Ode on a Grecian Urn^[3]

Thou still^{[4] unravish'd bride of quietness,}

(Quietness is usually the personified urn’s companion; a corner of non-interaction and contemplation would suffice, so that the urn would not be disturbed by the onslaught of time, or the sterility and bureaucracy of that era. It is provided with a buffer from the damning reality.)

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, (the repetitive “ssh” sound brings forth a sense of stillness and concealment)

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express^{[5](this approach is known as hellenism[6], Keats’ remarkable approach of imitating and re-incarnating the Greek culture, embossed with vibrant rituals and animating faith. Just imagine the painting of Nymphs and Satyrs!)}

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: (the vessel outstrips traditional poetry in terms of narrating tales)

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape (The urn’s spacial capacity transcends the constraints of time, while the speaker is preoccupied and dreaded by his rumination upon mortality. This resonates with the utility of urn: clasping the ashes of the dead, and not to aface their individuality. Just like how Yeats' bone being entombed where the terracotta tiles located during the warfare.)

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? (both are places in northern German as a favourite haunt for the Muses, referring to pieces of the Parthenon preserved in museum)

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? (The word "loth" means disinclined, or being averse to something; this befits the supposedly panting and perennial love that Keats felt. Keats witnessed the detrimental effect of disease consumption firsthand (when attending upon his sibling), so that blooming health and gritty spirit in Fanny would be so much cherished. Keats is a steadfast lover in a monogamous pair with his muse Fanny, instead of being entangled in rectangular dynamic like other poets such as Byron of his age. His poetry was panned in 1818 following Tom’s death, while 1819 was recognised as the most prolific year of Keats’ writings.)

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? (Maybe the horny fauns is pursuing the nymphs or girls, who struggle to escape from the men's grabbing arms)

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (Here a contrast between the unchanging urn and the temporal, terrestrial life is established within the very beginning of this ode. The “pipes and timbrels” perhaps indicate the elements of a Bacchanalian party.)

Heard melodies^{[7] are sweet, but those unheard}

(The urn appears euphoric and carefree, like an untroubled seamstress. We readers behold those capering lovers, pipe-playing musicians and plenteous natural surroundings, which would never turn barren thus sharing an ultimate potential of stillness. Art is usually a bittersweet attainment, involving the sacrifice of definable facets of existence in exchange for barely perceptible truth and beauty. That is, to live a style of monastic life, with the poet himself being the Monk.)

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; (use of caesura to break up logic flow thus imitating the outburst of the poet’s fragmented inner feelings)

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, (these are poetic melodies played to the imaginative, receptive ears)

Pipe to the spirit ditties^{[8] of no tone: ("of no tone" means musics played by ghosts or those non-existent creatures)}

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, (This reflects the consciousness of time marching towards death: to bring time to a standstill not only necessarily preclude death, but also spurn the possibility of life. Mortality is an integral part of living, rather than a simple object fetishised serving for aesthetic purposes.)

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, (Despite the fact that she would not grow old and gruesome as real people, he would never be satiated as those unfinished always remain unfinished, such as his unconsummated marriage.)

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; (The trees never shed their leaves, as they remain forever ripened.)

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

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; (the poet pays reference to the immortal life unburdened by sickness, torment and death, through the excessive use of word "happy"; the transitional physical excitement is however, suspended)

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, (love being forever pleasant and vibrant to the extent of making people feel fatigued (“cloyed”); in other words, it is too heavily burned and sticky (to the extent of “parching”))

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? (There is a sudden descend in the exuberant emotion of the narrator, to a tone more contemplative and curious. It reflects Keats’ archaic self disguised under ornate language; the poet begins to behold a sacrificial procession seduced to the “altar” sculpted from nature.)

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, (Heifer is a female cow not yet calved. Sacrificing a fleshy, unripened mammal is ritualistic (in a non-theistic sense?); “lowing” means mooing)

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? (In relatively plain phrases, the cow’s limbs are embellished with flowery chains.)

What little town by river or sea shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, (These images are representative of Theocritus’s shepherds’ living style. Keats masters the description of lucid expression and concrete imageries, which are highly adored by critic J.H. Fowler: “…no one more truly has vivified, whilst idealising, the picture of Greek country life in the fancied Golden Age than Keats.”)

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou (refers to the town) art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede (The urn’s Athenian shape classically from Attica and its beauteous attitude are celebrated again; “brede” is an archaic phrase referring to embroidery or plaiting, basically any interwoven patterns.)

Of marble men and maidens overwrought, (the term “overwrought” resonates with the poets’ craftily written enjambment, both being emotionally strained)

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought (It means to frustrate viewers with teasing riddles without definite allusion to anything; this leaves them with timeless amazement and power. This line is dragged out of the poet’s imagination, back to addressing the urn again.)

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! (shifting from celebratory to half-accusatory tone)

When old age shall this generation waste, (here back to reality, time regains its erosive power against those secular Christlike figures)

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty^{[9],—that is all}

(This famous line resonates with the first line of Endymion, that “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”. Here it shows Keats’ conciliatory spirit in an attempt to redeem some beautiful moments, which otherwise might flick into brutishness in reality rather quickly^{[10]. The poet achieves the realisation of Summum Bonum of human existence, as consisting of the equivalence between Beauty and Truth. It is through rhetorics that the poet’s sensual pleasure when appreciating this urn becomes spiritualised into genuine joy irradiated with beauty.)}

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

(The poet both reveres and teases the urn for being tight-lipped and smugly reticent. Perhaps the poet is telling us, that sometimes mystery without a wholesale answer is enough, that just experience the lushness of objects tolerantly . The doctrine is just as Keats himself once said, that “Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium^{[11] of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.” That is, to approach the world from a flaneur’s view, unlike those tiresome wage-slaves’ attitude: the playfulness, lack of practicality, and the attempt of regarding life with a cursory glance.}

But this last line might be analysed as being rather ironic, as it is also a desultory grip of the urn’s potential meaning, that is, an attempt to forge an wholesale answer, which may not ever exist.)

Conclusion

参考

1. ^Fanny possesses a feisty wit such as her taste for fashionable clothes; she was designed to find a spouse with monetary means and prestige (perhaps resulting from her family’s straitened financial circumstances), while Keats was inconspicuous and little-known by the world when he was alive. The latter passed away beholding his prospect of matrimony being blasted, his workpieces criticized as wishy-washy, or being potboiler out of lucre. He was in complete bohemian penury like early Yeats. Both were petty and censorious.
2. ^This epitaph derives from the play Philaster, a tragicomedy featuring the catharsis of disappointment when Bellario falls desolately in love with Philaster. Water is more forbearing and amenable to proof than the rough-hewn stone; a lot of people have been sculpting their names on stones as they acclimate to their social surroundings, but are being looked askance at and inevitably forgotten.
3. ^as one of Keats’ most cultivated odes and an Ekphrasis, it rhetorically represents a painting or sculpture in poetic form, sometimes being re-polished in alignment with pastoral nature (as evident in “Sylvan historian”, which associates with Roman god of the woods, synonymous with the word woodlands) Some further historical context is the debate centred around whether artefacts such as Elgin Marbles should be returned to the country of origin, or continue being institutionalised in British museum as being previously brought to England by an ambassador.
4. ^adj. unmoving OR adv. unchangeable from her virginal state? But remaining unchanged may mean risking never getting beyond irritating, bratty surfaces.
5. ^The urn’s melodious silence ravishes the poet for its permanence, as supported by the motionless phrase “still”. This is similar with establishing an antebellum fictitious, anti-historic past for southern plantations, the brocades and glowing chandeliers in Gone With The Wind.
6. ^Hellenism in literature resonates with how the draconian, darkened Neoclassical art hearkens back to ancient Greek style in visual art field.
7. ^This is spondaic variation of iambic pentameter. Spondaic patterns are all syllables with equal stress, such as ad hoc, heartburn.
8. ^Ditties are short but delicate songs; pipes are handheld flute instruments. Timbrels are similar with tambourine, like the circular drums. The poet’s imaginative capacity allows his desire for something/someone pleasurable to transcend the actual experience of subduing them. Similarly, the anticipation of love is more thrilling than its being actually materialised, “ridged like clamshells” [from Bishop’s poem The Moose] waiting to be opened. The lovers would no longer be tormented by the pangs of pining for unrequited love, and the vulnerable fertility. As real romantic or sexual gratification barely lives up to our expectation. In a relationship, we mortals could be deceived into thinking that the serenity and moments of understanding last forever. When the reality turns out to be disappointing, the sense of self-abasement might be a weary-hearted turnoff, that is, to blunt your strength of purpose.
9. ^This is the use of chiasmus involving two flipped clauses regarding the theme.
10. ^Indeed Keats once enunciated in his letters, that “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of hearts affection and the truth of imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” Beauty, nature and spontaneous imagination (that is, the Dionysian procession) are directly linked to the revelation of universal truth.
11. ^It means the innermost part; an inner sanctum https://www.definitions.net/definition/penetralium