Theme Of 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.

Literature often reflects real life. The world of imagination is a euphoric release from the world of actuality but paradoxically this world of imagination makes the world of actuality even more painful than what it is. Human life is often full of conflicts for example, the interconnection or mixture of pain/joy, intensity of feeling/numbness or lack of feeling, life/death, the actual/the ideal, and separation/connection. In the poem “Ode to a Nightingale” written by John Keats, the poet seems to be praising the nightingale for its melodious tune but upon further investigation it is revealed that he is actually using the nightingale and its song as a means of escaping the realities of human life. This poem is about the intense feelings the poet has about the transience about the nature of reality.

Keats uses the image on the urn to express desire that can never be realized. The urn depicts a scene of a man and a woman about to kiss, but this image is frozen in time. This

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

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ozymandias” both have the theme of nature discussed within their poems. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, John Keats portrays imagery of nature to illustrate the art on the urn. For example, “a flowery tale” or “leaf-fring’d legend”. In the poem “Ozymandias”, Percy Shelly explains how the sculpture is partially buried in sand in the desert. Both of the poems use nature, yet they differ in the outcome.

When reaching the second part of the poems, the reader starts to see the differences between the poems. Keats starts to talk about the “Cloudy symbols and the “shadow”. It seems that Keats might believe that love is a predetermined life event, seeming as though he is disappointed that he might of missed out on an

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

The first four lines are metaphors the speaker uses to draw you into the poem wondering who is in the urn. Making the urn as a mystery box. He goes into great detail about the urn, but leaves the final judgment of who was actually cremated in the urn to the listener. The speaker starts the poem off by acting as if the urn is a bride on her wedding day at the alter and the silence you hear as the groom approaches her. Maybe that’s not it, the ashes in the urn is a foster child, silence and slow time is the parents who are symbolized as the urn to protect the ashes. Then finally the speaker calls the urn a “historian” statin to the listener just imagine the stories these ashes could tell not just of those who have visited the urn, but of life

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

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.

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

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