Ode On A Grecian Urn By John Keats

The similarities between the poems lie in their abilities to utilize imagery as a means to enhance the concept of the fleeting nature that life ultimately has and to also help further elaborate the speaker’s opinion towards their own situation. In Keats’ poem, dark and imaginative images are used to help match with the speaker’s belief that both love and death arise from fate itself. Here, Keats describes the beauty and mystery of love with images of “shadows” and “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” to illustrate his belief that love comes from fate, and that he is sad to miss out on such an opportunity when it comes time for his own death.

John Keats was a famous British author in the nineteenth century. He was born in London, England in 1795. His mom died early in his life from tuberculosis and his father died from fatal injuries after falling off a horse. This led him and his younger brothers to be placed under the care of Richard Abbey. At age fifteen Keats was an apprenticed to an apothecary. He wanted to write and not go into to medical but Abbey would not let him. Keats secretly wrote on the side and used some inheritance to fund his writing behind Abbey’s back. In 1816 Keats met Leigh Hunt and decided to pursue being a poet. Hunt actually published Keats first poem and helped him jumpstart his career. His first major poem was “Endymion: A Poetic Romance” . Soon after Endymion was published, Keats started show early symptoms

The moments in our lives that we consider peaks of happiness can never be eternal. That is why our desires for permanence and change alternate dependent on our given state of mind. John Keats, a man who, upon experiencing a great deal in his short 25 years, realized through these painfully human experiences that beauty is an idea that exists in a state of infinity, however our enjoyment of this beauty is ever changing. Thus, we begin to contradict ourselves, and wish simultaneously for both the permanent beauty of an event or feeling–as well as the unreachable joy for more. Keats’ two poems, Ode to a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale discuss these opposing ideals, and build off of each other in a way that is comparable to a student educating

Beauty is truth, truth beauty discusses Keats’s exploration of the themes of beauty, truth and imagination in two or more of his works. Prior to the Romantic Movement, the prevalent notions in European culture was that the understanding of the universe could be comprehended with the application of rationality and logic. The belief that reason and logic could and should determine all aspects of life arguably underwent a shift of consciousness and was subordinated against the ideas of the Romantic Movement. In place of logic and reason, the Romantics placed a considerable amount of emphasis on emotions, beauty, individuality and in particularly the imagination. An integral part of this change meant that the way in which one perceived nature, beauty and imagination had to veer into a different direction.

Heaney’s view of poetry differs from that of Yeats and Auden, but still has noticeably similar characteristics. Poetry is, for Heaney, and archeological process, that delves into the past of humanity as well as his own past. In relation to violence, Heaney sees poetry as having an obligation to honor the dead without glorifying or detrimenting them. “The Grauballe Man” is the perfect example of a poem that explores the past, but also deals with the struggles of the present. The poem is focused upon a dead body that was preserved in a Danish bog. Heaney uses his detailed description of the dead man to honor him. He moves from “the ball of his heel like a basalt egg” to “his slashed throat.” (Heaney 2954). He sees beauty in this preserved form, and refuses to call is a corpse or body. There is something beautiful to be found in an honest and reverent honoring of the dead. Heaney at first only thought of the man in the form of a picture, but having spent time with this eternal image of violence and death, “he lies perfected in [his] memory,” helping him to cope with the tragic violence of his life as a Catholic in Ireland’s Protestant north (Heaney 2955). Heaney uses poetry to process his reaction, but in a different way. Instead of verbalizing his conflicts directly, he simply looks upon the world with honesty and describes it in truth and clarity. In doing so,

Meanwhile in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, the speaker experiences the belly of the whale when he comes to the realization that he will never be immortal like the painting on the urn. The belly of the whale--as mentioned before--deals with the lowest point in the character’s life, and specifically in this case, the persona, a human with a mortal life desires the ability of being immortal. The speaker undergoes the same wants as Dorian Gray but does not gain them. If anything “Ode on a Grecian Urn” serves as the realistic version of people accepting mortality than The Picture of Dorian Gray. Although Dorian Gray expresses what it “looks like” to receive what a person wishes for, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” turns a lesson into a wide perspective about what

Primarily, Keats’s use of this theme shows the importance of human life. As Keats states with his line, “Verse, Fame, and Beauty are intense indeed, / But Death intenser -Death is Life's high meed,” (), life has many intense elements, but death ultimately serves as the highest point of life. Because of the intense questioning of death by Keats’s narrator, Keats shows the importance of living life before the finality of death inevitably hits. Keats also allows a certain amount of personal freedom through his use of the glorification of the ordinary with the way that he begins his poem. As the poem begins, Keats tells that, “No God, no Demon of severe response, / Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell,” (). This line intends to show the complicated nature of religion and the mute lips which it comes from. Keats essentially throws religion out the window with this line, and he states that there are more important elements in life than religion such as the importance of living itself. In relation to this statement of life’s more important elements, Keats does acknowledge death’s ability through lines such as, “Why did I laugh? I know this Being's lease, / My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads;” (), and “Yet would I on this very midnight cease,” (), but he also places a heavy importance on living life simply because it is to be lived rather than dreaded or pondered. Lastly, Keats provides a final layer of depth by implying that his narrator laughed because of life and death. Keats shows this through his constant questioning of life and death in the context of laughing. By providing a satire to both life’s purpose and death’s inevitability, Keats shows us the greatest example of glorification of the ordinary which he has to offer throughout his poem by illustrating that death should be disregarded and life should be lived in

Keats, however, chose to use religious topics to inspire his works in other ways. Robert Ryan says, "Keats decisively repudiated the Christianity of their time as incorrigibly dishonest and pernicious." (Ryan 5). Ryan's statement along with the symbolism in The Eve of St. Agnes makes me believe Keats to have preferred the old religion over the new.

Lastly, another one of keats’ more famous poems is titled Urn. This poem, as now you probably have already guessed, is about an urn. Keats admired this urn from ancient greece and spent hours looking at it. It was beautiful and had all these different pictures and carvings on it. However, the one things that stood out to keats was that it was thousands of years old and it was still here. And I believe that his message was, when all mankind is dead, this pot will still be standing. But I believe that he meant that mankind won't be here forever, and he wanted people to remember that.

Keats composes in his poem, “…and I should feel a damp- a chill as from a tomb” (Poertryworld). The speaker makes his opinion obvious to the reader about his dislike for religion and finds it a vault for where his beliefs would go to die. In other lines such as, “The church bells toll a melancholy round” and “In some black spell; seeing that each one tears, Himself from fireside joys” (poetryworld). In those lines, the speaker further points out his resistance to religion and what people will do for religion such as, pull away from what makes them happy.

John Keats expressed the message of not wanting to be forgotten in both of the following poems called Ode to a Nightingale, and Ode on a Grecian Urn. Keats major worry before death was being forgotten and failing to leave an impact. In the poem Ode to a Nightingale, Keats has confusion with the versions of reality. It is emphasized that Keats is on a type of drug, making him see things not “normal”. In the fourth stanza, Keats has met up with a nightingale in a fantasy world. The bird suddenly flies away and the dream is over. The poet expresses his mental state which he explains is not caused by drugs are alcohol, yet compares it to those things. In the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats emphasizes the meaning of innocence. He develops the idea that the world is going to change. Things are going to suffer, but that’s the way the world works.

John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, England. He loved to write poems, especially about romance and death. “Outside his friend Leigh Hunt 's circle of liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the day attacked his work, with malicious zeal, as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work of of an upstart vulgar cockney poetaster- John Gibson Lockhart, and as consisting of the host incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language- John Wilson Croker”(John Keats). Many people attacked him and it affected him with his writing. “John Keats died on February

The twenty-four old romantic poet John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written in the spring of 1819 was one of his last of six odes. That he ever wrote for he died of tuberculosis a year later. Although, his time as a poet was short he was an essential part of The Romantic period (1789-1832). His groundbreaking poetry created a paradigm shift in the way poetry was composed and comprehended. Indeed, the Romantic period provided a shift from reason to belief in the senses and intuition. “Keats’s poem is able to address some of the most common assumptions and valorizations in the study of Romantic poetry, such as the opposition between “organic culture” and the alienation of modernity”. (O’Rourke, 53) The irony of Keats’s Urn is he likens

John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is written through the power of eternity, beauty and truth regardless of existence, as Wordsworth showed likewise. Keats illustrated his poem through love in its sublime. For example, in the first stanza he says, “What wild ecstasy?” (Keats 930). If ecstasy is a huge feeling of

Keats, on the other hand, uses the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to express his perspective on art by examining the characters on the urn from either an ideal or realistic perspective. In the beginning, Keats asks questions regarding the “mad pursuit” (9, p.1847) of the people on the Grecian urn. As the Grecian urn exists outside of time, Keats creates a paradox for the human figures on the urn because they do not confront aging but neither experience time; Keats then further discusses the paradox in the preceding stanzas of the poem. In the second and third stanza, Keats examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover “beneath the trees” (15, p.1847) and expresses that their love is “far above” (28, p.1848) all human passion. Even though