Chapter 3: “Thou Silent Form”

 

 

John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” gives us a wonderful perspective on the representational differences between poetry and the visual arts. In this ode,  Keats has constructed an ekphrastic response to an urn which may or may not have existed. It is possible that Keats based his notion of the urn on several urns that he had seen on his many visits to the British Museum. (The drawing of the urn, left, is by Keats’ own hand.)  If this ode is a composite of other urns, then it can be seen as a ‘fictional’ or ‘notional’ ekphrasis – a poem based on an artwork that exists in the imagination of the poet. Keats’ ode describes the urn in much detail, so that one can ‘see’ it without having actually seen it. However, the primary focus of the poem is not the urn’s beauty, but rather its nature as a work of art.  Throughout the poem, Keats asks many questions of the silent urn, questions which must inevitably go unanswered. Notice how many of the lines of the poem exemplify the limits of poetry and painting as suggested by G.E. Lessing (see previous chapter). I have taken some liberties in marking these lines in the poem and will come back to these below.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do no grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this fold, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou are desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

 

Much has been said about Keats’ odes and this one is particularly fascinating in both its paradoxes and questions about the nature of art and beauty and what sets this ode apart from many other ekphrastic texts is its sustained comparison between poetry and the visual arts. In the first 4 lines, Keats makes clear that the urn contains a narrative and history that it cannot convey to the viewer, since the work of art is silent, or ‘frozen’, in space and time. Although the urn can tell its tale ‘more sweetly than our rhyme’ (as it calls on the faculties of the imagination), the poem has the advantage of being temporal (time-based) and therefore would be able to narrate the entire story of the urn (albeit over many sequential lines). To demonstrate the urn’s silence, the speaker asks it to explain the images emblazoned on its surface – and there are many. What story must have generated the scenes represented here!   But, importantly, Keats goes on to praise the advantages of ‘slow time’ and the frozen narrative: the boy will never catch the girl, but he will always remain young and she forever beautiful. The boughs of the trees will never lose their leaves and the pipers will always play their unheard tunes – which are ‘more lovely than those heard’, as they will be made beautiful in the imagination of the reader. Finally, we come to the most puzzling lines of the poem, and yet the most important to meaning:    “Thou silent form does tease us out of thought’. Remember that Keats’ friend Shelley places imagination above thought in his “Defence of Poetry” (see last entry) . This is a Romantic notion (the imagination is on a higher plane than thought) and seems to be the same line that Keats is taking here (recalling the different stances of 19th century writers about the need for ‘scientific proof’). The silent form, then, has the advantage of taking the viewer of the urn beyond the observable world of the senses to the spiritual world.

Now that we have set the stage for our  pursuit of ekphrasis, the next entry will present different types of ekphrastic texts that we find in literature.