Ode On A Grecian Urn

Question 1

What happens in stanza 1

Answer 1

-speaker picks up urn + inspects imagery
-urn perfect work from Ancient Greece
-brings unknown message from past
-connections intense fleeting passions life with permanent beauty art

Question 2

What happens in stanza 2

Answer 2

-speaker celebrates undying nature of art
-reflects on figures living eternally in their passion
-love + beauty eternal + never fade like in reality

Question 3

What happens in stanza 3

Answer 3

-clear intensification of S2
-‘happy’ repeated 6x + ‘forever’ 5x — communicate something about speaker that counters his words
-insecurity + doubt for craving of permanence of art - is it perfect?

Question 4

What happens in stanza 4

Answer 4

-speaker turns urn around + sees procession by a priest leading cow to religious sacrifice
-focuses what urn doesn’t show — little town where they came desolate like lover can never kiss maiden
-in art things eternal but lifeless — reality full life but mortal

Question 5

What happens in stanza 5

Answer 5

-imagery cold + lifeless like eternity
-beauty is truth of living — what makes something valuable is transience, can + will lose it + truth source of all passion
-urn not insignificant as gives us thus message
-at end speaker lifts out of urn + reader out of poem realising ode same effect for us as urn for Keats

Question 6

What is Keats’ negative capability

Answer 6

-first used by Keats 1818
-explains capacity that negates intellectual pursuit of mysterious answers
-ability contemplate world without desire try + reconcile its contradictory aspects or understand through reason
-Keats wants find beauty in ugly world
-wants accept every aspect of world + claimed other poets lacked objectivity in their view of human conditions + natural world

Question 7

When was it written

Answer 7

-May 1819
-an address to subject of the urn
-inspired by feelings regarding his mortality
-the urn is symbol of life

Question 8

What is the form + structure

Answer 8

-5 stanzas ten lines each
-varied miltonic sestets — ‘Milton’ = John Milton famous poet wrote paradise lost
-in seated first 3 lines fixed rhyme CDE + final 3 lines variable rhythm e.g. S1 DCE, S2 CED, S3 + 4 CDE + S5 DCE
-uniformed structure

Question 9

What is the metre

Answer 9

-mostly iambic pentameter
-like a heartbeat — Keats has heartbeat + is mortal but people in urn are eternal with no heartbeat + so lifeless

Question 10

What paradoxes is the poem based on

Answer 10

-discrepancy between urn with frozen images + dynamic life on urn
-human + changeable vs immortal + permanent
-participation vs observation

Question 11

What is ekphrasis

Answer 11

-poetic representation of art
-vivid description of scene or work of art
-through imaginative act narrating + reflecting on ‘action’ painting etc.
-Keats specular on identity lovers appear to dance + play music simultaneously frozen in perpetual motion

Question 12

‘Foster-child of silence and slow time’

Answer 12

-metaphors/personification of silence — unmoving, silent, permanent
-nature immortal + transcendent of time like the urn’s images
-forever frozen in time + permanence contrasts to humanity’s transience

Question 13

‘A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme’

Answer 13

-foreshadows inevitable beauty fading yet urn remaining
-Keats feels words + poetry less evocative than silent visual impressions
-words fleeting but urn a constant
-the visual imagery is preserved for future gens to marvel at

Question 14

‘Deities or mortals’ ‘men or gods’

Answer 14

-juxtapositions est man v divine + urn v nature
-must use imagination to explore art + determine for ourselves what we choose to see
-anaphoric ‘what’ — emph questioning as it’s a mystery urn

Question 15

Stanza 2 assertive lang ‘heard Melodie’s are sweet’ + negating lang ‘not to the sensual ear’

Answer 15

-paradoxical language assertive + negating
-asserting that the Melodie’s are sweet but negating lang takes this away
-love will never be fulfilled - irony of paradoxes ‘never, never’

Question 16

‘Beneath the trees, thou canst not have’ S2

Answer 16

-trees, nature + love oneness if experience in unity/joy
-creates idyllic pastoral scene to be immortalised but never realised

Question 17

‘Happy, happy’ ‘forever…forever’

Answer 17

-hyperbolic repetition — happiness eternalised
-glorifies permanence love on urn
-love new + intense rather than transient + changing love of reality

Question 18

‘For ever panting, and for ever young’

Answer 18

-ambiguous lang
-repetition becomes ambiguous
-speaker celebrates life + scenes frozen in urn represent victory life over death
-the tree beneath the lovers will never be bare eternalising nature, beauty + love

Question 19

‘A heart high sorrowful and cloy’d//A burning forehead, and a parching tongue’

Answer 19

-negating lang
-real lovers feel living death = reality is too painful
-urn offers idyllic love though false
-‘cloy’d’ — overpowered by excitement but instead warm + pleasant feeling, he feels feverish + thirsty
-like a man stuck in desert but craves love not water

Question 20

‘Who are these coming to the sacrifice’

Answer 20

-rhetorical question symbolised tonal shift
-sacrifice of virgin low but will never be sacrificed due to eternalised frozen images
-reception unanswered questions continues through S4 as speaker seeks understand narrative urns images creating further ambiguity

Question 21

‘Not a soul to tell//Why thou art desolate, can e’er return’

Answer 21

-speakers sympathetic voice ends stanza of feeling similar desolation in not knowing or understanding anything more of story urn shows
-town personified as desolate + unfulfilled with loss of its people + life

Question 22

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’

Answer 22

-ophorism — Keats tries express what is fundamentally impossible
-better to have loved + lost than to never loved at all
-we have what we need in earth with love + don’t need know answer to everything for it to be beautiful
-it’s okay for beauty to be ambiguous