Ode On A Grecian Urn Summary

Ode on a Grecian urn John Keats On a Grecian urn means to or about a Greek urn, so from its title, we can see that the poet is talking about and addressing a work of art, which is a very characteristic of ekphrasis. We should also realize that the poet is writing about a fictional work of art that exist only in his imagination and inside the poem’s verbal creation of it. This is what Murray Krieger calls the illusion of ekphrasis.

FORM

The ode is divided into five stanzas .Each is ten lines long. The first four lines roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop it. In each stanza, the poet speaks about a different aspect of the urn. THE FIERST STANZA The poet begins by describing the Grecian urn. He is fascinated by the

Some critics say that it is the viewer who is speaking to the urn to express that in spite of all the beautiful and sweet feelings, which the urn arises in him, he is aware of its limitations, it may not need know anything beyond the equation between beauty and truth.

Other critics suggest that , these lines are of the urn in which it gives a moral lesson to human kind saying” all humans need to know that beauty and truth are one thing in spite of all the complications of human life”

Still there is ambiguity about the intended meaning of these lines. John Keats emphasis on the paradox between mortality and immortality may refer to his desire to be immortalized with this poem, which describe an immortal urn. At the end of this analysis, we can attribute parts of the poem to some theories about ekphrasis:

1-Lessing in his Lacoon differentiates between the silent, fixed, spatial and natural work of art and the eloquent, dynamic, temporal and arbitrary work of a language, and this is clearly found in the poem from the very beginning especially in the first three