John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

In the song "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poet speaks directly to the reader and describes the tantrum. there is an instancy in the way Keats describes the scene and comments on the action. A perfunctory reading might make one think that he is describing an actual scene he is observing, when in fact what he is doing is describing a scene painted on the side of a Grecian urn. He sees on the side of this urn im boards of life--people reveling, dancing in the woods, singing, playing music, and so on. The entire image is of a consequence frozen in time, a joyous moment in which people are laughing and cavorting and now will be doing so forever because of the way the scene has been captured forever by a long- ago artist.

The scene for the poem is therefore wherever the poet has encountered this urn, an the poet is now responding to the images he sees on the urn, to the ideas that the scene brings to his mind, and to the way he feels about those ideas. The audience is the reader, who hears the scene described and who is then hardened to the idea evoked in the mind of the poet by this scene and by the way the scene has been frozen in time.

The poet's personal credit line is simply that the artist has given these people and their actions immortality. In a broader sense, Keats is speaking of the power of art to transform beauty into a larger truth and to give it the

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know (46-50).

Britain. capital of The Netherlands: Time-Life, 1986.

The youth on the urn is told that he can never pass his place beneath the tree, and that those trees will never be bare--the orb of the urn is always comminutedly as seen, and for Keats the sadness is that this world is different. In this world the trees are bare and youth changes to old age and then death.

Pascal, Blaise. PensTes. New York: Penguin, 1966.

Stover, Leon E. and Bruce Kraig. Stonehenge: The Indo-European Heritage. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978.

Are sweeter; therefore, ye spongy pipes, play on (11-12).

One of the themes expressed in this poem is the way Art shapes Nature and makes it more than it was before, adding the human caprice so the artist can speak to subsequent generations as Keats does in this poem and as the painter did on the urn. There is something in the human being that seeks both to reshape and to rationalize the world through creation. Keats chooses to do this by means of poetry, utilise words and sounds to express his ideas and to communicate with others. Pre-literate people thousands of years ago in what is now Britain sought to express their awe at the mysteries of the universe by creating a huge stone monument, the precise function of which remains i some doubt. Stonehenge was not the unaccompanied such stone circle created during that era, but it remains the around famous. The fact that this creation still empowers the imagination is noted by Stover and Kraig when they write,

The island of Great Britain consists of three countries, England, Wales, and Scotland, and along with the province of Northern Ireland, these countries constitute the United Kingdom. There are many small islands environ Great Britain. The people are more diverse than in most areas of the same size, for Britain is a multinational society at bottom a unitary political state. This affects the culture of the region greatly, for it draws elements from the diff
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