This is a follow up to my series
of tributes to the literature classics that stole my heart. Last time it was
Tennyson’s Tithonus, a very beautiful piece of work. This time it is ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’ by John Keats. Now
it is really difficult to express my feelings and the flight of imagination
that Keats evoked inside me. The reason is very simple. Feelings, especially
love and gratitude cannot be put into words. No matter how hard you try, the
other person may only get an essence of what you actually feel and you will end
up with a feeling that you failed to convey what you wanted. Ode on a Grecian urn is a cherished poem
which has left an irremovable impression in my being. This poem is based on a
very beautiful observation which is otherwise missing in the vagaries of the
mundane human life. Keats’s poem leads me to an amazing insight and I find it
deeply spiritual. By spirituality, I mean living one’s life with a feeling of
an unseen entity that craftily drives the working of the universe. It gives you
a feeling of freedom from the shackles of life. This is what Keats summarizes
the poem to. But let me start off with how actually this poem moves on with mesmerizing
ideas, one after another.
The entire poem revolves around
the multitude engravings of people, nature and things that adorn the face of an
ancient vessel- the Grecian urn. Keats admires the urn like an artist admires a
beautiful art piece. He carefully unfurls the urn’s beauty like a legendary
lore. The scenes carved on the urn’s surface come to life with Keats’s enquiries
about what he sees. He beholds beautiful valleys, woods and trees, men or gods-
he himself is not sure, playful men chasing maidens, a youth playing a flute
beneath a tree and a priest leading a procession with a heifer which is to be
sacrificed at a green altar. And what amazes him about all these things? That
everyone he can see, is living in eternal bliss. It is because their moments of
ecstasy have been frozen for eternity. The tree will enjoy perpetual spring
never having to shed its leaves; the young lovers will never face disappointment
as they are immortalized in the anticipation of meeting their beloved, the
youth will play on sweet melodies on his flute untethered, and the heifer will
forever gaze at the skies unsure of his fate. Keats further imagines that the
procession that has arrived for the ceremonial sacrifice has left its town
desolate for forever. So if anybody ventures into the empty town, there will be
no one to inform the visitor about why the place continues to remain abandoned.
Keats stresses upon a very
remarkable note- the mutability of the material world. He finds the marble men,
maidens, trees and things thriving in bliss, as they will never perish. Here
I feel he makes a hint at what mortal pursuits are aimed at, i.e. in finding happiness
or bliss. Anything we do in the material world is with a purpose of gaining
happiness. But the small moments of happiness or what we expect would make us
happy soon fades out. We only get a glimpse of the ultimate bliss when we fulfill
our desires in the material world. There are places in the poem which can make
one sure that Keats is actually talking about something like this. He refers to
the different pursuits of the marble beings as living a life free from ‘human
passion’- that cloys your heart and cripples you with feverishness for holding
onto the pleasures too tightly. He further upholds the urn as a beacon of hope
for people who are steeped in misery. The urn’s wisdom is stressed upon as it ‘teases’
men’s imagination such as the poet himself, as does eternity to a mind that
attempts to gauge everything. Remember I spoke about spirituality in the Grecian urn? The poem’s conclusion aptly
hammers on this philosophy. Keats pays his homage to the urn by referring to it
as an epitome of the ultimate truth- “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. So the
urn that has stood the test of time will continue to convey the beautiful truth
that lies above the material world of transience.
If you have made it this far in
this post, then I admire your patience and maybe your heart for things. I remember
most of my friends in class either dozing off while the poem was being taught or
cursing the whole fraternity of romantic poets who made things really
complicated for the English exams. We had Keats’s poem for our twelfth standard
board examination, and as far as I remember I was lucky enough to get it on the
question paper. Now, taking the entire
poem in a literal sense would sum up to an eccentric poet dreaming away with
possibilities of varied interpretations of the engravings on an urn which was
created thousands of years ago. Visualizing this would be funnier: a man
staring at an urn and running his wild imaginations. But again, that’s why
poetry acts as a medium for subtle things in life that might not fit into
logical facts. Poems like the Grecian urn
are made to reflect on aspects of life that revitalizes the passion to live. Yes
it is lofty, and those who didn’t like literature (let alone poetry), would
rather like to be sent to hell than extricating the poets’ fantasies which
never stopped getting loonier for them. For me, I had a heart for such things.
The visualization of frozen ecstasies delighted me immensely, such that I have
wished in some beautiful moments of my life that those moments could be
immortalized on a beautiful urn like the Grecian urn. There are some moments
really beautiful in our life where we would want to remain captured forever,
beyond time and space. And this is exactly where Grecian urn
led me!
In any case, I would recommend
all to read the poem for once. Who knows what musings it might lead you to?
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| No this is not a Grecian urn, it's a huge vase that Romans loved to keep it in their gardens. Anyway, it comes close to a sculpted urn...... |
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