twenty-first-century students from the eighteenth-century way of thinking toward the nineteenth-century ideals of the Romantics.

Reading John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” one might think that he had been in one of those classes. What Keats does in this poem is very much like what I asked my students to do in the aforementioned writing exercise. The piece is Keats’ response to the images depicted on the sides of an ancient Hellenic urn, but unlike my students, Keats does not describe the images in the sense that the reader will simply know what they look like. Keats instead makes use of his own imaginative power to create an entire world, indeed entire lives, around the two-dimensional figures etched so long ago on the urn’s ceramic circumference, and also to illustrate the duality of, and tension between, objective reality and imagination.

In the poem’s first stanza, Keats echoes my own initial questioning of the students, as described above, though certainly much more poetically. “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit?…” (ll. 8-9) In effect, he challenges his own imagination by gazing upon the urn and wondering about the context of the image. His wondering here is almost aimless, his questions varying in scope, indicative of the limitless possibilities of imagination. Yet they also echo my students’ desire to know the “real” story behind the pictures I gave them; the speaker here is as unsure as they are as to exactly what the images represent.

The questions are addressed to one “Sylvan historian” (l. 3), a personification of the urn as someone not only with a tale to tell, but who could tell that tale far more effectively than any poet, yet he cannot; he is referred in the opening lines as a “bride of quietness/…foster child of silence,” so it is up to the poet’s imagination to do the best it can. The tension between reality and imagination exists here in that the urn itself, for lack of a better way of putting it, “knows the truth” but cannot speak; the poet can, but only from his imagination, lacking knowledge of the objective reality. The pictures I gave the students do have an objective reality, but without the captions the students cannot know it (this is also why I avoid recognizable persons and TV/movie images); they can only create the reality by writing in their notebooks from their own imaginations.

Unlike my students, however, the poet here does not necessarily seek, and certainly does not feel that he requires, that objective reality. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter” (ll. 11-12) intones the second stanza, as the poet moves willingly into the realm of imagination, which can attain a perfection and beauty beyond the potential of objective reality, and begins to envision the scene. He describes a youth beneath the trees, accompanied by his lover, whom he is apparently preparing to kiss. This “frozen moment” in time evokes conflicting emotions in the poet; the youth, though his lover will be there with him forever, her fair appearance unchanging, their love eternal, is at the same time condemned to never actually kiss her, to never escape those “unheard melodies.” In a sense, he is forever locked in a moment where he is about to reach his ultimate goal, but because he is locked in that moment he will never reach it. Take, for example, the famous photo of Bobby Thomson’s 1951 pennant-winning home run, the “shot heard ‘round the world,” heading for the left-field stands at the Polo Grounds (and let us put aside, for now, any knowledge we may have of baseball history and put ourselves in the position of Keats’ speaker, unaware of the objective reality). In that moment, the Giants are about to win the pennant, but they haven’t yet; in that moment, they still trail the Dodgers by two runs, and despite the inevitability of the outcome, in the moment captured in that photo, they always will. In that inevitability we see once again the tension between imagination and reality, in the sense that the imagination tells us that the young lovers will kiss, that the Giants will win the pennant, but those facts do not exist in the images themselves. For the Bobby Thomson we see in the photo, like the youth on the urn, triumph appears to be just a moment away, but it will never come.

The third stanza seems to resolve those conflicting emotions by heralding the virtues of being frozen in time; everlasting Spring, a tireless musician forever piping melodies, endless love, eternal youth (establishing the hierarchy of nature – art – human experience), with “All breathing human passion far above” (l. 28). The imagined state of eternal love and youth is supposed here, by placing the urn “above,” to be preferable to the objective reality of human emotion, which is in a state of constant change, and the poet not only wishes to but believes he can share in the life depicted on the urn; only through the imagination can this be accomplished, and only because of the image’s (and the urn’s) silent, stationary nature.

The fourth stanza brings us to another image, that of a priest about to perform an animal sacrifice of some sort, presumably on the reverse side of the artifact, or perhaps even a different one. The purpose of the ritual is as unclear to the reader as it is to the speaker of the poem, who suddenly, after the emotional outburst of stanza III, feels as desolate and empty as the “little town by river or sea shore;” or, as the writer’s notebooks of my students who vehemently proclaim their confusion and recalcitrance.

The ending of the poem presents an interesting dispute, due to differing editorial interpretations of the punctuation of lines 47-50. In English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967), the lines appear thus:

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.”

Yet in Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay, edited by Robert DiYanni (Random House, 1986), they appear:

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.

The obvious difference is in the placement of the quotation marks, and by extension the speaker of those last two lines. Both editions refer to the urn as “a friend to man,” which it will remain throughout time even as monuments are overgrown with weeds and generations are ravaged by old age; the urn’s “silent form” will “tease us out of thought,” meaning that it will transcend time and always express “its own special character as a work of art” (Perkins, footnote on ll.49-50, p 1186) regardless of the social or temporal context in which it is observed. But the question remains as to the precise, explicit message of the urn, and the effect on the meaning of the two different editorial punctuations.

In Perkins’ edition (which, according to the footnote, “follows that of Douglas Bush in his edition of the poems”) the urn, once again personified as that “Sylvan historian,” speaks the entire two lines; both the idea of truth and beauty being synonymous and reciprocal, and that the idea thereof is the sole essential principle of human life on earth. In the DiYanni text, however, the latter sentiment is expressed by the poet/speaker, not the personified urn. Setting aside for a moment the question of which is likely the correct (or, more accurately, intended) form, both seem to be rather cryptic, but the latter punctuation suggests that the poet knows and understands the meaning of the historian’s words and leaves it to the reader to decipher for himself, while the former does not indicate either way the poet’s understanding of, or feelings about, the relationship between truth and beauty and thus connects the speaker to the reader, along with their individual experiences and imaginations, in a slightly more direct and meaningful way.

In a sense, the speaker in the latter version separates himself, his imagination and his experience from that of the reader, which seems to reinforce the idea that the former is likely the correct/intended version. If the quotation ends after “truth beauty, –” then the poet/speaker is addressing the reader directly in the final two lines. In examining the rest of the poem, we see only one other instance of second-person address: in the first stanza, and that is directed at the urn/“Sylvan historian” (using the singular “thou,” where the final couplet uses the plural “ye,” suggesting an address to the world as a whole). It thus seems unlikely that the poem’s speaker should suddenly deign to address the reader, or even the world, directly in the last two lines. However, if the speaker is addressing the urn at this point (using “ye” as singular), it would make a bit more sense, but it would suggest that while the urn’s message is directed at all humanity, the speaker then re-directs the message back to the urn, implying that the statement is true for art, but not for life.

Either way, the idea of truth and beauty being both synonymous and reciprocal is further indication of the tension between reality and imagination in this poem. The speaker admires the state of eternal happiness depicted on the urn, and interacts with it imaginatively, but in reality it leaves him “high-sorrowful” (l. 29) and unfulfilled, because it exists only as a work of art; the speaker’s imagination has elevated it beyond anything it can ever actually be. A work of art can be paradoxical, as the urn reveals the dualities of sound and silence, time and timelessness; its message, though, that beauty and truth are one, exists only in the imagination, because in reality that is not necessarily true. In the real world, beauty is often fleeting and deceiving, and truth can be uncomfortable and dangerous.

I would never reasonably expect any of my students to come up with an “Ode on a Newspaper Clipping” in response to this writing activity, but I always hope they will come up with something. It seems, though, that their responses very often lean toward those aforementioned “real-life” notions of beauty and truth; a young lover cuckolded, a party ending a drunk-driving accident, a schoolyard dispute ending in gunfire. One wonders if this is a product of entertainment media, life experience, or any combination thereof. Is it imagination they lack, or are they missing the kinds of experiences that inform the imagination? Either way, the tension exists in their minds and in my classroom as much as it does in Keats’ poem.