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
From that Keats idly contemplates the idea of immortality and eternity as opposed to changing, perhaps as a result of his fatal condition. be because living things are caught up in a cycle of change and death. Great Expectations also deals mainly with change on a personal level that affects the individual whereas Ode on a Grecian Urn speaks of a form if immortality that challenges time and how some things, such as art, do not in fact change and remain timeless. To Keat's the urn symbolises beauty, imagination and immortality in that it hasn't aged or died, the images on the urn are free but frozen. Only there in the images can things remained locked in stasis as the world about it changes and moves on. In Great Expectation, change is seen rather as a chance of opportunity and choice, something that just happens to a person and they have the choice whether to embrace or reject it. Keat's usage of a slow pace in the poem reflects the sinuous shape of the urn and he uses the power of the imagination to give life to the urn. Compared to Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and its theme of change, Ode on a Grecian Urn is a stark contrast with its own concept of timeless change. Change in the poem is referred rather as a something as unstoppable as time in nature, in fact, that they go hand in hand. Another example is the line, "When old age shall this generation waste". He establishes a second metaphor as well, this time comparing the urn to a 'sylvan historian', in that it can record in its workmanship the details of a culture long extinct. However, it is not a sonnet because it does not have fourteen lines, and it does not have the setup-argument-conclusion format that a sonnet does; it couldn't have, because it does not begin and end in one self-contained stanza, but continues its argument from one stanza to the next. Ode on a Grecian Ode however changes this concept and offers an alternative perspective on the concept. When one first reads these lines, one gets a sense of peace and tranquility.
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