Ode On A Grecian Urn John Keats Analysis

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.

From the first few lines Keats alludes to the great romances of the previous ages as opposed to William Shakespeare's great tragedies. While it could be discerned that Keats is referring to his poem

Poetry is used to express several different mediums through: structure, tone, imagery and rhyme schemes. John Keats’s ode “To Autumn” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” or, a Vision in a Dream” will be critically analyzed, compared and contrasted to each throughout this paper to further dissected the meaning of each poem.

Readers of Keats’s story begin to realize that the fear of a young death is a demon that haunts us all. This was Keats’s goal as a romantic writer: to connect with the reader, to portray his ideas in the form of art, and to make the reader see from his point of view. With his use of colorful figurative language, such as repetition, imagery, and personification, Keats accomplishes his goal. The reason that Keats is so successful in painting a clear picture is because he “uses his imagination to write” (King). By writing his poem in the form of a “Shakespearean sonnet consisting of three quatrains” (King), Keats, like any great artist, clearly states the point he is trying to make. Apprehension of a young demise is a plague that haunts us all. In “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to be,” Keats takes our hands and reassures us that we are not

Time is the one constant in life that one cannot change and both Humbert Humbert and Keats try to evade it by trying to stop time. In Ode on a Grecian Urn, resembling John Keats, Humbert Humbert envies the past youth and innocence that transforms overtime into a relationship of distrust and disillusion. One can see through textural evidence that Humbert craves the innocence of a past relationship that was uncompleted though his desire to replicate this relationship with Lolita. Humbert wants to keep this perfect image of youth and innocence alive through his desires just as Keats wants to be a perfect image that never changes on a Grecian Urn so that time never passes.

Conversely, in another of Keats’ poems “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, he describes a piece of art that is spoken of in admiration. Keats believes that art as beautiful as this or any art for that matter is forever. This artistic expression transcends death itself. “When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe” (Keats). While everyone around grows old and eventually passes away this art is untouched by the hands of death. The works people leave behind are immortal and will withstand the test of time. Whether it be a sculpture or a poet’s work. Keats is not the only one who sees a death as an opportunity though. In “On Death”, another of Keats’ poems he speaks of death as a chance to let go of the suffering in this life and find peace in another. In the first line of this poem Keats creates an idea that when we are living, or awake, we are dreaming. “Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?”(Keats). I believe he’s saying that we are living in a dreamlike state, where we go by in our everyday lives and every

A brilliant American poet, Henry David Thoreau, once claimed, “This world is but a canvas to our imagination”. This idea that everything can be interpreted differently using creativity is evident in many of John Keats’ poems. However, how does “Ode on a Grecian Urn” reveal the beauty of art? Keats uses different images of melodies, love, and happiness to show that the idea of true beauty of art is within the eye of the beholder.

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's contrast of permanence and change becomes especially evident in the last stanza. The urn is a "cold pastoral," callous to the intense longing that it draws forth from its beholder, who is painfully mortal and insignificant in its presence and, furthermore, bewildered, for the urn "dost tease us out of thought" as we attempt to grasp its eternality. The notorious closing lines express the wisdom that the urn imparts to its beholder, and they tell us exactly what we can take for granted: ""Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."" Hence, everything else in the world is shifting, inconsistent; but the urn, an ideal specimen of beauty, is immutable and immortal.

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

Both the poets believe that it is only art which can give solace and contentment in life. The impermanence of all the earthly and living things has been contrasted with the permanence which art bestows on them. According to Keats, the work of art is more vivid than the actual life as it has its own life; Keats touches on this in the third stanza of the poem. Like Yeats, Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” also talks about imagination and music:

observations on what is painted on the urn. "What men or gods are these? What

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

m, and to try to understand its significance, then he/she will be left behind it, none-the-wiser. In Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats states “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter .” The elements are that tangible and noticeable are important, but it is the unseen or unnoticed elements that hold a greater meaning. The noticeable elements, such as the people, the towns, and the material possessions only last for a short time, so they are sweet while they last, but the unseen elements, such as love, happiness, messages, cultures, and beliefs, are sweeter because they accompany time as it changes from one event to the next, as they do through the urn, delivered by its art to Keats. He additionally states “soft pipes, play