ode to a grecian urn

             "More happy love! more happy, happy love!" (Keats, line 25). When one reads lines such as this, one cannot help but think that the poet must have been very, very happy, and that, in fact, the tone of the poem is light and filled with joy. However, this is not the case in John Keats's poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn. At first glance, the tone of the poem seems light and flowery. However, when one looks deeper into the poem to find its underlying meanings, one discovers that the tone of the poem is very morbid. This is because the poem has two separate levels. Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn has a superficial level of happiness and joy, which acts as a facade for a deeper level of morbidity and death, most likely because of the fact that Keats was dying from tuberculosis as he wrote this poem. Ode on a Grecian Urn was written only about two years before his death. In this poem he discusses immortality and things frozen forever in a state of perfection, such as the urn. It seems he is longing for the immortality that is possessed by the urn. He knows he can never have this immortality.
             Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a long poem extolling the perfection of art as opposed to real life, showing that art is timeless whereas nature can never be because living things are caught up in a cycle of change and death. This is an idea that validly opposes the concept that everything changes in time, and that nothing is left untouched. Keats also implies that a sense of perfection and immortality could be captured in the image on the urn. Only there in the images can things remained locked in stasis as the world about it changes and moves on. From that Keats idly contemplates the idea of immortality and eternity as opposed to changing, perhaps as a result of his fatal condition. Keat's idea of the urn is also that of a storytelling legacy, because when his generation is long dead and gone, and the world is changed, the urn w...

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ode to a grecian urn. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 05:26, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/20544.html