The Real World and the WOrld of Art, Beauty and Truth in

By Somaye Nouri Zenoz

The Real World and the World of Art Beauty and Truth in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by

Somaye Nouri Zenoz

January 2004

Comparing the transience of life with the permanence of apprehension of a work of art, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ asserts the quality of both the real world and the world of art. Contrary to the generally believed idea that in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Keats actually prefers the immortal nature of art over the mortal nature of human activities in the real world, it is noticed that he is indeed depicting a sense of loss in the transcendent and incorporeal world of art as well as that in the real world. In line with development of the same idea, Keats comes to prove the real identity of the concepts ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’, believing that one can obtain the utmost of human knowledge if he perceives that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ operates on a range of paradoxes about transience and transcendence, activity and inactivity, change and changelessness and mortality and immortality. These paradoxes can be defined as the discordance between the urn with its static images and the dynamic life depicted on the urn, the human and ephemeral versus the immortal and permanent, participation versus observation and at last, life versus art. Existing in a timeless world, the portrayed figures cannot move or change, nor can their feelings change, yet the sculptor has succeeded in creating a sense of living passion and action. As in "Ode to a Nightingale", the real world of pain is in conflict with the ideal world of joy.

As discussed by Jack, if ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is not a direct description of any particular Greek urn, this need not be surprising: in the light of Keats’s general practice, it would be surprising if it were. Even when his debt to a work of art is undeniable, he is almost certain to introduce details which are not to be found in his original, and as a rule he uses a painting or a work of sculpture as a springboard for his own imagination (221). Fluctuating between these images, the poem has brought about arguments mostly pointing to the idea that it is representative of Keats's desire for immortality and its preference over mortality; however Keats doesn't try to manifest any priorities of immortality and its upshot over mortal life and its consequences. The first stanza begins slowly, asks strange questions and raises abstract concepts such as time and art. The comparison of the urn to an "unravished bride" functions at a number of levels. It prepares for the impossibility of fulfillment of the second stanza and for the violence of lines 8-10 of this stanza. "Still" embodies two concepts, time and motion, which appear in different ways in the rest of the poem and specially in the second with the urn as a "foster" child. Although the urn exists in the real world which is subject to time and change, the life it presents and itself are static and unchanging; thus the bride is "unravished" and as a "foster" child, the urn goes through the "slow time" and not the time of the real world. The figures carved on the urn are not subject to time, though the urn may be changed or affected by slow time.

The urn as "sylvan historian" speaks to the observer, even if it doesn't answer the poet's questions. The urn is "sylvan'', possibly because a border of leaves encircles the vase and the scene carved on the urn is set in woods. The "flowery tale" told "sweetly" and "sylvan historian" do not prepare for the terror and wild sexuality in lines 8-10 and this can be considered as another opposition. It is again paradoxical that the urn, which is mute, tells tales "more sweetly than our rhyme". The poet is unable to distinguish between mortal and immortal, men and gods and this is another opposition; it can be a suggestion of coexistence and inseparableness in this combination of differences between them. In lines 8-10, the poet is caught up in the rapid activities depicted on the urn and moves from observer to participant in the life on the urn while he is emotionally involved. Again paradoxically, the dynamic passion is portrayed on a piece of motionless stone. As Talbot puts it, ....escaping himself and entering the life of the urn, Keats develops the contrast between immortality and the dream world of the urn in contrast to reality and the human experience. Unlike anything in the world, the urn is both vital and timeless; however as in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ he returns to the unpleasant realities of the human world. The view of life as a work of art, though, holds the tensions of expectation in a permanent balance. The urn is first seen as a 'still unravished bride'. Brides are brides temporarily, before they become wives, and the consummation is devoutly to be wished. Yet when a woman changes from bride o a wife a loss is involved.... (62) The urn covers designs of human activities but is a creature associated with ‘quietness’, ‘silence’ and ‘slow time’. Therefore it can be said that the activities are quasi-immortal and the hesitation in whether they are gods or mortals who are so engaged is therefore appropriate. Employing various negative phrasings, the first lines of the second stanza also contrast the ideal (in art, love, and nature) and the real. As beautifully mentioned by Talbot, the second stanza reminds of the paradoxical delights of unheard music. Music is a temporal phenomenon and the loss of a timescale makes it impossible but if the witness of the timeless activity has sufficient ‘Negative Capability’ he can enter into the held moment when the music enjoyed without ever hearing the song end. This is juxtaposed with picture of the lover who is strongly congratulated: 'Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal- yet, do not grieve; She can not fade, though thou hast not thy bliss For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!' this is the definition of life as momentary perfection in the sense that the tension between expectation and achievement is never resolved because satisfaction is never achieved (Talbot, 63). To put it another way, a great loss is indeed involved but the freedom from the misery of hearing the music stop and the song end and of seeing the girl once kissed fade into the terrible old age is also as great.

Repeating ideas from the preceding two stanzas, the third stanza re-introduces some figures, the trees which can't shed their leaves, the musician, and the lover. Keats portrays the ideal life on the urn as one void of disappointment and suffering. The passion depicted on the urn may be human, but it is also "all breathing passion far above" because it is unchanging. This could be an irony that the superior passion depicted on the urn is also unfulfillable because attaining the utmost satisfaction is actually impossible. This stanza is considered as a rather emotional dwelling on the scene of the second stanza. The boughs, melodist and love are all free from the destructive nature of mortal or natural activities. The empathy with which Keats enters into the depictions attracts the attention in that this timeless activity is to be always full and rich but the following last three lines take us back to the bitter reflection on temporary passion and on the essential interdependence of joy and sorrow: 'All breathing human passions far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue' (Norton, 587)

The fourth stanza, describing a quite different scene, a sacrifice scene, makes the reader feel a sense of loss in the metaphysical and transcendent world of art. The people at the sacrifice will never return to the little town they have left and it will be the poorer.

This demonstrates the ability of art to evoke the imagination, so that the viewer sees more than is portrayed. The poet imagines the village from which the figures on the urn came. In this stanza, the poet begins to depart from his emotional participation in life on the urn. The image of the desolate town embodies both pain and joy. It is also ironic and paradoxical that no one can tell us why the town is empty and that the vase communicates so much to the poet and so to the reader. As argued by Talbot, here we come to affirm the quality of both the real world and the art world. The world of art itself involves contradictions in that there is no possibility of change and yet the recognition of a future beautiful consummation is part of the essential attraction of the scene. This paradox is also related to the sense of the interdependence of joy and melancholy as mentioned above (65). The next stanza can be considered a return to the outside view of the depictions on the urn. The poet observes the urn as a whole and remembers his vision. After the confusion raised from the ‘bride of quietness’, the urn is now a ‘silent form’ again and worse ‘a cold pastoral’. The world of art is not a living world and by the power of fancy, it pretends to be so. Yet the urn is further established as a very precious thing in a different way: it is of permanent validity as a friend to man and provides a great manifesto for looking at human life:

''Beauty is truth, truth beauty''- that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (Norton, 588) What is meant seems to be that human life can be looked at in such a way to take the shape of a work of art in which all the disagreeable matters can be involved without spoiling the whole of it. In this way, truth becomes a wisdom which must be involved in the recognition of beauty just as beauty must be involved in the recognition of truth. This is the central idea of Keats’ famous definition: ‘The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.’ As Fogle remarks on the ode, beauty and truth reside in the phenomenal world itself and may be found there if one will take the trouble to seek them out. There is a tendency in Keats working against any inclination to erect walls between ideal and real. Nor need one seek the unusual for the secret lies as well close at hand as far off (193). The real is full of unpleasant ugliness and pain but the beauty of the real is a beauty which resides as well in pain and ugliness as in beauty itself. There’s the sorrow and melancholy which makes sorrow more beautiful than beauty’s self. It’s also worthy to mention Thorpe’s remark that ....here in brief, seems to be Keats’s theory to the possibility of creating beauty out of the ugly and evil: take any subject, however repulsive, and represent it in an art form with enough vigorous universal life-truth gleaming through to excite intense imaginative speculation and insight, and the unpleasantness vanishes- is not recognized; what one sees is a vision of life and there comes an elevation of soul that carries one for the moment away from the accidents of time and place. It is entirely and admirably consistent with Keats’s large theory that a direct and intuitive perception of truth is beauty' (137). Thus we can recognize that beauty is the ultimate goal and one can achieve truth along the way of discovering the real beauty. As Thorpe ads to the above, it is apparent that Keats understands his mortality as though looking for beauty in his mortal life, he can start to recognize the truth of his own transience. He has a strong belief that beauty needs to be appreciated in order for truth to be found. The immortal beauty found in the ancient Grecian urn deserves to be regarded as of true beauty. In this regard, Talbot presents the idea that the beauty of the real lies in the uniqueness which belongs to every thing or thought simply because it is. Thus the mind’s philosophy should as well be approved by experience and experience should be shaped in a form that relates to both the transience of man and the stasis of art. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ accepts the fact of mortality and necessary loss and the fact of momentary perception as the essence of life and its beauty. This fact channels the suffering of the heart, the trouble of the mind and the delight of the imagination into a precious view of life and art supremely rich and compassionate (66, 67). Meditating on the great paradoxical nature of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ as discussed above, we shall consider the poem as the welcome of the spirit to both immortality and mortality as represented by the transcendence and incorporeity of man in the world of art and his transience in the real world. Developing this very idea, Keats points to the fact that human life can be looked at in a way to resemble the beauty of a work of art in which melancholy and disagreeables can also be involved without spoiling the whole and joy of it. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ embodies mortality and immortality proving that immortality lies in the bosom of mortality and can be achieved through identification of the self and believing in the fact that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’.

References Fogle, R. H. The imagery of Keats and Shelley. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1949. Jack, Jan. Keats and the Mirror of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Keats, John. Ode on a Grecian Urn. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. J. Sokhanvar & H. Honarvar. Tehran: Vahid Publications, 1997. Talbot, Norman. The Major Poems of John Keats. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968. Thorpe, Clarence Dewitt. The Mind of John Keats. New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1964.

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