Beauty and Truth An Outlook on Keats’ “Ode on a Greecian Urn”

BEAUTY AND TRUTH
AN OUTLOOK ON KEATS’ “ODE ON A GREECIAN URN”

“On a Greecian Urn” is unlike most other odes of Keats in several respects. In most of the other odes Keats addresses beauty and the beautiful things in nature. In a way even the one on melancholy eventually falls into the same category. In the ode “On a Greecian Urn” he addresses a work of art which has once and for all captured the beauty of Nature in one piece of art, the urn. And it is only in this ode that the world of arts speaks with the world of man, the world of life, in the last two lines. While most of the other odes voice only the poet’s anguish at the transcience of love, youth, beauty and joy in life-in-nature, in this poem the work of art, the urn, acts as a friend to man and comforts him with the wisdom– 

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty–That’s all
Ye know on earth and ye need to know”

The poem itself springs from a recognition of a paradox which underlies the world of man. Human life longs for lasting beauty and joy. The beauty and joy we find in nature and life only serve to rouse and intensify this yearning and end in redoubled sorrow caused by their evanescence and they leave

“…..a heart high, sorrowful and cloy’d
A burning forehead and a parching tongue.”

The man of keen aesthetic awareness would fly “on the viewless wings of poesy” and capture moments of surpassing beauty in life and nature in his art and render them permanent. Keats himself provides instances of this in his odes. Thus art which is a product of transient life renders beauty and joy which are evanescent permanent. Out of a recognition of this paradox springs the poem “On a Greecian Urn”.

The awareness of this paradox is suggested by the very choice of the urn as the subject of the poem. For, any other work of plastic art could have served the poet to convey the rest of his meaning as well. And an urn is a vessel which is intended to contain the mortal remains of a departed soul. As a work of art it is a symbol of man’s artistic or moral triumph over his transience in life and nature. As the preserver of the ashes, it remains a “silent form”, a “bride of quietness”; as the preserver of beauty in art it sings “to the spirit”, “unheard melodies” which are even sweeter than the heard melodies”. It is no wonder then that art, in the person of the urn speaks of Life, like a comforting friend amidst its “woes”. It tells man that the only lasting Truth that we can grasp from life is the beauty of art. And this is the only true beauty that man can ever hope for and he needs to hope for. Only art can say what Shakespeare said to his friend and patron in his “Sonnets”:

“So long as men can breathe and eyes can see
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

Has not the Urn given life eternal to the panting lovers, the “soft pipes”, and a whole crowd of ancient Greek rustics proceeding to a sacrifice? May be even the gods of Tempe–Apollo and the Muses–as well as the men of Arcady have been immortalised. Is it not a paradox that the “cold pastoral” could do what “all breathing human passion” could not? This sense, I suppose, is stressed by the apostrophe after “cold pastoral” as after “attic shape!”

How does the “silent form” accomplish this? It is by teasing us “out of thought”; for “to think is to be full of sorrow” (“Ode to a Nightingale”). The urn could do it only because it is a “cold pastoral.” Whatever utters or sings its joy cannot accomplish so much. The “songs of spring” (“To Autumn”) pass away and the “music too” of Autumn cannot say or accomplish this much. Even the song of the Nightingale could not do it; it needed Keats to “fly” “on the viewless wings poesy” in order to fancy that the bird was “not born for death” even then he has to quickly realize that…….“fancy cannot that so well.”

Keats the poet himself is sure that he cannot do it through his song and so he confesses that the urn can “express”–

“A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.”

Thus the urn accomplishes the unique function of immortalizing beauty and making it the only Truth that could or need be aspired for. This triumph of art is made most telling in the passage referring to the “little town”

“What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.”

Not a soul can say why the little town is desolate. And as Walter Jackson Bate explains, It is not simply because the figures are forever imprisoned on the urn that no one can ever return to the empty town but because the actual inhabitants disappeared in the remote past–a past from which no one remains except as figures on an urn in other works of art.” And what all those persons could not do, the urn has done; it has told Keats why the town is empty. And in doing so the urn has actually done to the inhabitants of the town what Shakespeare promises to do to his patron-friend in the lines from his sonnet quoted above. Indeed it has done the same for Tempe and Arcady, and for the whole of ancient Greece. (That is why Keats called it a “historian.”) Then the urn in itself has immortalized Greek sculpture. Art is thus more enduring than even a whole culture. If its Beauty is not Truth, what is? And is not this Truth the only Beauty that man can ever know? And while the critics wrangle about the aesthetic propriety of the last two lines of the poem uttered by the silent urn, the urn remains “still” the very same–

“Sylvan historian, who can’t thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme’

And if the critics are remembered by posterity as such it is on account of the urn of Keats’ poem and not the other way round.

In short the last two lines of the poem are not merely those of the urn but of all plastic arts in general and through them, that of all art. If art does not say–

“Beauty is truth, truth Beauty–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

What else can it say? And what else is art expected to say without ceasing to be art? If the urn ceases to say what it does, all art ceases, and with it the only hope of giving permanence to beauty and joy which man has. The sole aim and hope of all mankind would be defeated. And in speaking out this invaluable truth, is not the urn the true and only friend of man though critics seem to dislike its saying it? And what else is more appropriate to be said by the urn which is the “still unravished bride quietness,” and which is, like the lady in one of the pictures on the urn–

            “Forever warm and still to be enjoy’d  
            Forever panting and forever young.”

            Going a step further, did the urn utter the last two lines of the poem at all? It is “a cold pastoral”, the “silent form” and could not have “said” it. The lines only represent the “unheard melodies” the “soft urn sings to the spirit and the essential truth of the saying lies in the urn being what it says both in its beauty and truthfulness.

            There is another possible way of viewing the words that the urn is supposed to utter to future generations. I suggest that besides the pictures described in the fourth stanza of the poem the urn should be taken to be bearing these two concluding lines of the poem as an inscription engraved on it. For such a thing is quite in keeping with ancient Greek custom of urn-making. Walter Jackson Bate has come very close to saying this: “The final two lines are in the vein of the inscriptions on Greek monuments addressed to the passing stranger.” Thus realistically taking it, it is the ancient maker of the urn that has made the statement by inscribing it on the urn; and he himself had gone into dust; this is the additional force behind the poet’s address “Thou Foster child of silence and slow time”; this “Foster child of silence and slow time” bears out the truth of the saying by its own beauty and permanence; and in making such an urn, its maker too demonstrated the truth of his own statement. It is only because the urn could make such a statement and because of the sublime truth of the statement itself, we may fancy, that “slow time” and “silence” consented to become its foster-parents and took all care to preserve it, especially time, which is usually the destroyer of all things.

            Three points have emerged from the above consideration:

            1. That the main theme of the poem is not merely the statement that “Art is long and life is short”; besides it is that plastic art is superior to all other arts like music and poetry.

            2. That the last two lines of the ode are not merely approriate; they are even essential to the poem.

            3. That lines 39 to 41 do not carry “an undertone of sadness, of disappointment” which Sidney Colvin calls “a dissonance”; and that the expression “cold pastoral” is not expressive of Keats’ dissatisfaction with urn’s want of human feeling which, according to Prof. Garrod, contradicts the general tenor of the earlier part of the poem. The feeling expressed in both the cases is quite the contrary; it is one of joy and marvel at what a lifeless marble could achieve.